A small miracle story

A friend of mine heard God speak this week.

He was out on an evening walk around his neighborhood, and he was praying as he went. We’ve been having a prayer workshop at church and talking about how prayer works, and he decided he would put it to the test. So he was out praying about a lot of things.

But he noticed as he went that he was doing most of the talking. One of the things we had discussed in the workshop is the fact that you can actually hear God speak. It takes discipline, practice, and enough consistency that you can tease out the difference between the Holy Spirit’s voice and your own, but it’s something believers can learn to do. That is, if we stop doing all the talking.

So he prayed, “God, what do you want to say to me?”

As he did so, he glanced to the side and looked at the house he was passing. On it, there hung a giant banner from the front porch bearing only one, slightly strange word.

“Believe.”

He saw this and knew God was talking to him.

The skeptic’s response

Now I know what a person who has no faith will say. Someone who is stuck in the practice of “materialism of the gaps” would say that there was no miracle here. There is no Spirit speaking, and no God anyway.

That person would be wrong, but you can understand the instinct.

In a world populated by God and a spiritual realm, it’s very easy to believe that God might speak in such a way. In a strictly material world, it’s easy to understand that coincidences might happen, and our brains, which have adapted to make causal associations for the sake of our survival, might assume wrongly that there are invisible forces at work.

So how do you determine who is right?

Let’s make sure we understand the dilemma. Both worldviews are internally consistent. The skeptic, for his part, is putting together a reasonable explanation. We have evolved to survive, so it’s important that we can do some basic reasoning about how the world works. If I anger my father, for instance, and my father punishes me, I should learn how not to anger my father. Because the world seems mysterious and enchanted, I might have evolved to have an instinct to assume there is a father in the sky who can be angered. Thus, a religious instinct develops.

Unless, of course, there really is someone up there.

The whisper of coincidences

In my experience, coincidences are the first soft words of the Holy Spirit.

The God whom we know through Jesus of Nazareth does not impose himself on humanity. We have rejected God, and he has mostly honored our request. However, for the sake of love, he pursues us. One of the most common metaphors that the Bible uses for God’s relationship to humanity is marriage, and God is consistently portrayed as the faithful husband pursuing relentlessly his adulterous wife.

The whole narrative arc of the Scriptures is the story of God chasing us as we run away.

This God does not force us to take him back. Instead, he died for us.

Then he waits for us to respond.

Jesus says, “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me,” (Rev. 3:20, NIV).

You know the sound of someone knocking at the door? Sometimes it’s so gentle you assume you are just hearing the house settle. But then, if you get up and look, you find someone there. That’s how the Holy Spirit calls.

The reason he uses the language of coincidences is because God is more humble than we are. He will only suggest and wait for our response. A coincidence is bold enough that we notice it, but subtle enough that we can ignore it.

What happens when we stop and pay attention

This was my own story of faith. I started noticing coincidences that were so subtle that I simply attributed them to my own intuition.

I remember talking to a woman in a college dormitory, and suddenly suspecting that I knew something personal about her life that she had never told me. I asked her about it, and she confirmed it. I simply chalked this up to intuition.

Later, I remember having slightly stronger impressions of things. There was a moment in which I prayed to God and asked what I was supposed to do to help a certain group of people. I heard in my mind what felt only like a daydream, “Just be overwhelmed by me.” But it was so counterintuitive, powerful, and unlike anything I would have thought of on my own, I had a feeling it wasn’t me. Still, I couldn’t prove it, and I had been raised on a hearty intellectual materialism-of-the-gaps.

But then I hit a snag. I started seeing these coincidences that couldn’t be coincidences.

I once was going to a conference and had such a strong impression that “the last speaker on the last day of the conference isn’t going to be there,” that I wrote it down and told my wife about it. In fact, I even had this daydream that he was supposed to be speaking on the subject of why bad things happen to good people, so I wrote a talk for the conference on that subject myself. When I arrived at the conference, I discovered that indeed the last speaker had missed his plane flight and wasn’t coming. I opened the program and found that he was talking about exactly the subject I had imagined.

Now, at that point, the materialist actually looks silly. Trying to credit that to coincidence seems less like clear thinking and more like blind bigotry. Because it is.

Since then, I’ve had multiple repeated experiences of knowing things about events that were coming or about people’s lives that they had never revealed to me, that the language of “coincidences” has become far narrower for me. Certainly, there are coincidences, but not all confirmed expectations are coincidences.

Sometimes, the Spirit tells you to “believe” through a banner hanging on someone’s house. And the more you listen, the clearer it becomes.

The reason that’s subtle is that he isn’t forcing himself. You have to want him. You have to ask for more.

Try this yourself

If you’re interested in hearing from God, try this yourself. Begin exploring prayers that are clear, specific, and measurable. Pray for things that are sufficiently clear that if they happen you will know it, and if they don’t happen, you will know it.

Specifically, pray that God will speak to you. This is more important than praying for material benefits, even healing. Pray that God would speak, because once that piece is in place, a lot follows.

Pray that God would make himself obvious to you. Note that there is a significant difference between the person who prays flippantly to justify their skepticism and the person who prays sincerely because they really want to know. God is humble, but not stupid. He doesn’t owe us anything at all. He is a being of love who reaches out in love to those who will receive him in love. Pray sincerely if that’s the God you want to know.

Then, pay attention to coincidences. Don’t mindlessly give yourself over to a hyper-religiosity that finds spiritual activity behind every tree and under every rock. Look for things like I’ve experienced that are so clear that they couldn’t be anything else.

From that will come authentic faith, not based just on hope but on experience.

God is eager to reveal himself, but it takes a willingness on our part to listen. Without that, we’re never going to see anything more than coincidences, anyway.

Christianity

Spirituality