The Girl Who Wanted To Eat Alone

I was a fairly new Christian the day I saw her.

She was sitting by herself at the end of a long cafeteria table, the kind with the attached benches that never quite fit anyone, with a tray in front of her and a wide stretch of empty laminate on either side. Everyone else had sorted themselves into the usual clumps. She hadn’t, or she’d been left out of them, and from across the room I felt something tug hard at me.

I’m fairly sure now that what I was seeing was myself.

I knew what it was to be the girl nobody sat with, and some part of me looked at her and saw my own lunch hours. But I didn’t recognize that at the time. At the time, I was sure God was telling me to go talk to her.

I was proud of it, too. I’d been taught that mature believers hear from God, and here I was, hearing. I picked up my tray, crossed the room, sat down across from her with the warmest smile I could manage, and introduced myself with all the confidence of someone on such an errand.

She looked up at me, frowned, and told me to go away. She wanted to eat alone.

I didn’t know what to do with that. I picked up my tray and went back to my table, and I spent the rest of lunch trying to work it out. Hadn’t God sent me? Hadn’t I felt it? If the prompting was from Him, why did it go so badly? And if it wasn’t from Him, then what had I been listening to?

I’ve walked with the Lord for more than 20 years now,

and I’d describe my relationship with Him as an intimate one. I recognize His voice in ways I couldn’t at 15 years old. But I’ve also met plenty of people who read God into every gust of wind and every rainstorm, as if each weather event were a personal memo.

I don’t doubt that He can speak through anything He likes. He spoke through a donkey once. But I’ve seen what gets labeled “God told me” turn out to be emotion, or a passing thought, or wishful thinking, and occasionally something darker. (I lost count, in Bible school, of how many young men announced that God had told them who their future wife was. More than once it was the same young woman, which raised some questions about the reliability of the reception.)

I had a conversation about this just the other night. I asked someone how they check whether a prompting is from God. What safeguards do they use? They told me there aren’t any. You just know.

I said I thought that was dangerous, and I was called out for saying it.

I’ve been chewing on that exchange ever since, partly because I still think I was right, and partly because I’m not sure I said it well.

In fairness, “you just know” isn’t an idea someone made up.

Jesus says His sheep hear His voice and follow Him, and that they won’t follow a stranger, because they don’t know the voice of strangers (John 10:4-5). Isaiah describes it as a word behind you saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or the left (Isaiah 30:21). There is a kind of knowing that comes from closeness. I’ve experienced it. I’d be lying to say otherwise.

But I notice that sheep learn a shepherd’s voice the slow way. They hear it day after day, season after season, until the sound of it is unmistakable. And a shepherd’s voice doesn’t change from one day to the next. If a voice that sounds like his tells the flock to walk off a cliff, the flock should begin to wonder. The knowing is real enough, but it rests on long familiarity with what the shepherd has always said.

There’s a story in 1 Kings that ought to unsettle anyone who trusts their own sense of “God said.”

A man of God comes from Judah to Bethel with a word against the altar there, and God has given him clear instructions: don’t eat bread or drink water in that place, and don’t go home the way you came (1 Kings 13:9). He obeys. He refuses even the king’s hospitality.

Then an old prophet who lives in Bethel rides out to find him and invites him home for a meal. The man of God repeats his instructions. And the old prophet answers, “I also am a prophet as you are, and an angel spoke to me by the word of the LORD, saying, ‘Bring him back with you into your house that he may eat bread and drink water'” (13:18). The narrator adds four words: “But he lied to him.”

The man of God went home with him and ate. On the road afterward, a lion killed him.

I find that story nearly unbearable, and I think it’s meant to be. The man of God had a clear word. Someone else came along with a more recent and more spiritual-sounding claim, an angel no less, and he let it override what he’d already been told. The second message didn’t match the first. That should have been enough.

The difficulty is that deception rarely announces itself.

Paul warns the Corinthians that “even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). If the enemy can imitate light, he can certainly imitate a prompting. It makes perfect sense to me that a demon would much prefer you mistake his voice for God’s than recognize it as his own.

