Bring the pizza. Buy the book.
Learning to listen to myself/God.
Last night I dreamed a name, first and last, and I knew it was the name of an author. Whenever I would wake up for the rest of the night—which was often, because I am sick and also #midlife—I would repeat the name to myself so I could hopefully remember it the next day.
As soon as my eyes were adjusted this morning, I searched the author and found their book, which releases in September. The title is intriguing, I read all the blurbs and descriptions with interest, and the foreword is written by someone whose work I appreciate. The author is not familiar to me—I am pretty sure I’ve seen/heard their name before, but I have never read anything from them and they aren’t someone in my online circles.
I have discounted all chance that I thought up their name because I had been reading about them the day before, or even in the last week. It seems either completely random or deeply significant and I am still undecided.
I considered pre-ordering their book but I am waiting a while, still curious about the whole event. It was odd enough and vivid enough that I didn’t just dismiss the dream, and that might be the whole lesson.
I have a perpetual dialogue in my mind that I usually consider to be my own voice, talking back to me like an alter ego. I am not a verbal processor at all and this is something I’m trying to overcome, choosing to talk about things out-loud and stumbling along without linearity until the knot untangles enough for someone else to kinda get it, kinda follow my thoughts. If you are a verbal processor it probably sounds dumb for me to say this but it is true: verbalizing my thoughts takes a lot of energy.1 But the conversation in my head is nonstop.
Internal dialogue is so much easier but in the long run, it makes me a bit of a bore and is kinda selfish. It shields me from the vulnerability of being misunderstood. The energy it takes to verbalize my thoughts is partly the work of editing I’m trying to do in real time. It’s not that I don’t want to be honest or vulnerable, but I want to be succinct and clear. When I write, especially here on Substack, you get my vulnerable, internal dialogue with some edits, and I know I can be vague and not always clear to readers, but writing something makes it much easier to verbalize it when and if the time comes. I only write a tiny fraction of what I’m thinking, though.
Lately I’ve been reframing the internal dialogue as prayer again. I’m inviting God into the conversation and I’m considering the ways he is already present in my thoughts. I’m allowing for the chance that my thoughts are actually prompted by the Spirit (because shocker!—dirty sinner that I am, Christ has chosen to fill me with his Spirit). I’ve been following Jesus for 30 years and I know this is a lesson I should have already learned, one I shouldn’t have to keep coming back to, but that’s the thing with lessons—I would rather know things than be taught things, would rather live an experience than be told how it feels. I am sure I have been taught how to listen for the Holy Spirit. What I haven’t yet learned is how or if that is different from learning to trust my internal dialogue.2
Bring them a pizza, I thought.
I don’t know a person who would reject a free pizza or be in any way offended by the offer of one. Even if they’d already eaten. Even if they were trying to eat healthy. All the people I know would see a free pizza and feel loved and seen.
But I can be deaf to my own voice as well as God’s. I didn’t bring a pizza for all kinds of ridiculous reasons. I brought the one thing they asked for—a quart of milk—and when I opened the door of their completely empty fridge to put the milk in, I knew whose voice I had ignored. And it didn’t matter if it was mine or God’s because I think they were the same.
I have heard the same idea from four different sources this week, three of them within a couple hours of each other, and the gist of all of it is: Jesus gave us full, unfettered access to God, to ask for what we need, what we wish. This is not a new message to me, nor probably to you, but the way it has been repeated in my life this week has shown me how little I have believed it. How I have filtered my own intentions and motives so much that I have not bothered to ask at all, because asking has felt selfish. Nevermind that Jesus told us “Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.”3
The best summation of the message I heard repeated this week came from the fourth instance, from the Pray as You Go app. At the end of the second reading in the book of Acts, when the Holy Spirit sets Barnabas and Saul apart for a specific work, the host of the podcast said, “...ask for whatever you need to continue the life to which you feel called.”
Whatever I need to continue the life to which I feel called. That phrase pried up a rock lodged deep in me, knocking it loose so I could examine it more closely. I’m happy to tell you that I verbalized this with Tim, wrote about it in my journal, am writing about it here, and it’s still imperfect and unclear but I’m writing and talking about it anyway. That is all part of the life to which I feel called.
Earlier this year I claimed “confidence” as my focus for 2026, because I know I need it to live the life to which I feel called. I heard someone say “Confidence is what you get after you do the thing, not before,” and I think about that weekly. I think about it when my insecurity slips out of my mouth and I’m embarrassed that you saw it. I think about it when I see others doing good in the world. I think about confidence after I’ve second-guessed myself out of something as miniscule as a pizza and I wonder how this person (me) will possibly be able to market her book this Fall with any kind of confidence at all.
But when I prayed yesterday for whatever I needed to continue the life to which I feel called, I didn’t ask for confidence, I asked for wisdom. Looking at it now, I know that wisdom is what I think I need to give me the confidence to act, so maybe it’s not any different than asking for confidence, except that wisdom sounds more spiritual. Whatever is true, I am not under the impression that having wisdom will mean “knowing without a doubt” in regards to a choice, or that confidence will mean never being nervous or unsure of myself. We have decisions to make and I know from experience that wisdom often comes after-the-fact, just like confidence.
For now, I’m going to let my confidence be the fact that I have full-access to God, and his son Jesus wants my joy to be full.
Well, I changed my mind and pre-ordered the book. It won’t come until October so the verdict is still out as to whether this was my own midnight delusion or the direction of the Spirit of God, but it’s a pretty small risk. The whole lesson, afterall, is to stop dismissing my internal dialogue.
My husband is very much a verbal processor. Sometimes I don’t know if he’s talking to me or to himself, and I can’t tell you how many problems this has caused ; )
I’m intentionally saying “dialogue” instead of “monologue”. I’m not just talking to myself.
John 16:24 ESV. This is a hard verse because we have all prayed for good things that have seemingly been denied—a big part of my book (coming this October) is around that problem. But let’s not overanalyze it here. Jesus doesn’t call us to be miserable. Joy is joy and I don’t need to know the Greek.
Have I told you that I've started my day with Pray As You Go for ten years?
The Greek word for joy is 'chara', very close to Gk for grace, which is 'charis.' I think there's a reason those words are so similar. Agreeing with you for more grace as you learn to think out loud and for the presence of the Holy Spirit to bubble into quiet joy.