"If God speaks anywhere it is into our personal lives that he speaks. Someone we love dies, say. Some unforeseen act of kindness or cruelty touches the heart or makes the blood run cold. We fail a friend, or a friend fails us, and we are appalled at the capacity we all of us have for estranging the very people in our lives we need the most. Or maybe nothing extraordinary happens at all-just one day following another, helter-skelter, in the manner of days. We sleep and dream. We wake. We work. We remember and forget. We have fun and are depressed. And into the thick of it, or out of the thick of it, at moments of even the most humdrum of our days, God speaks. But what do I mean by saying that God speaks?"(F. Buechner "Listening to Your Life" pp.2-3)
That's a good question. If I believe that God speaks what do I mean? Certainly I hear God speaking through the words in the Bible. But can I hear God speaking in the everyday moments of my life. Certainly in the big moments I do. When life throws a curve at me, or a fastball right down the middle of the plate. I get those wow moments.
But it is harder to hear in the thick of the humdrum days. Those days that roll one into another. Those days when I feel I'm sitting on a boat in the middle of a lake and only the small current make the boat move up and down but never forward or backward. On those days can I hear God speaking?
I find that I can only if I fight off the boredom of those days. Instead of seeing them as oh well moments, seeing them as gifts to be able to focus more attentively to my prayer life. To see them as opportunities to listen with a keener ear to what is being said in that still small voice.
It is fascinating how easy I find it to hear God in the chaotic moments, but much harder work when all the days seem the same.
Blessings,
Ed
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