And Moses gives Israel a test that has always surprised me. If a prophet or dreamer gives you a sign, and the sign comes to pass, and then he says “Let us go after other gods,” you are not to listen to him, “for the LORD your God is testing you” (Deuteronomy 13:1-3). The sign coming true wasn’t the test. The content was. A message that leads you away from what God has already revealed is suspect, however impressive the confirmation.

Which means the wind and the rain, by themselves, can’t settle anything. A sign has to agree with what God has already said, or it isn’t a sign from Him.

Even sincere, Spirit-led people get the interpretation wrong.

This is the passage that has helped me most with the “just know” question. Near the end of Acts, Paul is heading to Jerusalem, and at Tyre the disciples, “through the Spirit,” tell him not to go (Acts 21:4). A little later the prophet Agabus takes Paul’s belt, binds his own hands and feet with it, and says the Holy Spirit says the owner of this belt will be bound in Jerusalem (21:11). Everyone begs Paul not to go.

Paul goes anyway, and he isn’t presented as disobeying the Spirit.

How can that be? I think the answer is that the Spirit revealed what would happen (chains, hardship), and the people added their own conclusion (therefore stay away). The revelation was from God. The application was from them, born of love for Paul. Even Agabus, who spoke accurately, didn’t say “the Spirit says don’t go.” He described what was coming. Paul had already said the Spirit was warning him in every city that imprisonment waited for him (Acts 20:23), and he went because he’d been called to.

If faithful believers in the apostolic church could mix the Spirit’s word with their own understandable feelings and not notice where one stopped and the other began, I don’t think I can claim immunity from it. Neither can anyone who “just knows.”

So what checks did the early church use?

When the Jerusalem council had to decide whether Gentile believers must be circumcised, they didn’t settle it by one person’s impression. They argued it out at length. Peter testified to what he’d seen God do. Paul and Barnabas reported signs among the Gentiles. And James tied all of it back to what the prophets had already written (Acts 15:7-18). Then they sent a letter with a phrase I love: “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (15:28).

To the Holy Spirit and to us. Spirit, community, and the written Word, all held together. That’s a check. It’s slower than “just knowing,” and it requires humility, but it’s how the church made one of its most consequential decisions.

When I think back to the cafeteria now, I notice a question I never asked.

Blind Bartimaeus is shouting for Jesus by the road out of Jericho, and when Jesus calls him over, He asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:51). It’s an odd question on its face. The man is obviously blind. But Jesus asks anyway, and lets him answer.

I never asked that girl anything. I decided what she needed (company, a friend, rescue from her empty table) and I showed up to deliver it. If God was moving me at all that day, I suspect He was only asking me to notice her. Everything else was me filling in the picture with my own memories of being alone.

And her answer was hers to give. She wanted to eat by herself. That’s allowed. I’ve come to think the lesson that day wasn’t for her at all. It was for me, about the difference between compassion and projection, and about how easily pride can attach itself to the feeling of being sent.

Not every good impulse is a burning bush, either.

There have been times on long drives home when I’ve felt a strong pull to get off the road and close my eyes for a while. And I have. I could tell those stories as divine interventions, and in a broad sense, I suppose every good thing is a gift. But mostly, I was exhausted, and a tired driver is a hazard, and the sensible thing was to pull over.

Jesus fell asleep in the stern of a boat in the middle of a storm (Mark 4:38). The Son of God, with a body that wore out. Nobody had to send Him a revelation that He was tired. God made us creatures with limits, and some of what we call promptings is simply our bodies telling us the plain facts about themselves. I don’t think it honors God to inflate common sense into a miracle. If anything, it makes it harder to recognize the times He does speak.

The other piece is I might have said “dangerous” too sharply.

I’ve written before that I tend to over-rationalize, to talk myself out of convictions that can’t be pinned to a chapter and verse. Someone who leans the other way, toward trusting that inner knowing, might hear my caution as a dismissal of their whole relationship with God. And I don’t mean it that way. I believe God speaks. I believe some people hear Him with a clarity I envy.

I still think “there’s no check, you just know” is risky, and I’d say so again.

A heart that has no way of testing itself has no way of catching a lie. But I could have said it more gently, and I could have asked more questions before I answered, which, come to think of it, is the same thing I failed to do at that lunch table years ago.

I’m still learning to hear. I’m still learning to ask. And I’m still a little embarrassed about that tray.