Opus 2024-025: Reach for the Dialogue

One of the reasons that we have a hard time communicating with God is that we refuse to listen.  We start off complaining or expressing our anger and bitterness.  That can work because God is willing to listen.  This alwasy amazes me when I consider that God is the creator and sustainer of the universe and can listen to billions of people at the same time.  He has the advantage of knowing our hearts, and knowing what we’re talking about.  He knows what is legitimate and what is just us expressing our pain.

The real problem comes when it’s time for us to listen.  We don’t want to. We want a  monologue, not a dialogue.

God communicates in many ways.  I know I’ve expressed these things before, but let me say them again.  In this day and age, God communicates first of all through the Bible.  He had it written for a reason, you know.  It wasn’t just because He had a blog post due and needed something to publish.  It is not His Ph.D. thesis.  He did it with a direct intention of supplying humanity with the information they needed for salvation.  He supervised the writing and the preservation.

He has given us the Holy Spirit.  For those of us who follow Jesus, had our sins forgiven, and receive the Holy Spirit this can be relatively direct.  Sometimes this works together with the written word.  The Holy Spirit will bring to mind scriptures that we know.  Often we can only come up with a phrase or a couple of words, but if we are conscientious, we have the tools to figure out what it is that the Holy Spirit is trying to say to us.  Can you say “concordance” or “Bible software?”  But even for those who are not believers, the Holy Spirit is working in their lives.  He is limited because of the concept of free will, but He is still working.

Then we have such things as sermons, books by inspiring authors such as CS Lewis, radio, and Internet sources, discussions with friends. The list can be endless.  God is very creative.

God knows what we think.  He knows it before we do, in a sense.  But He still listens and gives us a chance to communicate, to vent.  The problem is that we don’t listen. The bigger problem is that we often don’t want to listen.

Some problems only you can solve.

homo unius libri