Overheard by the soul
Jeff planted this three-season “bloom again” azalea less than a year before he died.
In the warmth of October 2018, its fall blooms whisper a reminder of undying beauty.
And we dance
to a whispered voice
overheard by the soul
undertook by the heart.
You may know it…
—Neil Diamond
There’s an intriguing story in the first book of Kings, in the Old Testament. The prophet Elijah was fleeing for his life, because the queen, Jezebel, had sworn to kill him. It was no idle threat; she had already put many of Elijah’s fellow prophets to death. At one point, Elijah became so exhausted and discouraged that he prayed to God that he might die, but that prayer was answered with an angelic delivery of food and water, and a command to eat and drink to replenish his strength for a long journey.
Forty days later, God told Elijah to go to the mountain where God would pass before him. At this point, it’s easier, and more poetic, just to quote directly from the story– in this case, the New International Version:
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.
I’m sure you know, or have guessed, that God came to Elijah not in the wind, earthquake or fire, but in the gentle whisper. In the King James Version of the story, the translators used the term “a still, small voice,” which is the origin of that popular phrase.
I’ve thought of that story many times in the past five years or so, through the storms of our lives, in which I could not hear the voice of God despite clinging to the promise that God would be there for us. To the extent that I have felt a sense of God’s presence, it has been in the form of the whispered voice; a still, small reassurance that my soul can only occasionally overhear in the quiet of solitude.
The whispers, of course, are not literal sounds. But sometimes they are remembered echoes. Sometimes they are the unexpected discovery of a startlingly relevant message in a note written many years ago. Sometimes they rise from a photograph, or from a sunlit morning seen through a familiar window, or from the bloom of a botanical gift lovingly planted by one who would not live to see its growth.
As Neil Diamond suggested in the beautiful song linked above (which I hope you will take the time to experience), overhearing the whispered voice is only part of the experience. It must be undertaken by the heart, if we are to understand what we are hearing. There’s quite a trick to dancing to a whispered voice, when you think about it. The beat doesn’t come from a musical instrument, but from the heart. But what a dance it is.
This post was first published seven years ago today. It is one of my personal favorites.
This page is not designed for viewing on cell phones, but you can get a less distorted version of the photos if you click on the “view on blog” link at the top right of the screen. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, at the individual post views. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.
Defeat Despair 
Good morning, Julia!
For various reasons I have been thinking of selling my house and moving out of Minnesota. So this summer as I’ve landscaped my yard and planted perennials and trees, I’ve had that feeling of preparing the gardens and property for someone else to enjoy. It’s shaping up to be the best home it’s ever been.
Unlike Jeff, who did so much of that out of his love for you, I don’t know whose path I’m sweetening. In fact, I don’t know if my modest home may be demolished to make way for a bigger, newer place. Still, this is what I do, to try to leave my world a little better than I found it.
Susan, Jeff and I always had this philosophy. Even when we lived on base in base housing, we added many lovely touches to the landscaping, including an entire red hibiscus hedge that hid the chain link fence of our back yard in Hawaii. It flowered beautifully all year. We added abundant plants to our base housing home in California, as well as in our rented home in northern California, and of course, also made improvements to the homes we owned. It was intrinsically rewarding to leave our homes clean and in good shape for whomever would live there next.