Hearing God Through the Piano on the Floor

Over the weekend my mom (who teaches music appreciation classes at the local community college) was telling me about Beethoven's struggles with deafness as he grew older. By the time he composed one of the greatest hymns of all time, Ode to Joy, he was nearly completely deaf.

In order to continue composing, he cut the legs off of his piano so that it lay flat on the floor. And he would lay his ear to the ground and hit the keys as hard as he could so that he might be able to hear the vibrations through the floor.

I don't know that Hollywood could invent a more stirring scene.

As I later considered Beethoven's commitment to his work, it struck me that I am not nearly as committed to hearing the voice of the Lord.

There are some seasons of life when I desperately need to know God's direction or command. But what I find is that when it's convenient, accidental, or he beats me over the head with a two-by-four, I hear him. And when it's not convenient, when it doesn't just sort of happen to me, or when it's much more subtle than the two-by-four method, I often miss it.

Obviously I have been given the Scriptures and most days I simply need to walk by faith in those and do not need another, more personal, word to me. I really need to trust and obey what I already have been given to trust and obey.

But there are some seasons when I need more specific guidance and a more personal word. And in those seasons, I'm wondering if I'm willing to do whatever it takes to hear him.

Perhaps cutting off piano legs and pressing my head down to the floor while pounding on the keys is roughly equivalent to a day or two of solitude, fasting, silence, Scripture, and more and more silence and solitude.

Whatever it might be, I'd like to eventually be the kind of person who is that intent on hearing from God as I need it. I just hope that I don't have to lose my hearing entirely in order to hunger for it.

My Plans Meet Eeye-Ore and the Christmas Carols

Periodically over the course of our lives, those of us who attempt to live out this following Jesus thing at all seriously bump up against the reality that God occasionally refuses to get on board with our reasonable plans.

We make what seem to us to be perfectly reasonable plans for relationships, career, what to do with our money, how to view sexuality and marriage and worship and raising our kids. And then we find either in the Scriptures or circumstantially that God says no to our plan.

And at this point many of us quit on God in order to do our own thing. Happens all the time. Some of you can identify the fork in the road where God said "no" to something you wanted and so you said "no" to God. Some of you are perhaps at that fork in the road right now.

Some of you said "no" to God's "no" several weeks, months or years ago and now you're on your way back to God. Your plan that sounded so very wise and reasonable back then doesn't look so wise and reasonable now.

As for me, I've certainly had times when I've chosen to say "no" to God's "no." But more often than not at this point in my life, I'm accepting it, but kind of passive-aggressively. I get angry. Then I pout and mope and get all Eeye-Ore-ish.

If it gets really bad, I start listening to Christmas carols. Don't ask me why, I'm not even sure why. It's just how I roll.

When we strip away the outer-wrappings of whatever it is we're wrestling with God about, the issue almost always comes down to this: who will you trust to decide your life and direct your future? Who am I, who are you, going to trust with the steps of our lives?

I've hit some Eeye-Ore patches over the past six months. I've dialed up a little Handel's Messiah a couple times this fall. I've been angry and wondered and pouted and struggled with God and with anyone who I can get to listen to me.

But I think on the other side of some of it, I'm coming out with roots pressed deeper into the love of God. I think that I'm weathering this storm still--not done yet--but it's starting to abate.

And I think I can already sense there's fruit from it. I think I'm more committed than I was a couple months ago to trusting God with my plans.

In a couple of weeks, I'll have the official green-light to start playing Christmas-type music without the prerequisite of being in a funk.

My prayer is that as I continue to press ahead towards the celebration of God coming to get us, I'll find myself not only glad to celebrate what he's done in the past, but more reckless than ever in trusting him with my future.

Drilling Down and Striking Gold with the Betrayal

I tend to be a generalist: I prefer the big-picture and trends, don't bog me down with too many details. This can be either a character flaw or a strength, depending on who you ask and what exactly is going down.

But in Scripture study, I tend to be a plodder. I'm in no rush to get through anything. I tend to drill down and soak in a small portion of Scripture rather than race through, check it off, and get precisely zero out of it.

But this summer I'm skimming over Matthew as I spend the summer looking at the questions Jesus asks. And sometimes in the process I realize some of the larger arcs that I've missed in my plodding over the years.

And other days I drill down into a question and the immediate context and I strike gold.

This morning I was in the scene in Matthew 26 where Jesus is betrayed. One of the disciples (traditionally ascribed to Peter) pulls a sword out to fight off the crowd (and to cut off the ear of one of them) coming to arrest Jesus. But Jesus rebukes him and poses these two questions:

"Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled which say it must happen this way?....all this has taken place so that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled."

The double-appeal to the scriptures being fulfilled is what struck me this morning. Taken in isolation this entire event can be seen as nothing other than a tragedy, a brilliant life cut tragically short. Unfortunately, many have attempted to read it this way over the years.

