"Many Americans not only believe in God in some general way but experience God directly and report repeated contact with the supernatural." [T.M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (Knopf, 2012).]
1. One of many.
I claim to be among the "many" that Professor Luhrman talks about.
I don’t boast in this. It’s just a fact of my life. Communication with God is something that I’ve sought and obtained.
I share here what I believe to be a message from God personal to me. I share what was communicated, my grudging response to it, the after-effect of yielding to it. I cast about for the why of it. I discuss its importance to me.
This isn’t a Message to America. It isn’t an Oracle to the Human Race. The subject will seem ordinary.
Why God involves himself in the details of our lives, and in my life in particular, is a question that I won’t try to answer. I’ll just point to a question raised by a very flawed, very great man who loved God with his whole heart:
What is man that You take thought of him, And the son of man that You care for him? [Psalm 8:4 (A Psalm of David) (NASB).]
2. Jesus.
Jesus is above me as high as the moon is over the Mojave Desert.
But to be like him is my goal and the goal of any Christian. I won’t reach that goal while I walk this planet. Still, I want to do my best to imitate him and, to that end, I contemplate the closeness between Jesus and God.
Jesus submitted to God in all that he did. This is from the gospel of John:
Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner." [John 5:19 (NASB)].
Not only did he do what he saw his Father doing, he said what he heard his Father say:
Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works. [John 14:10 (NASB).]
This relationship is evident, even if sometimes it’s not indicated in so many words. There’s a backstory to the account of the Greek woman who came to Jesus pleading for him to heal her daughter. Her daughter was possessed by an impure spirit. Jesus said to her, "Let the children be satisfied first, for it is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs." (Mark 7:27 (NASB).)
After Jesus spoke, the Greek woman said back, "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table feed on the children’s crumbs." (
Id., 7:28 (NASB).) For that answer, Jesus told her that her daughter was healed. The woman went home and her daughter was well.
Jesus was not cruel. He knew something from God, or God knew something and told Jesus what to say. Jesus said what he said to bring the woman to some realization, some repentance, perhaps some needed humility – Mark does say. But the existence of that backstory seems clear.
Nobody has ever had Jesus’s closeness with God. I’ve heard that prioress Hildegaard von Bingen longed to be a "feather on the breath of God", but I haven’t heard that she achieved that.
And that’s the human condition. For the most part, we’re left to ordinary resources for choices in our life.
3. My own choices
But sometimes God makes his will known. In a perfect world our response to God would be automatic. God commands, we obey.
To my shame, I have defied that perfect, four-word formula.
a. Marriage.
Twenty-some years ago, I believed that God directed me to marry a specific woman. I was praying. I asked God who I should marry. Immediately, the image of the face of a woman I knew came strongly upon me. The image came, I think, three times.
But I wanted to marry someone else. This other woman who I wanted to marry was smart, charming, beautiful, and professionally accomplished. We had dated.
So I resented direction to marry somebody who wasn’t her.
So instead of pursuing the woman of the vision, I started to study about divine guidance. Frankly, I was hoping to alibi myself out of doing what I didn’t want to do; though, in my defense, I was not altogether insincere. I read, I consulted others. I could never bring myself to act on the apparent response to my question to God.
It’s good that I didn’t marry the woman that I wanted to marry. We often were not kind to each other – there was conflict. Also, she was smarter and emotionally stronger than I was. If I had married her, I would have become her satellite. She would have been unsatisfied with that, and I would have been unhappy because she was unhappy.
It’s a pity that I didn’t marry the woman of the vision. I can now see how it could have been a good marriage. But I didn’t think so at the time.
I didn’t marry the woman that I wanted, and I didn’t marry the woman that I thought God wanted me to marry. Decades of loneliness followed.
b. House.
Around the time that I was refusing to marry the woman that I thought God wanted me to marry, I bought a house in Pasadena. It was small but charming.
But before I signed the papers to buy the house, a very clear voice came to me at night. I saw the house in my mind’s eye, and I heard: "No!"
But bought it anyway, although with anxiety.
House prices soon plunged, and the house became a burden. I unloaded it at a substantial loss.
c. China.
Around that time, I happened to see an advertisement from a Christian service organization about short-term teaching assignments in China. I called to ask about those.
