Wow . . . speak, Lord. I'm LISTENING!

In my last post, I talk about a "pull" I'm feeling. It hit me, near the end of that post, that I'm doing something very big there: I'm acknowledging my belief that this "pull" is probably God's grace - and not just my own desires or subconscious. That's either a large step closer or a large step further from where God is calling me to be: I'm either right, and acknowledging a deep and beautiful truth, or I'm delusional and letting my pride and arrogance guide me into thinking I can know God's will in this way. This calls for prayer. I definitely believe it is the first option, that this is a deep truth, but my reason for believing that is the "pull" itself. It's circular. Then again, don't we trust our senses and reason for similarly circular reasons? Because our senses confirm themselves. Because our reason assures us that our reason is correct.

It's the three together that I find shape my perception of life: the "pull", which I believe is grace and conscience; the senses, which I believe are honest interpretations of the physical world around me; and reason, which I believe is a real talent humans have that allows us to draw new conclusions from the information available to us. The leap for me is to put what I believe to be my way of experiencing conscience and grace, separate from reason, on a parity with the senses as a way to gain knowledge about the world. It's a bit more difficult to accept this "pull" as real information, because I can't confirm my experiences with others as well. We lack a vocabulary to describe the experience of grace as richly and clearly as we can describe our experiences of sight, sound, touch, and so on.

My approach with any new, basic paradigm is to "try it on for size". While at some level I've accepted these experiences as real in the past, I've also kept a strong mental buffer that I could just be making this stuff up. Is it okay to let that buffer down, or weaken it? Can I trust these experiences in a way that is more like how I trust my own sight? Is this sense real at all, real but highly distorted (possibly by sin), real and very trustworthy? Can I experience "hallucinations" of this "sense" much the way I might imagine I hear DH saying my name - only to find out it was a radio announcer saying the words "and the"? So it's time for a trial run: Act as if the paradigm shift I'm considering is accurate, and see if I continue to have greater confidence in the new model of my world than in the old.

I may be just kidding myself, but I may also be learning to consciously use a new set of "eyes" for the first time ever. Yet even if there is some truth to this idea, I also need to be prepared for another possibility: Maybe this is God's grace that I experience, but maybe I am not meant to understand it. Yet part of me responds, "Surely God would want us to understand enough to know that we can trust Him! If He is calling so hard for us to listen, through His Word, surely there must be something reliable for us to hear!"

So, uh, God? I'm listening. Are you willing to give me a microphone check? Huh . . . wait . . . I'm suspecting . . . that I'm hearing one, and it says, "40 Days for Life, test, test".

Now, the big question . . . do I post this, and risk sounding like a crazy person, speaking of senses that don't touch the physical reality? Or do I play it safe and just leave it in draft form, saved on the server but never made public?

If you are reading this, then you already know what I decided.