I was a dog in a field. Again and again God threw a stick and asked me to fetch. Each time I heard the excitement in his voice, and ran after the stick with everything in me. Then I felt a tug, and realized I was chained. Each time, the chain ran out before I could reach the stick. I strained against it until He called me back to his side.

For decades, this has been the pattern in my life: God calls me to go somewhere. I go. I get pulled back against my will. The locations and circumstances change, but the feeling is the same.

I saw myself running back to him, tail wagging, confused. Obeying when He said “fetch”. But each time I got jerked back, it got harder to trust Him. Harder to run with abandon. And harder to not resent being on such a short leash. The whole thing seemed sadistic, abusive, and not how I wanted to picture God.

I asked Him to show me why He kept me chained up. My field of vision widened. We were in a mine field. If he had let me run free, I’d have been blown up.

“So why are we playing fetch in a minefield?”

“I’m training you to sniff out mines. You will be unleashed, and your discernment and skill will save lives. But you need to learn to stay close to me. Your safety depends on it. You’re too valuable to me to be a casualty of war.”

And that felt true. The leash, the rescue mission, walking by his side, all of it. But then He showed me one more thing: the image zoomed in on my collar, it had a metal tag with one word printed on it:

mine.

That’s what He calls me (and there’s also the play on words, which is totally my love language). He says, “You are mine, and you will sniff out mines. Together we will diffuse what what meant to destroy. You will run free where others would never dare to tread. Walk close to me. Trust me even if it seem like I’m yanking your chain.”

In this example, God’s voice was the unyielding hand yanking my chain. That voice taught me things about God and about myself that I couldn’t have learned from any other voice. That protective voice spared me so much pain, without me even knowing. His unyielding hand has held me back for my good, and for the salvation of many lives.

That same hand appears in the next stunning description of God’s voice from Psalm 29 (if you missed the one from last week, you can read that here):

“The voice of the LORD is powerful” The Hebrew word בַּכֹּ֑חַ or “powerful” comes from a root word originally made up of the כ (an open palm) and the ח (a wall), symbolizing a strong unbending hand.

How have you experienced God’s voice as a strong hand in your life?