God and I have regular “conversations”, for lack of a better word. But before I get into that, I want to give a bit of background perspective. I was raised Episcopalian but left the church of my father a long time ago. I still consider myself Christian, but in the time since I left that church, I’ve had a number of conversations, experimented with meditation and learned about a number of other things that have been incorporated into my spirtual experiences. One of the things that endlessly frustrated me and had me questioning my faith, was precisely the idea that I should literally be hearing the voice of God and the only reason I didn’t was because I didn’t have enough faith.
The thing is, I’ve come to realize I was hearing him speak to me for a long time, just in different ways than I expected. I also suspect he speaks differently to different people, so it’s a matter of learning how we relate to God and working with that. It’s really not all that different from the idea how some people are visual learners, some are audial, some are tactile, etc.
So, in my experience, he speaks to me in a few ways. One of them is through my intuition. Sometimes this comes as a sudden bit of knowledge I really have no idea how I got. There’s the obvious examples of “oh no, someone I care about is in trouble” that we’ve all had, and I’ve had plenty of those. But there’s perhaps just as many where perhaps I should be worried, and just have an intuitive sense it will work out. I’ve learned to even suss out these things through types of meditation and self-conversation, but this sort is usually of a type of immediacy, something I need to have snap my attention quickly, deal with it, or perhaps stop dealing with it, and then move on.
I think it was Einstein who said that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous, and this is an idea of I’ve latched onto. When I’m working through things or struggling, it’s important to really get a good way of phrasing what my struggles are, so I can understand how to see his response in this way. It’s difficult to really explain without getting into specifics, but it’ll be something interesting like a phrase repeated in various contexts in a short time that directly responds to the phrasing I had. A recent example that probably doesn’t make much sense out of context was in relation to an issue I had with some acquaintances, and in a short period of time, maybe about 48 hours or so, all of them used a particular turn of phrase that was a direct response.
For me, though, the most prominent method is through song, particularly as I’m a musician. Sometimes it’s through the songs of others, but often, particularly recently, it’s through my own work. An interesting example was, for instance, was a few years ago where I was struggling with working through a concept. Then surprisingly, a band that I’d loved but had not done anything for years so I’d largely stopped following, seemed to release an album out of no where that explored exactly that concept. But particularly in my own work, it’s sort of that place where the music or lyrics just write themselves and when it’s done and I go back over it, there’s a very clear message in it to me.
