Where Do You Hear God?

thanks to Rick at Spiritual Living for posing the question

Where do you connect with God in your relationship with Him? Where is God when you think of him, talk to him? When he's communicating to you, where does his communication come from?

Sometimes, God is an out-there kind of thing.

Me. Here. God. There.

Sometimes God is an internal whispering kind of thing. A movement from inside maybe like the early stirrings of an unborn baby (sorry guys, you'll have to come up with your own interpretation of this).

Sometimes God is more of a movement in the brain, in the head. Sometimes in the heart, the chest.

Sometimes God is the breeze that sways a tree in leaf or starkly bare, or the thousands of grains that make up a boulder.

When I used to read the bible, I got this thing going where everytime I'd read it I'd feel great waves of revelation and insight. It was so exciting that sometimes I could not wait to open it up and read.

Them's my thoughts. I think that God shows up when and where and how He pleases.

More and more I think that God resides within me, without me, through me, within you, without you, through you.

My challenge is to permit this without reservation.

eye of the needle

What if the Christianity we know today is much, much smaller than the Christianity God had in mind?

The more I live the more I come to believe that God's vision for his faith is much, much broader than man's (I use the gender-specific word on purpose) vision for the faith God intended for us to have.

Not all that sure I have anywhere coherent to go with this thought.

The traditionally Christian way of saying this might be, The more contaminated a person becomes by the non-Christian world view so pervasive in our American culture, the more likely that person is to reject the time-honored traditions established and maintained by true Christianity.

You can't follow that with a coherent thought because, as any student of the Bible knows, everything we need to know about God is right there in black and white.

This Christian world view stuff—it dismisses what we see, hear, feel and experience by calling it ungodly. That just doesn't cut it any longer. God has got to be bigger than that.

...Giving God credit for being larger than our own conception. How is that un-Christian?

the definitive explanation of Emergent Church

the phrase "emergent church" describes a shift in how some people define "church."

"emergent church" is not an attempt to configure God into yet another denomination, doctrine, building, human institution.

Rather, the ec movement is a collective recognition by many christians that humankind has shrunk God's concept of church to fit within human understanding.

The ec movement does not reject Christianity. Rather, it asks the question, "How would the body of Christ act if it were not constrained by current standards and practices?"

There is nothing inherently wrong in asking this question and exploring answers. However, to the tradition bound this exploration may often appear to be an instituitional acceptance of universalism or other practices not accepted by one's faith tradition.

Bible God Bible God...

"We know that God exists because the Bible tells us so...and contrary to popular thought, this is not circular reasoning."

Woodrow Crowell said so this morning on the radio. I usually appreciate what the guy has to say, so I paid attention to his argument. It began with "God did not write the Bible to prove his existence," then went on to talk about how God wrote the Bible to talk about the bigger picture. Crowell didn't question the primary assumptions of his opening statement: That there is a God, and that God wrote (or caused to be written) the Bible.

Good grief. When are the people who make money pushing Christianity going to figure out that using illogic to prove an article of faith is only fooling the fooled?

Come to think of it, they are making money at it. Maybe I need a new gig.