Movie Spotlight: How Do You Hear God?

Fourteen people walked into a room and answered a question most would sidestep: How do you hear God? A pastor who once knocked on a stranger’s door in Fresno, Texas. A hairstylist of fifteen years who refuses to let taboo subjects keep her bound. A librarian who gets called “Kindred.” Someone who describes himself, without flinching, as “the worst of the worst” as a kid. Documentary filmmaker Micole Williams asked them all the same four questions and kept herself mostly out of the way.

The film that came out of it, How Do You Hear God?, is less a spiritual argument than a listening exercise. Williams, who teaches for a living and spent years documenting her own 2021 relocation from Houston to Los Angeles in her previous film 365 Days in LA, found herself needing to know whether anyone else heard God the way she did. “I didn’t know if it was common for people to hear God and move across the country as I did,” she says. “I didn’t know if it was common for people to even hear God the way that I did. So I wanted to capture and showcase the diversity of how people hear Him and how they react to hearing Him.”

A question born from catastrophe

“The film ‘How Do You Hear God?’ began as a simple plea, a burning question stemming from all those things: being in spaces where I was starting to hear Him more prominently,” Williams says. “But it was also knowing and acknowledging that I would meet people who weren’t necessarily feeling that way. It was born out of a time of knowing there was catastrophic suffering at the micro and macro levels, yet I wanted to shine a light on the idea that there were those who still called on God in such an incredible way. I wanted to explore that dichotomy more.” She was clear about her focus: the people who did acknowledge hearing Him, even when they struggled at times to hear Him clearly. “During filming, I was struggling to hear him at times,” she admits. “Whenever I’m filmmaking it, it is a faith walk.”

Filmmaking stretches her more than any other form, more than writing books or teaching. The obstacles are real and often amplified. But that pressure became part of the film’s texture.

The question rather than the answer

Williams trained as a journalist before becoming an educator, and both disciplines shaped what the film refuses to do. It does not argue a position. It does not steer its subjects. “I wanted to be teacher-off-duty with this film,” she says. “I don’t want to step in and be a hindrance to anyone who is answering these personal questions, nor do I want to be a distraction.”

She sees the documentary working like a classroom where the teacher knows when to shut up. Resources get offered. Conclusions get drawn by the students themselves. “I just want people to experience it for themselves, because I feel like that’s the best lesson: the one you make your own.”

The church that burned

Williams grew up at Metropolitan CME Church in Houston. The building burned down. She is, by her own description, a sentimental pack rat, a hoarder of memories, an obsessive documentarian, so the loss was visceral in ways that went beyond bricks. “That building housed our community,” she says. “We were really displaced for a while and making due in other buildings.” She remembers announcing her graduation there, being sent off with trunks of supplies along with seven other young people who graduated at the same time. She sang in the youth choir, even though she couldn’t really sing.

That childhood church became what she calls “a ghost in the film.” Several elders are gone now, but she can feel them rooting her on. People who came to a screening saw photos of the old building and wept. Someone named Miss Llonda helped her track down archival photographs during post-production, a harder task than it sounds because a lot burned and a lot of people were simply surviving at the time, not documenting. “Nothing is in vain,” Williams says. “Some of us serve as historians of the people, places, and things we hold close.”

Who ended up in the room

Williams did not cast strangers. She reached out to sixteen people she knew, or had come to know in some way. Fourteen showed up. Pastor Hayes had knocked on her door years earlier when she first bought a house in Fresno, Texas, inviting her to his church down the street. He was also the person she called when she was thinking about leaving for California, and again during her divorce. The hairstylist had been in her life for over fifteen years. The librarian once lived in her neighborhood and still calls her “Kindred.”

Mental health surfaced in unexpected places throughout, woven through conversations without being announced. “Growing up in the South, mental health sounded like you need to just try harder,” one interviewee said. Williams had not planned for it. “Everything really surfaced on its own,” she says. “I was really sitting back behind the camera, taking it in real time and just appreciating their transparency and courage to peel back those different layers.”

Forty-two years of church

Williams has visited, joined, served in, and left five churches. She is careful not to frame this as damage. She has found a kind of peace in the distinction between church people and people who have a relationship with God. When she lived in California, she had a church home. Back in Houston now, she listens to three pastors from other states online. She misses the fellowship, the same faces, the mutual knowing. But her original church, the one that burned, will always be her church in some form.

After making the film and sitting with so many different answers to the title question, she feels closer to her own. “It just helped prove that we hear Him in so many different ways,” she says. The film was primarily viewed through a Christian lens, but the range within that lens is wider than most people expect.

What to know before you press play

Williams wants viewers to come as they are. “I want you to view the movie as an invitation to know Him through people who have immersed themselves in His Word or have been casually open to His encounters with them,” she says. You may watch it in one sitting. You may need to pause and come back. She made it with the viewer in mind, and she means that in a specific way: “Maybe, just maybe, if you sit in and listen to somebody else’s take, it can broaden your answer.”

Documentary

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Streaming now on Relay.