When they found out that I was a lawyer, they strongly urged me to go to China long-term. They wanted me to teach international business law. The idea was attractive. Work at the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office had become a great strain because of conflict with my supervisor.
But again there was a warning. I do not remember now the exact circumstances, but I remember a voice that said, "Stay home and take care of your father." Dad was old, and he was lonely after the death of my mother.
But I was fixated on doing the good that I wanted, not the good that God apparently wanted, so I went to China. I taught there for two years.
I have good memories of China. But my time there ended with dread, with a belief that I had been opportunistically blamed for injury to a pedestrian who had walked into the side of a moving bus. I was not responsible. But in my last months in China, I always believed that I was about to be arrested.
In the meantime, Dad came under the influence of a manipulative woman who labored to divide him from his sons.
Each choice that I made, about marriage, about buying a house, about going to China, came with consequences. In fact, I still suffer consequences of those choices. And I may be largely unaware of all of the consequences that flowed from those poor choices. I note in passing that within a few years after I came back from China, I was fleeing vast conspiracies and looking for places to sleep out of the wind in ditches, in orange groves, and under shrubbery next to freeways.
4. No swimming.
This history of disobedience and disaster informs my response to guidance that I think I have had recently.
I was swimming regularly. I had for years. The thought occurred to me that I should give up swimming. As I thought about this, I felt an inner weight, which I interpreted to be the Holy Spirit signaling that this was from God. This thought was persistent.
This thought was not welcome. Swimming is my exercise, my hobby, and my enjoyment. Swim meets are my avenue of physical competition. It makes me proud to swim well and to be strong and fit. It’s good for my appearance, and I’m so vain that I like to see my broad chest and shoulders as I shave in the morning. I have friends that I know through swimming. And, after all, doesn’t the Bible say "Physical training is of some value"? (1 Timothy 4:8 (NIV).)
I weighed what to do. I went through some of the classic stages of grief. There was denial – does God really want this? There was bargaining – God, what if I don’t swim or compete on Sundays; then is it OK?
5. Caution.
It’s right to be cautious about supernatural guidance. I have to approach supernatural guidance with special caution because I have been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic– or, more exactly, as having something
like paranoid schizophrenia. I take medicine.
But that doesn’t make me automatically dismiss the idea that God might speak to me. My times dominated by that disease are marked, first, by paranoia. I suffer alarm about an apparent conspiracy to harm me. As the disease progresses, the conspiracy seems to grow, and my alarm deepens. Only then do the voices and visions come. I assume that if I were listening to disease and not to God, before that I would be in flight from a vast conspiracy.
And to acknowledge my disease is not to say that I can never be supernaturally guided. That would be like saying that because I have ringing in my ears, nobody ever presses my doorbell.
Yet I have had supernatural-seeming thoughts that turned out
not to be from God. Once I was leaving my home, and I had a strong sense, not unlike the sense I had about swimming, that I would never return to it again. It’s from that home that I now write. I’ve also heard voices with more alarming messages that I now know were not from God.
So not every voice, not every supernatural-seeming thought, comes from disease; nor does it necessarily come from God. If a voice told me to harm someone, I would know that it came from something evil that had access to my mind.
6. Discernment.
So I had to decide whether this thought about swimming really came from God. I convinced myself that it did by driving into mountains, finding a quiet, shaded spot, and being alone to think.
For the most part in my hours in the mountains I did not address the immediate issue of swimming. I began by reading a few chapters of scripture. Then I worked on an essay about the fear of God. At the end of several hours, I felt peace and comfort about the idea of giving up swimming.
Maybe I’m wrong. That’s always possible, and it’s good to be humble about the possibility of making a mistake. But all you can ever do is what you think is right after giving the matter careful thought.
7. Why this has happened.
Naturally I have wondered why God apparently banned me from swimming.
"Why" questions with God are perilous. He often does not give us the "why" of what he wants. And compared to God each of us is like a pawn or a bishop or a knight on an infinitely large chess board. We see only what is immediately around us. God sees the whole board. So sometimes we just have to trust.
