Today, if you hear his voice...

Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.
Hebrews 3:15

Within this verse lies one of the reasons that I believe KatieLyn did NOT hear from God when she broke the engagement and bolted back home in the middle of the night.

Let's review the sequence of the courtship:
KatieLyn, the not-yet-running bride, heard from God; she was happy, even euphoric. Gos had answered fifteen years of prayer!
Gwen, KatieLyn's mom, became jealous of her daughter's joy and her answered prayers.
Gwen's own premarital dating had been filled with sex and lies, and Satan provoked her into being envious of her daughter.
This opened the door for the devil to deceive Gwen. Where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. James 3:16
Satan manipulated Gwen's jealousy in order to steal KatieLyn's peace.

God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, 1 Corinthians 14:33.
KatieLyn original peace was robbed by the fighting that her mother provoked.
Once the devil stole KatieLyn's peace, he planted doubts.
KatieLyn no longer trusted what she had originally heard from the Lord.
Her mother, whom had been used to plant the doubt in the first place, now told KatieLyn that she had to be 100% sure.
KatieLyn panics in hysteria¹ because her mother's words do not match what God told her. 

The author of Hebrews² goes back to this point first made in 3:15 and repeats it in 4:7.
   He spoke through David, as was already stated: "Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts."

Today, KatieLyn's heart is much harder than the heart of the woman Joe fell in love with. There is a correlation between one's ability to hear God and the hardness of one's heart. It is what did Pharaoh in during the time of Moses; David wrote about it in the Psalms. It is the hard heart of the receiver that is the problem, not God's transmission of the message. 

KatieLyn heard God originally because her heart was tender and open to receiving and answer for her fifteen years of prayers. Gwen, on the other hand, was rigid and expected God's answer to match her preconceived ideas of what a courtship should look like. It did not, so she could not accept it as being God.

The fact is, God talks to everybody who will listen to Him. KatieLyn listened at first until the devil stole her joy and injected words of faith-robbing doubt during the fights with her mom.  Gwen was going to hear God only if He would say what she wanted to hear. He did not. The Lord has a call on KatieLyn's life, but it wasn't the call that her mother wanted. Gwen had other plans, and because she walks by sight, the devil was able to use her to derail God's plan. Gwen believes a courtship must be long and drawn out because it usually takes her a long and drawn out time to hear God. 
The fact is, God talks to everybody who will listen to Him, and if you are listening well with the inner ears of your heart, you can hear God at the speed of thought.

The Lesson
There are many voices in the world. To hear God clearly and consistently, you can develop your listening by keeping your heart tender. (You also need to keep you mind quiet and free of worldly reasoning, but I chose to limit this post to the heart part.)  It is not hard. We easily recognize voices of our family and our friends because we are familiar with them.  
The night KatieLyn ran back to her parents' house, Joe was dealing with KatieLyn's obstinate, hardened heart. Hers was not the heart of a woman who had heard God. She would not even answer the question, "Are you sure that you heard from God?" The recalcitrance he saw that night did not come from the Lord. To this day she is unrepentant, which means that she hasn't dealt with the underlying issue yet. She only ran from it.



¹ "Hysterical" is a quote from Gwen; I would not have used it otherwise. .
² Scholars disagree about who wrote Hebrews. Authorship is often attributed to Paul, but some variances in the wording don't follow the style he used in other letters. The explanation that I am most comfortable with is this one: Paul wrote his other letters in Greek, the universal language of the day. But to the Hebrews, he wrote in Hebrew. That is perfectly reasonable. The  closest-to-original manuscripts that we have today are in Greek. It is probable that Luke translated Paul's original Hebrew language letter into Greek to make the information more widely accessible. This would explain why the content matches something Paul would have written, but yet the language varies from his usual style.