Love Notes

 Tonight I asked God to speak to me. I wanted that experience. That experience that some people go through when they hear, as if in the room with them, Him speak. I always hear of these experiences and become jealous. I believe in God and I believe that He is real and desperately wants me. All of me.

I always wondered why I have never had this “Vocal God” thing happen to me… I felt that maybe I had to do something drastic or that I needed to do something crazy to get God’s attention.

I always get really quiet and just plead with God to talk to me. I just open the door and invite him to speak. And deep down inside I am hoping for him to talk verbal and physical words to me…

Then it hit me.                      

God is ALWAYS talking to me. Maybe it’s not the verbal kind, like some people experience, but a different kind. Like the kind when you liked someone in middle school or high school and you leave them a note because you’re too nervous to openly confront them.

Those notes for me were always mushy because I found I could just write down or create a drawing of something that wouldn’t make me look like the bumbling idiot I am.

I LOOKED AT MY HAND.

I saw all the little creases and pores of my skin, each individual hair in its place. I heard the wind tossing the trees outside my apartment window. I saw the stars outside; the billions of galaxies that are out there. THAT IS GOD SPEAKING.

I’m not saying that God is nervous or a bumbling idiot so that he has to leave me “love notes” but that is how He does it. I look at the complexity and utter beauty of his creation and I hear him saying “THIS IS REAL. I AM REAL.”

Maybe God talks to me this way because He knows that if he revealed his “vocal voice” to me. Even the tiniest syllable; I would explode like the Nazis in The Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It’s quite absurd of me to ask God to speak to me, as if I’m daring him to prove his reality. He’s left behind all these love notes for me to find. Like it makes a girl or boy curious and excited about who wrote their note, I’ve found Creation makes me pursue Him more than if I just heard his voice and that was it… it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful because that reaffirms that HE WANTS ME TO PURSUE HIM CONSTANTLY!

And that is magical.

PRAYERS

I want to do something huge God.

Not for my own gain or satisfaction but for You.

I WANT TO LIVE AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE GOD.

I don’t want to be content with a 9-5 job or a nice little routine.

I want to be places I want to be out there.

I want to go out and DECLARE your name forever!

I want to scream it from the rooftops Lord and I don’t want to do that in nice comfortable fashion.

Break me and shape me.

Take all my preconceptions of You and DESTROY THEM.

I WANT ALL OF YOU JUST LIKE YOU WANT ALL OF ME.

Amen..

"Only the Cover..."

Today I finished another read-through of C.S. Lewis' epic tale, "The Last Battle". This is the final chapter in "The Chronicles of Narnia" and documents the end of time and the final hardships experienced by the Narnians and the heroes of the stories. After the characters die and all that is good is swallowed up by evil,  the story really begins. The heroes and heroines of all the past stories find themselves alongside the great lion Aslan as he brings an end to the world they knew.

In a chilling and dazzling series of events He separates His true followers from the false ones and drowns the world in the sea. He calls the stars down from the sky and blots out the sun and moon and erases his former creation. The characters instantly find themselves in a different place: the "real Narnia", or the "real existence". It is paradise.

Lewis really strikes a cord with me when he describes the world(s) we live in as only a shadow of the real thing. It's beautiful really.

What we think of as good and perfect are ugly and flawed when compared to the real thing! God promises us in Isaiah 65:17 "Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind."

Lewis at the end of his book states that our life here, and all the stories that we live and all our pain and happiness is "only the cover and the title page." When we finally come into our perfect fellowship with Almighty God we will only be in chapter one of the Great Story! It will "go on forever, and every chapter will be better than the one before!"

IT. WILL. BE. GLORIOUS.