Tag: spirit

Does My Heart Have Ears?

Shirleyjdietz4 Comments

My heart has heard you say, “Come and talk with me.” And my heart responds, “Lord, I’m coming.” Psalm 27:8

I’m thinking about that question, “does my heart have ears?” I think it does.

I was walking one evening this week, feeling thankful for a chance to get out where it was quiet, feeling the rhythmic, somewhat stumbling way my feet were hitting the uneven ground, feeling like the open sky was listening. I was thinking (because it’s too hard not to think) about all the decisions of the day, all the possible responses to upcoming events, and processing, processing.

I felt like I heard in my spirit the suggestion that I talk about all those things – like, just speak them out. So I did that, and as I got into it more, it didn’t feel terribly weird. It felt like I was being listened to. It was easy to credit God with that – it had sounded like his voice, and no one else was around.

Bedtime Thoughts: God

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What does a spirit look like when you finally see it? I don’t know. But I think about it a lot, usually at night before I fall asleep.  Maybe it will be strange and scary to see God. He must have thought so because there were times he told people not to look.

But when I say “I’m putting something in God’s hands”, I’m not thinking of a scary God. I’m thinking of Jesus – God, who gave up being whatever unusual, powerful, and possibly scary thing he was and became like a man forever.

Jesus had hands. He could hold things.

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Thoughts on Knowing Myself

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(As I sit at the table, looking out at the green world with bright splashes of sun coming through the trees, on my day off, aware of how amazing it is that I can have thoughts at all…)

Hello self. Who exactly are you?

I believe my self-knowledge comes through my spirit.  I am not just a body having a spirit, I am a spirit having a body (from A. W. Tozer). I am different from other creatures in that I am spirit and body, made to resemble certain characteristics of the one who made me. The more I discover about myself, the more I know about my creator – and the more I know about my creator, the more I will understand about myself. It’s called “made in the image of”.

I believe in the reality of a spiritual world even though I don’t have eyes that see it. I often wonder how frightening it would be if that world were suddenly visible… That unseen world affects me day to day, moment to moment.  My moods, my physical responses, my energy, my courage or lack of it are all of extreme interest to this spiritual world.  You might even say there is a war going on and I am at the center of it and most of the time, completely unaware.

Can I prove the spiritual world? I have proved it to my own satisfaction in several ways.  Ultimately, I choose to believe it because its reasons and defense makes more sense to me than other beliefs.  The natural world is such a testament to someone greater and smarter than I am, or anyone else is.  People who believe otherwise say that we will discover natural answers to things we now consider supernatural – given time we will discover them and be master of their processes.  I also think we will discover things given time, only what we find will be increasingly complex and intricate and I believe we will discover God behind it all.

I believe that we all worship.  If I made a list of the things that concern me, that I fight to maintain, that I spend great amounts of time on, the item at the top of the list is what I worship. Do I want to worship things, or the creator of things, all things? Even the things we discover about the world – we discover, we don’t create. Science admits that the odds of evolution creating the complexity and diversity of life that we see are astronomical.  The “faith” required to accept a universe of its own creating is something I don’t have. It’s too big a leap.  I’m just sayin’ that’s one thing I know about myself.