Sometimes, in our lives, God takes us down paths we would least likely expect.
If someone had told me as little as two years ago that I would be developing a website called The Whisper of God and writing inspirational and spiritual messages, I might have thought they were crazy. But that is exactly what I find myself doing now - a lot of writing and really enjoying it.
In the back of my mind I had always had the urge to write.
I took a little break from our series "Building a Relationship With God" partly because other things came to me that I felt I needed to write about and partly because I was waiting for inspiration to hit me again. Well God has inspired me again so lets continue with part 5 of our series.
In the past few articles of our series, we explored the topics of talking to God, hearing God talk to us, and looking for the signs God gives us in our lives. Now let’s discuss how we know and learn the word of God or, in other words, what He has already told us.
God has given us His word and His word has been recorded by various people throughout history. While there are many books and writings that we can look at to find what God has taught men over the course of history (some ancient writings were not found until fairly recently), the Bible is the primary source of our knowledge of God’s word. In fact, with estimates of between 2.5 and 6 billion copies being sold, the Bible is the most published and best selling book ever. So let’s start there.
Life is so short.
When you think about how much time we really have in our lives, it can be quite humbling to realize how quickly it can go by.
I am 49. The odds are that more than half of my life is over. I am to the point where I can remember things that happened before many of the people that I talk to were born. This feels very odd as it just seems like yesterday that I was a teenager.
I am now starting to feel like one of the “old guys” I used to know that would give me life advice. Back then I couldn’t appreciate what they were trying to tell us. I had no idea what they were talking about and sometimes I even thought they were kind of crazy.
One of the hardest days of my life was the day that I dropped my daughter off for the first time at college.
I lingered as long as I could when I brought her there. We moved her in, made her bed, and took her to the grocery store to stock her room with college student snack essentials. When it was finally time to go we looked at each other with the greatest of trepidations, hugged, and parted. I got in the car just in time for her to not see the tears in my eyes that I got when I saw them in hers.
When I got home, it was probably the closest I had ever been to being depressed. Her room was dark and quiet: no music, no tv, and no laughter as she talked with friends on the phone. She was not there to come out of her room to say “Hi” when I walked in the door like she had done nearly every day before. The realization set in that she had just taken her first big step towards the rest of her life.
In parts 1 – 3 of our series “Building a Relationship with God”, we have taken a look at how to start to talk to God (through prayer) and how to start to listen for God (through mediation). Now let’s take a look at how God gives us signs that He is all around us.
When I tell some people the story about what had happened to me a few months ago they look at me as if I’ve absolutely lost my mind. As a matter of fact, at the time, I thought I might have been a little off my rocker and kept this to myself for a while. But in an article that I previously posted called God Helps Ease Our Concerns, I tell the story of how one night I was really feeling quite all alone. That night I asked God to give me a sign that everything was going to be okay. This is what I wrote in that article:
The other night, while at the end of a vacation, I was upset about what seemed to be a lot of little things. I was sitting at a restaurant on the water and had just watched a beautiful sunset. After the sun had set and the sky had darkened, I was thinking about why I was upset and, as I do sometimes, I asked God to give me a sign to let me know that everything was okay. As I asked that, simultaneously a star appeared in the sky and a light from a boat appeared on the horizon. I was wondering if this was supposed to mean something when a thought popped into my head: I am like a boat at sea navigating with a sextant (a compass) and God is my guiding star.