But Jesus insists that this isn't an isolated event. This mob-scene is not an accident. And Jesus is committed to submitting his life, this particular crisis and potential-for-panic-moment all to a larger story which he is the climax of but over which he has no control at this particular moment. He has relinquished control--on purpose.

The question then is this: am I willing to enter this larger story as well even and especially at moments of crisis, trauma, or great uncertainty?

What if my life isn't about what I experience in my life? What if I'm honestly just a "bit part" in God's saving work? What if my great, great, great, great grandkids are in some ways God's real purposes my life?

What if there's difficult seasons of my life that aren't there for any other reason than so that the God's plans might be fulfilled? Am I okay with that?

And I think the answer, for me anyway, is that it depends on what day you ask me and what's going on at any particular moment. But for today, the submission of Jesus to his Father's larger purposes, even at excruciating cost to himself, is cause for worship...and serious self-reflection.

Decision-Making, Wisdom & Calling, and the G.I. Effects of Lunch

Today I spent almost all day meeting with seniors. With approximately 105 days until graduation, of course everyone is thinking and talking and praying about what to do next.

Several of the students were stuck in a place that is peculiar to Christians: they had options and ideas for the future that made total sense...but they weren't sure if something making sense was "spiritual" enough, or if their thoughts were God's will for them or just their own ideas of what they wanted.

I think that there's a couple principles that operate when it comes to godly, biblical decision-making.

First, there's the seeking wisdom principle, outlined particularly in Proverbs.

There are wise and un-wise ways to make decisions. Learning wise processes is a critical part of establishing healthy decision-making patterns. Wise processes will as a rule lead to wise outcomes and perhaps even more importantly will bear the fruit of shaping us into wise people.

Foolish, sloppy, or poor processes will lead to a life of foolish decisions and again, more significantly, bear the fruit of foolishness in our lives.

Making a wise decision about things like the next step post-college from a biblical perspective includes some things that are commons sense: does it fit with your passions and interests? can you afford it (i.e. grad school)?

And then there are other things that are somewhat unique to the biblical process: prayer (sometimes accompanied with fasting), the moral boundaries of Scripture, and an emphatic command to have your community be a part of your process.

I think that this type of "seeking wisdom" process governs the vast majority of decisions that I've made in my life, both big and small. No angels dancing. No voices from heaven. Simple wisdom.

But there is one more step in the process: submission. At the end of what I think has been a wise process, I submit the outcome of that process to the Lord. Because sometimes God calls us to chuck wisdom in order to do something that makes absolutely no sense and does not line up with anything we've expected or considered to this point. That's God's trump card. It's called "calling."

Calling is a tricky thing, and it's experienced by different people in different ways. But calling is basically something that is communicated by God to us a in a way that is (eventually) a clear invitation to move in a specific direction.

The New Testament most often uses 'calling' in terms of our salvation. We are called to salvation. God speaks, most often through other people, to invite us into relationship with himself. But obviously it relates to decisions like career choices, marriage, and other major life decisions.

Calling cannot be put into a formula, and it can be hard to know if we're experiencing a "calling" or just the effects of this afternoon's lunch in the cafeteria. This frustrates us when we're in decision-making times. But it is a gift.

If we were given formulas, we would rely on those formulas instead of a real-time, real-life communication with our Good Father. This is why the New Testament doesn't give us formulas...and why you should immediately go and burn all "Christian" books that attempt to reduce any matters in relation to God into a formula.

So we seek wisdom. And then we submit it to the Lord in order to allow him to trump it with calling. If we earnestly engage in this process, he will not allow us to go wrong--at least not for long. His will is not a minefield, and he does not play games with his children. He loves you too much to do that.

But if we can learn to grow up into a holy process of seeking wisdom and submitting our conclusions to the Lord--that will make us into holy, grown-up people. And that is a tremendous, tremendous gift.

What To Do When We Don't Get What We Think God Would Want

So when the same concept, issue or Scripture comes up a couple times within a couple days, I try to pay attention. And I often try to post on it--being the external processor that I am, blogging helps me to roll up my sleeves and engage with something...and sometimes it's helpful for others.

In Acts 16, Paul and his buddies are trying to go to Asia to speak the gospel there. Only one problem: God won't let them. The Scriptures twice say that the Spirit of the Lord kept them from doing so, that God would not allow them to do so.

Then Paul gets a dream, a man in Macedonia begging him to come and help them. So they go to Macedonia.

They land in Phillipi, and on the Sabbath they go looking for a place to pray. They bump into Lydia, "a dealer in purple cloth." But there's another little detail that's important: she's not from Phillipi. She's from Thyatira.

Thyatira is in Asia. The exact place Paul was prohibited from speaking the gospel.

Lydia was no small player in her world. She was basically a rich fashion designer. She had a house in Thyatira and in Phillipi. She traveled, she was successful. So instead of a random Jewish guy showing up in Asia to preach the gospel to strangers in a strange culture, the gospel arrives to Asia delivered in a limousine, a woman of power and influence and significant means.

