“There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.” (1 Corinthians 14:10). Don't we sometimes wish that the Lord would speak to us or reveal Himself to us in the exact same way every single time? Wouldn't it be better if we could immediately hear and recognize His voice every single time? Why is it that so often we find it so difficult to hear and recognize the voice of the Lord? Our Heavenly Father and our Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost are beings of infinite depth and breadth and complexity. It would be impossible to fit all of Who They are inside of our head all at the same time. When the Lord speaks to us with different voices, He is not trying to trick us or encrypt His messages to us so that we have to prove some minimum level of intelligence or worthiness to get the message. Rather, each time that the Lord speaks to us in a voice that we do not recognize or in a context in which we are not used to finding Him, He is revealing one more facet of His infinitely complex existence to us. He is also revealing to us that He truly is with us at all times and in all places. When Elijah stood upon the mountain and experienced a great wind, a fire, and an earthquake, and then finally recognized the Lord in the still small voice that followed, that is not to say that the Lord might not also have been speaking to Him in the wind and the fire and the earthquake but Elijah was perhaps too overwhelmed to seek out or to find the voice of the Lord in those circumstances. When Moses asked the Lord what name He should give to his God, the Lord told him, “I am that I AM.” When the rivers of blood came, He was that I AM. And when the frogs came, He was that I AM. Through Moses the Lord revealed to the disbelieving Pharaoh ten different I AM’s. We should seek to hear the voice of the Lord at the tops of mountains and at the bottoms of pits, in the stillness of our closets and the cacophony of bustling crowds, in our moments of greatest triumph and in our most abject failures. We should do this not only because we will surely find Him every single time, but also because He will reveal aspects of His character and nature in those particular settings that we would not be able to find or understand anywhere else. I know that the Lord speaks to us in an infinite array of different voices, but as Paul says, none of them is without signification.
