We are assaulted by noise and misdirection every day in order to keep us from God.
Our ability to communicate with God through prayer is based on God’s grace and our ability to recognize when God is speaking to us. Scripture is God’s primary language. God-given “signs” are another.
There are God-given signs all around us, but we either fail to recognize them as such, we misinterpret them, or we simply ignore them.
In his book Whisper:How to Hear the Voice of God, Batterson asserts that God-given signs are one way God tries to communicate with us, and that they are always consistent with Scripture. “Signs” include what we notice as coincidence. Coincidences are a language used by God to communicate with those who are listening. When preceded by prayer, they can reassure us that a difficult decision we have made is the right one.
I remember one particularly difficult decision I had to make with my sister regarding our dear mother. After what seemed like an eternity of tears and prayer, we made the decision to move her into a retirement community against her wishes because she could no longer live on her own and we could not care for her. We prayed for weeks for God to guide us and to reassure us if we were making the right decision. On the day that we moved her from her home into her new apartment, there was a small picture on the wall — despite having had the apartment commercially emptied, cleaned, repainted, re-carpeted, and inspected beforehand. When we saw it hanging there we were stunned. It was an antique print of Mom’s favorite painting as a child, “Spring Song” by Simon Glücklich (1863-1943). Mom had always had a print of that painting in her homes. She had given her only print to my daughter when my daughter was born. From the moment we saw it hanging there — perhaps more importantly, from the moment Mom saw it hanging there — we knew that God’s grace had guided her to this new home. (And yes, thanks to God, she grew to love her new home and it turned out to be one of the best decisions we ever made.)
Whether we recognize coincidences as God-speaking to us is a deeply personal matter. Perhaps it is indicative of our faith and ability to believe that God did not stop speaking to us when the Bible was written. As for me, I believe with all my heart that God continues to talk to us in an endless number of ways in an attempt to engage us in on-going conversation and to have a meaningful, personal relationship with each of us.
We need only to open our hearts to the reality of miracles and God’s language.
Image: Subject to Copyright, Spring Song by Simon Glücklich
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