I find it very difficult to hear God
Archive Imported from my Original Blog -- The Invisible Next Step
is a spiritual journey a narrow path, diverging from a wide road? is it scanning the pine trees to see the blazes of a trail mostly overgrown? is it turning and (re/)turning in response to insistent taps on the back by a trickster God?
I grew up in smaller mega-churches, just on the cusp of the nondenominational mega-church movement. The demoninations I grew up in were splinters of splinter groups -- fundamentalist, dispensational, pietistic, non-glossolial, KJV only, bus-ministry-sunday-morning, AWANA clubs sponsoring, REVEREND [insert the name of the senior minister here on the church sign] churches. These were churches that would "disfellowship" a "sister church" because they believed in the mid-tribulational rapture of the church instead of the pre-tribulational rapture of the church. These were churches where missionaries mourned the "cult-like presence of the charismatics" in the developing world countries they worked.
Do I need to clarify that I do not remain in these churches?
Did I *hear God* when I was in them? Probably I did, but to me it was always the voice that was speaking over and against the surrounding babble. The voice of God was the marginal, oppositional, secret sub-text, undermining the proto-text.
But since then...!
I have tried to be faithful, believing as I still do that God has called me to the divine pursuit, but I have found it very difficult to find a tradition / a community / a place to hear God.
Lynn and I have heard God in what's felt like waves and then we've wandered in what's felt like silent deserts for eons.
The last three years in Canton has felt, in general, more like a dessert. We visited 17 churches, tried to stay in three, had a wonderful homechurch experience that didn't work out.
When I mentioned to Lynn that people would be standing up in church on Palm Sunday to praise God, I thought I saw her eyes fill with disappointment. I read in her gaze -- what does that have to do with us? God is not talking to us these days. And while I wanted to have a different feeling. Those words reflected by deepest suspicions.
But this past Sunday our church invited the congregation to stand up and talk about God's presence in their lives. Harry (the minister) threatened that if no one stood up, Ebeneezer might just start in (Ebeneezer is a 3'x2' boulder awkwardly placed in the sanctuary alongside the --; a boulder that Harry hauled into the sanctuary ten years ago when he arrived as a marker of where God had brought the church then).
People stood up and told stories for the next hour and I cried quietly for the whole time.
The stories were about children with precarious physical conditions and horribly specific dietary needs, about losing a baby after two weeks, about losing a seventeen year old sister in the middle of a long unemployment spell, about feeling Grace while marking the fourth year of being widowed. People losing jobs, bumbling through vocations with surprising profit, finding shocking grace in small "lowly" work, being healed from a fear of marriage.
These people were (I felt astonished) hearing God in their loss, hearing Vocation in the accidents of their work (!), finding truth in the unbearable sacrifices of the quotidian.
When I first read Sacred Journey, I felt the same quiet tears of relief. That *YES* God could speak to us through the unexpected. Through what was around us. Through our accidents and mistakes.
Everyone was calling out Hosannah on Palm Sunday. Jaelyn, my daughter kept using her palm branch to tickle the 23 year old woman in the row before us, who I do not know. The woman was crying, but laughed every time the branch brushed her. Jaelyn's eyes were delighted by everything. When the drums were pounded she raised the branch high and swayed it back and forth. This caused our eleven year old friends David and Michael to laugh.
For the first time in a long time I feel like I am MOVING. That I have a step to make. That my leg is already extended, and I cannot, on any count see where it will land, but I don't care. I want to go. I want to move.
is a spiritual journey a narrow path, diverging from a wide road? is it scanning the pine trees to see the blazes of a trail mostly overgrown? is it turning and (re/)turning in response to insistent taps on the back by a trickster God?
I grew up in smaller mega-churches, just on the cusp of the nondenominational mega-church movement. The demoninations I grew up in were splinters of splinter groups -- fundamentalist, dispensational, pietistic, non-glossolial, KJV only, bus-ministry-sunday-morning, AWANA clubs sponsoring, REVEREND [insert the name of the senior minister here on the church sign] churches. These were churches that would "disfellowship" a "sister church" because they believed in the mid-tribulational rapture of the church instead of the pre-tribulational rapture of the church. These were churches where missionaries mourned the "cult-like presence of the charismatics" in the developing world countries they worked.
Do I need to clarify that I do not remain in these churches?
Did I *hear God* when I was in them? Probably I did, but to me it was always the voice that was speaking over and against the surrounding babble. The voice of God was the marginal, oppositional, secret sub-text, undermining the proto-text.
But since then...!
I have tried to be faithful, believing as I still do that God has called me to the divine pursuit, but I have found it very difficult to find a tradition / a community / a place to hear God.
Lynn and I have heard God in what's felt like waves and then we've wandered in what's felt like silent deserts for eons.
The last three years in Canton has felt, in general, more like a dessert. We visited 17 churches, tried to stay in three, had a wonderful homechurch experience that didn't work out.
When I mentioned to Lynn that people would be standing up in church on Palm Sunday to praise God, I thought I saw her eyes fill with disappointment. I read in her gaze -- what does that have to do with us? God is not talking to us these days. And while I wanted to have a different feeling. Those words reflected by deepest suspicions.
But this past Sunday our church invited the congregation to stand up and talk about God's presence in their lives. Harry (the minister) threatened that if no one stood up, Ebeneezer might just start in (Ebeneezer is a 3'x2' boulder awkwardly placed in the sanctuary alongside the --; a boulder that Harry hauled into the sanctuary ten years ago when he arrived as a marker of where God had brought the church then).
People stood up and told stories for the next hour and I cried quietly for the whole time.
The stories were about children with precarious physical conditions and horribly specific dietary needs, about losing a baby after two weeks, about losing a seventeen year old sister in the middle of a long unemployment spell, about feeling Grace while marking the fourth year of being widowed. People losing jobs, bumbling through vocations with surprising profit, finding shocking grace in small "lowly" work, being healed from a fear of marriage.
These people were (I felt astonished) hearing God in their loss, hearing Vocation in the accidents of their work (!), finding truth in the unbearable sacrifices of the quotidian.
When I first read Sacred Journey, I felt the same quiet tears of relief. That *YES* God could speak to us through the unexpected. Through what was around us. Through our accidents and mistakes.
Everyone was calling out Hosannah on Palm Sunday. Jaelyn, my daughter kept using her palm branch to tickle the 23 year old woman in the row before us, who I do not know. The woman was crying, but laughed every time the branch brushed her. Jaelyn's eyes were delighted by everything. When the drums were pounded she raised the branch high and swayed it back and forth. This caused our eleven year old friends David and Michael to laugh.
For the first time in a long time I feel like I am MOVING. That I have a step to make. That my leg is already extended, and I cannot, on any count see where it will land, but I don't care. I want to go. I want to move.
posted by Redbaerd at 4:21 PM
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