The Wrong Voice

Do not be quick to name it God
when something speaks from urgency.
What presses you toward decision
has not yet learned how to love.

You say a voice came to you
in the hour when your strength was thinnest,
when need leaned forward
and called itself necessity.
It knew your private rooms.
It touched the places where you were left.
It spoke as though it had always been there.

But listen more carefully.

The true voice does not seize you.
It does not hurry your becoming.
It does not confuse hunger with command
or fear with calling.
What is holy gives space
even to uncertainty.

The voice you heard was old.
Older than you thought.
It learned its language
from those who withheld,
from eyes that measured your worth,
from love offered only in exchange.
It speaks fluently
because you survived by listening.

Yet that does not make it true.

God does not speak
against your own breathing.
God does not ask you
to abandon yourself
in order to be received.
What is eternal
does not require your diminishment.

If a voice tells you
that you are not enough as you are,
that you must become something smaller,
faster, more obedient to be held,
then that voice is not God.

God speaks, if God speaks at all,
in a way that leaves you intact.
With patience that does not wound time.
With a recognition
that has always known you.

Trust this.
The voice that tells you you are loved
does not shout.
It waits.
It remains
even when you turn away.

And when you learn to stay with that quiet,
you will find
that nothing essential was ever demanded of you,
only received.