In the first chapter of Mark, Jesus heals a leper. He strictly tells the leper not to tell anyone about how he came to be healed. But in his enthusiasm, the one-time leper told everybody. It’s right, isn’t it, to give glory to God? But afterward, the throngs of people made it impossible for Jesus to minister in towns, according to Mark. After that Jesus’s ministry was for a time confined to the countryside. (Mark 1:40-45.)
So God has his reasons, which we might not know. But here are reasons that make sense to me.
It might have happened in answer to a prayer. Months ago, seeing how tottering was my walk with God, I asked him to "quicken" me. I meant "quicken" in the sense of changing me from passively religious to actively engaged with God and doing his will. And I often pray for wisdom.
And my exercise regimen has been spectacular, but my prayer-life and Bible-study have been comparatively grudging and meager. Maybe God wanted to shake things up.
And I think of Jesus and the rich young ruler. He came to Jesus and asked what he should do to gain eternal life. Jesus told him to obey the scriptural commandments. But he pressed Jesus. He said that he had done that from childhood. Then Jesus told him to sell all he had and give the proceeds to the poor; then he would have treasure in heaven. Then, Jesus said, the young man should follow him. (Luke 18:18-23.)
Maybe I am like the rich young ruler, without the wealth. I have no great wealth to give up. But I can surrender this thing, swimming, that is such an important part of my life. Maybe my swimming is the wealth that makes me stumble in my walk with God.
And, apart from all of that, maybe what I heard was just a sovereign choice by God.
8. Effect.
I notice things about myself now that I don’t swim. I’ve had a quickening of ideas. I’ve had flashes of love for strangers – wholly uncharacteristic of me. These might be breadcrumbs from God dropped in my way to lead me to know that I’ve done right.
And now that I’ve given up something costly, I’m less patient with my lax religious practices. When I waste time, It seems to me that I risk forfeiting any benefit that I might gain from my sacrifice.
It used to be that the first thing I would do on waking in the morning was go online. Lately, the first thing I do is read the Bible.
And before, at night, I typically put off reading the Bible until shortly before sleeping. But by then I was so tired that I retained almost nothing of what I read.
So giving up swimming has shifted my priorities and made me walk better with God.
9. Hard.
Giving up swimming has been hard in two ways. It’s hard to give up something that I love. Also, it’s hard to know that I’m rightly interpreting God’s will. I’m glad for these two difficulties.
The value of what I’ve given up increases the value of what I gave it up for. Think of Thomas Paine. Think of what he wrote in a time when the American revolution had suffered military setbacks in New York. Paine wrote these words in his booklet
The Crisis:
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.
Giving up swimming is, in fact, a low price for a closer walk with God. But it is costly in my mind.
It’s also hard to know that I am not being fooled. But the fact that I struggle with this is some comfort.
Bryan Garner is a writing guru. He’s written many books, including two books he co-wrote with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. I’ve heard Garner say that the difference between a good writer and a bad writer is that a good writer thinks writing’s hard; a bad writer thinks it's easy.
Maybe that’s true with spiritual things, too. So the fact that I wrestle with my apparent messages from heaven might be a good thing.
10. The limits of supernatural guidance.
I am mindful that by far most of what I do and think will continue to come from my own thoughts. I’m not Paul that I learn all of what I know of Jesus by direct revelation. I need to study my Bible. And when I work at my law practice, I have to look for the law, and I have to think hard, and I have to labor at my advocacy.
Yet even most of the time, I hope and believe that God, if he chooses, might be guiding me, even if that’s not apparent. It might be that God speaks to us through our own thoughts, but he speaks to us below the level of our awareness.
11. The limits of my sacrifice.
I chose to interpret this supernatural guidance narrowly: not to give up all exercise, but only swimming. I took up running. But I wrestle with whether I am called to give the guidance a broader interpretation and to sacrifice all exercise for the sake of gaining more focus on God.
12. The limits of my sanctity.
Communication with God doesn’t make me a saint. I don’t love as I should. I waste a lot of time that God has given me. I spend too much time arguing about politics. Even as I post a snarky comment about a politician, I know that it doesn’t make me grow closer to God.
I walk with God haltingly. I hope that God will make me his foot-soldier. My hope is not to be exalted but acceptable. For a man who spent a decade convinced that he was lost to God, this hope is spectacular.
