God's spoken world.

This week I started a book called Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World.  I'm not very far into it yet, but I must say, it is beautiful!  The writing style is different; it's a little tilt-a-whirl-ish, circling among multiple topics simultaneously.  It's almost a stream-of-consciousness but not quite as crazy and definitely not as annoying.  Reading it feels like having a conversation with a friend.

The author is super down-to-earth, not a lofty philosophical theologian type.  In fact, he's a college literature professor who's never published in the spiritual/religious genre before.  (Oh, it's a Christian book.  Guess I should have mentioned that.)  In fact, he even uses curse words and slightly crude images here and there.  You may think I'm crazy or "un-Christian-ly", but that's refreshing to me.  It's real.  It indicates freedom in Christ, a religion built on relationship instead of rules.

Rambling aside, here's what I wanted to share:

The author, N. D. Wilson, talks about the language of God.  We so often get frustrated when we don't hear God speaking to us, but the truth is He is speaking--all around us, every moment of every day.  We expect God to speak in English, but why would He?  He's not American.  Or British or Australian or Canadian for that matter.  Why would God even need words to communicate?  I mean, He's God for crying out loud!

Wilson says we don't hear God not because He isn't speaking, but because we are listening for the wrong language.  God's language is His creation.  He spoke it into existence, didn't He?  He spoke and a mountain appeared.  We look at that and say, "Oh that's too hard; I'll make a shortcut," and we choose the word mountain to mean the actual thing.  God doesn't need shortcuts.

But mountain isn't the answer I needed, you may say.  That's fair.  But God speaks things through His creation as well.  Just one example: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." (Matthew 6:28-29)

Listen for God's voice today.  His words are all around you.

P.S. I highly recommend this book.  You can borrow my copy when I'm finished.