The point is this: sometimes what looks to us like a closed door, sometimes what looks like a "no" from God, sometimes the thing that just doesn't make any sense to us at the time, the thing that we say "if I were God, I would want this to happen"--sometimes those things are going to get done indirectly rather than directly.

Sometimes God calls us to go to Macedonia to get the gospel into Asia. Sometimes God says a short-term "no" in order to say a long-term "yes." Sometimes, rather than the direct route that we think makes the most sense, God calls us to do a "bank shot" to get the job done.

The work of the pilgrim trying to figure all of this out is to wait, trust, submit, and believe. We don't always meet Lydia from Thyatira immediately after our preferred-option door gets closed. Things don't always come together quite so neatly in our lives--there will always be loose ends on this side of heaven.

But sometimes God allows us to see his method behind the madness. And he calls us to walk by faith and believe him, even when it takes us places that surprise, madden or confuse us.

The GPS vs. the Flint Knives

I do not like to waste time. In fact, I'm so addicted to not wasting time that I shatter the "men don't ask directions" stereotype. If I feel the slightest bit anxious about directions, I'll stop and ask directions. I hate the inefficiency of getting lost.

Of course, for Christmas I bought our family a GPS. Masculinity safely intact and I don't get lost. Everyone wins.

Sometimes my addiction to efficiency means that I miss what God wants to do. Because sometimes God's plan is for me to waste time doing something that seems less important at the time.

I was reminded of this as I read Joshua 5 this morning. The entire nation crosses the Jordan river, forty years to the day after the Passover in Egypt and the subsequent similar crossing of the Red Sea. The nations that currently occupy the Promised Land hear about this and tremble. The Israelites are full of confidence and ready to take the land.

And then God issues an interesting and very uncomfortable and inefficient command: circumcise all the men. They had been wandering for forty years and none of the baby boys had been circumcised as had been arranged with Abraham as a sign of God's covenant with his people.

So rather than leverage the momentum and strength and confidence of the people after they cross the Jordan, they make flint knives and circumcise all the men. Ouch. Easy tiger, you're not going anywhere for a while. In fact, they hang out and camp for two weeks in order to heal.

Talk about taking the wind out of the proverbial sails. They could have done the deed after the conquest of the land, it's probably what I would have suggested to God. But this mattered and it mattered now, even if it wasn't terribly efficient or practical.

And it mattered because the "who" is always a higher priority to God than the "what." Who we are is of exponentially greater importance than the things we do. And this sign of circumcision was always to be a reminder to all the people that they were a unique, set-apart people. This identity as God's chosen ones was the fuel for the work ahead. Who before what.

Meditating over this passage this morning reminded me that God's timing just isn't my timing. It reminds me that even when everything circumstantially says "go!" God might be saying "wait." I'm quick to try to read the circumstances for guidance. I'm not always as quick to actually ask God if it's his timing or not.

And I'm certainly much more interested in what I'm doing than who I'm becoming. Oi, how often my priorities need to be re-centered, corrected, purified, re-aligned.

This is not to say that God doesn't use our circumstances to communicate with us and direct our paths. It's simply to say that our circumstances aren't the final arbiter of God's will for us. And if he makes it clear that we are to wait, even when everything and everyone around us says "go," (even the GPS) we move at our own peril.

Knowing God's Will

In my work with students, the big question that most all of them have at some point in their college career has to do with knowing God's will: what should I major in? who should I date? what the heck am I doing with my life?

I think that there are two extremes that are bad and that faith looks like something in between these two.

On the one hand, there are the martyrs. These people believe that the only way that something could be God's will for their lives is if it's really hard, it's really painful, it's really what they don't want to do, or any combination of any of the above. There are fewer and fewer of these, but they're still out there.

On the other hand, there's the consumers. These folks believe that if I'm not happy then God's not doing his job. God's will for my life has to fit exactly into my plan for my life. If it's comfortable for me, then I'm willing to do it. If not, well...

Alas, these are a growing breed.

So I think that life in the Spirit generally looks like something in-between. Sometimes we sacrifice deeply for the Lord. Sometimes he seems to just hand us an opportunity that's gift-wrapped just for us.

The work of prayer, involving our community (i.e. asking our friends what they think), reading the Scriptures and knowing our own "bent-ness" in these matters (do I tend to be a martyr or a consumer?) all contributes to being able to make a wise decision that is faithful and good.

But I think that ultimately it is the process that matters more than the final product. If we learn faithful processes, the outcomes over the course of our lives will generally be good. If we do not learn how to have wise processes, then our outcomes will not be consistently good.

It is amazing how many of us buy the powerful lie that change in circumstance is what we need in our lives to improve our lives. The problem with that, as one pastor I recently heard put it, is that everywhere you go, there you are. The common denominator is you. If we do not become changed people, we are not very likely to get different outcomes.

Much of life is learning how to make wise and good decisions. What that ultimately boils down to is becoming wise and good people. And that, I believe, is the work of the Spirit in us if only we will submit to it.