Voice

I’m in too many message groups to keep up with them all. It can be great way of keeping in touch with people and an effective way of communicating quickly, but I read so many messages I get lost in them. Too many voices! I had a really strange message on one of my group chats this last week. Really strange. I’m in a “Mum” chat with my brother and sister. We started it to keep in touch about our mum and to make sure we were all on the same page in what we were saying to her. And now we use it to keep in touch with each other, which we do sporadically. So far, so good. This week my sister put a short recording on the chat and asked me the question: who is the boy in the story? Weird. I listened to the recording, which was obviously quite old, and thought: I have no idea what this is about, or who this is, or even what her question means. So my reply was simply: “No idea.” She replied: “The boy in the story is you Ian!” What? What boy? Why is it me? This is…weird. And it stayed weird. It turns out that, unbeknown to me (and my brother it seems), there are reel to reel recordings of my dad speaking when he was a Vicar! Just so you get this, my dad died on the 1st July 1970, that’s 53 years ago! My mum evidently had some tapes (reel to reel) of him which she gave, at some point, to my sister. She apparently forgot she had them (weird), but has now found them and sent one recording to me and my brother on WhatsApp. So I’m listening to my dad, tell a story about me, and I had no idea whatsoever what was going on. Part of the problem was that I had no idea what my dad’s voice sounded like. In fact, when I heard the voice, I thought it was woman speaking (sorry dad). My dad grew up in Deptford and apparently when he went to theological college he had elocution lessons to make him sound…well…proper! The point though, is this: I didn’t recognise my dad’s voice. Why would I? I’d never heard it. I had no memory of what it sounded like. And, if I’m honest, it still doesn’t seem real. I’ve never heard God speak either as it turns out. Well, not an audible voice. And, it seems to me, that if we want to hear God speak, we have to learn to listen. We have to learn to hear him in the pages of the Bible. We have to learn to hear him speak through preachers (I’m really hoping that he does). We have to learn to hear him speak through nature. We have to learn to hear him speak in all the ways that God chooses to speak to his people. And, it can be hard work. And weird! But the more we recognise his voice, the more we’ll hear him speak. It may be, that over the coming months, as the recordings of my dad are put into digital format and I get to listen to more of my dad speaking, I’ll get to recognise his voice. And, maybe, after all these years, I’ll get to know him a little better.