Seriously? Seriously? (How I Know When God is Speaking)

We went around the circle, sharing ways we hear God speak, and how we know that it's God.

"It feels intoxicating."

"There is an echo within me - His spirit agreeing with my spirit."

"It matches up with scripture."

All of these pleasant ways of knowing.

I squirmed, just a little, wondering if I should add my voice to this conversation, knowing that what I would say wouldn't sound quite so pleasant.

Mentally sighing and shrugging just a little at the prideful realization that I cared what these people thought, and that I didn't particularly want to be the voice of dissent, and have that color their opinion of me, I began to speak.

"I know it's God when my response is 'Seriously?!?'  I've heard and experienced God in most all of the ways we've talked about, but the most common way that God speaks, and that I know it is really Him is when it is not something I could have ever come up with on my own.  Quite often it's the last thing I want to do.  It almost always drags me far beyond my comfort zone.  And most of the time it doesn't make any sense.  It's the thing that I will fight, and it won't go away.  The thing that causes me to fall immediately back on my favorite Grey's Anatomy explanation and cry 'Seriously! Seriously?'"

The circle was quiet for a moment, until the friend sitting to my left adamantly agreed and shared a bit of her own experience.  The group talked a little bit more about this - that often the things God calls us to are the ones that make very little sense.

I don't know if it colored their opinions of me, but that moment of sharing has stuck with me.  I've thought about it nearly daily in the week since the retreat where it happened.

It makes me smile, this God who mostly speaks to me in a way that arouses my sarcasm, in a way that leaves me wanting to fight, and cower in my safe place, rather than risk trusting.  It makes me smile that He knows that even despite this tendency to fight, I am generally willing to obey, and that He is continually determined to broaden my comfort zone, and my ability to love and trust deeply.

Today I'm asking you - how does God speak to you, and how do you know it's him?

Not a Spirit of Fear

2 Timothy 1:7 (NLT)
For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.

The passage above is perhaps one of my least favorites in all of scripture.  Not because I don't think that it's an absolutely incredible promise and statement, because I do.  I don't like it because it has been used as a weapon.

If I had a dollar for every time that someone has quoted that passage to me as a supposed "solution to all my problems", I'd be rich.  The gist of their thinking is almost always along the lines of "Well, don't be afraid, fear isn't from God, you know."


Really?  I hadn't caught that in all those years I spent growing up in church.


That's your big solution to the overwhelming and paralyzing fear I sometimes struggle with?  Just "don't be afraid, it's not from God."  Thanks for that.  No really, thanks for the helpful advice.


Obviously I've never said any of these things out loud to whoever the well-meaning person quoting my "favorite" scripture verse to me was.  I'm polite like that.  And well-trained.  And I might have permanent bite marks on my tongue, too.


When you're buried in overwhelming fear, "stop being afraid" just doesn't seem like an option.  When fear overwhelms whole arenas of your life, you're generally aware that that fear likely isn't a godly thing, and someone reminding you of that fact just feels like rubbing salt in an open wound.


And then, in God's usual way, he used my least favorite thing as an object lesson recently.


I'd woken from a brutal dream, terrified, and trying to pray.


It was one of those moments when God borrows his own words from scripture to speak.


"I didn't give you a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-discipline."


There's something different about those words when they're being offered by the original author, and not being quoted as easy solutions to a problem that the person doing the quoting can't quite understand, and quite possibly fears themselves.


When God spoke them into the chaos of my heart that early morning, they carried an instant peace.  A knowledge that I was loved, and the One who loves me was intervening in the darkness that had encroached while I slept, and pushing it back.


That passage will probably never be one of my favorites.  There's an awful lot of cynicism built up in me about it.  But, when Jesus speaks it, I'm going to stop to listen.  Because when He speaks it, something special, something healing, is on it's way.

Start with "He Loves Me"

In keeping with yesterday's post, I have another link, this time to a cartoon from NakedPastor.

It struck me deeply when I saw it first.  Largely because the last several days have been filled with the constant thematic reminder of God's deep love, for me, for his people, for the church, for the nations.  My heart has been full as I realize all of this again.

Not full in a way where that love makes the problems, the agonies disappear, but full in the way, that, like the "prayer from the cell" that I linked to yesterday, the reminder of the layers upon layers of His love is somehow enough to bring rest.

I will never forget, somewhere midway through the seven long years I suffered from severe depression, writing a dear friend, also not from a particularly experiential circle of Christianity if she knew, really knew that God loved her, deep inside her, not just in a head knowledge sort of way.  Her answer ("yes") surprised me, and spurred a quest of sorts.  I had honestly believed that God's wasn't something that could truly be felt or experienced, and then I'd met people who said it could, spurring the question I asked my friend.

In the intervening years I have come to know that love in immense ways, in startling ways, in healing ways.  I knew it first in the patience of friends who walked with me through depression, and then in that sudden and unexpected moment of healing.  I've known it as I've journeyed through the nearly five years since that moment of healing, through loss of deep relationships, through shattered dreams, through moments of great joy and answered prayer.  It has been a constant, an intangible constant, and somehow, that deep, constant truth, however hard it is at times to cling to, is enough.

And the cartoon?  "Start with, 'He loves me'" is an image that rings in my heart right now.  An only option.  A gentle direction.  A whispered shout.  It moved me deeply, as it played up against the themes building and playing through my waking life, and my nightly dreams this week, and I'm grateful for it.

You Want me to What?

Maybe I'm the only one, but I have a nearly constant internal narration or dialogue.

Years ago, I worked to cultivate that as part of my prayer life, and I try to be consistently internally dialoguing with God throughout my day.

Lately that dialogue has held a somewhat shrieky tone at times.

Usually just moments after God asks me to do something that seems, well, insane.

My response tends to be an internally shrieked, "YOU WANT ME TO WHAT???"  (As a side note, I wish I could add sound to my blog - I'd be happy to demonstrate the audio version of this particular statement.)

Because some of the requests have just been crazy.

And the results?  Well, they've been crazy too.

I had one of those conversations last night, about a particular situation.

To be fair, this time God gave me some advance warning.  He doesn't usually do that.  I had a bit of time between the request, and the execution, and it helped.

But a day later I'm still laughing at the fully ironic and ridiculous nature of what ensued in what was supposed to be just a quiet evening of me attending a conference with some friends, soaking up some time in God's presence in a different format than is readily available to me these days.  (Did I mention that I'd been looking forward to that evening for weeks, and God's plans were, umm, quite a bit different from what I'd had in mind?)

It's a good story for sharing over tea sometime - ask me, and I'll be happy to oblige.  With sound effects.

In the meantime, am I the only one screeching "You want me to what?" at God on a semi-regular basis lately?