\n<\/p>\n
In The Sin of Certainty<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, I tell a brief story about the time I was in middle school and made myself a sandwich. After I was done, I tied up the bag and tossed it\u00a0onto the counter a few feet away.<\/p>\n My mom, who had grown up in Europe during\u00a0World War II (the Big One, for you young folks), looked at me with conviction,\u00a0\u201cGod doesn\u2019t want you to\u00a0throw food.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n I snarked back,\u00a0\u201cHe didn\u2019t say\u00a0anything\u00a0to me<\/span>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Mom shot back before I had gotten\u00a0the last word out of my mouth,\u00a0\u201cMaybe you\u2019re not listening.\u201d*<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n That memory\u00a0came to mind recently\u00a0in conversation with a friend\u00a0who was done with God because, after talking to God for years and waiting for an answer, he never got one.<\/p>\n I\u2019m sure many or most of us can relate.<\/p>\n Can you hear God\u2019s voice?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think this\u00a0person or others like him are in \u201crebellion\u201d against\u00a0God. Rather, I think they are\u00a0conditioned<\/em> only to hear a certain kind of voice<\/strong> and when they don\u2019t hear it they draw the conclusion that my friend did.<\/p>\n He\u00a0wasn\u2019t expecting an audible voice or anything like that, but he was<\/em> expecting some concrete, tangible response\u2014evidence that God is there and cares.<\/p>\n After all, this is what we expect of any other being we communicate with. If we talked to family and\u00a0friends and they never talked back, those relationships would eventually come to an end. Why should\u00a0it be different with God?<\/p>\n I think this conditioning is rooted in the modern notion that what\u00a0is \u201creal\u201d is what can be demonstrated through some experienced, objective evidence. That idea\u00a0works a lot of the time<\/a>, but problems arise when\u00a0Christians are either taught (or it\u2019s caught) to apply this idea to\u00a0spiritual matters.<\/p>\n Hence, when\u00a0one prays for X and then X (or something like it) happens, that prayer is deemed \u201canswered\u201d and therefore\u00a0evidence that God is there and is interested in us.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not knocking that idea, though\u00a0I suspect this scenario works out\u00a0far less frequently than we might be comfortable admitting\u00a0if we stop to think about it. And when some\u00a0do stop to think about it, they draw conclusions like my friend\u2014who was conditioned to hear one voice.<\/p>\n I have wondered, though, over the years whether God \u201cspeaking\u201d to us doesn\u2019t take very different forms\u2014and maybe we need to condition our ears to hear them.<\/p>\n Maybe we hear God through others, through their acts or words of kindness (or rebuke).<\/p>\n Maybe God\u2019s voice catches us by surprise in occasional moments of happiness and contentment that happen free of words and logic\u2014that moment of peace with your family, the way the shade falls on the late morning grass, reading in a hammock, a breeze that pushes gently through the trees and hits us just so.<\/p>\n I understand how some might react: \u201cThis just sounds like a lot of vague spiritual\u00a0mumbo-jumbo where God is \u201ceverywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps\u2014or . . . maybe some of us are limiting God\u2019s speech<\/a> to what we have been conditioned to hear and we need to open up to God\u2019s presence differently . . . more immediately, intimately, and\u2014I don\u2019t hesitate to say\u2014subjectively, rather than what we are conditioned to have to<\/em> expect.<\/p>\n Maybe God is just bigger than that.<\/p>\n If this\u00a0is God\u2019s world, after all, maybe God\u2019s voice really is all around us. Perhaps what we perceive as God\u2019s absence is really our conditioned inattentiveness.<\/p>\n Perhaps we\u00a0just need to\u00a0learn to\u00a0listen.<\/p>\n [* For those of you playing along at home, you\u2019ll notice the version of this episode here differs slightly\u00a0from what I have in The Sin of Certainty<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(p. 187).\u00a0I think part of each version is correct but the memories\u00a0get jumbled together. Now I know what the Gospel writers felt like.]\n<\/div>\nMaybe God\u2019s \u201cvoice\u201d runs\u00a0deeper than we\u00a0are able to perceive in our hectic lives, where\u00a0we<\/em>\u00a0are the focus of our energies and attention.<\/h2>\n