Embracing Divine Dialogue: A Journey of Faith

and that desperate desire to want that life with god more than you want anything else and then for the thought to come that god really could speak to him and and then for it to come in such an interesting way as best as i can understand it the way that he would actually experience prayer is he would talk to god and then he would say back what he understood god to be saying to him in fact john i have a little passage of that you know he went to signal hill virtually every day [00:01:39]

just at this moment you must hear of this sacred evening the day had been rich but strenuous so i climbed signal hill back of my house talking and listening to god all the way up all the way back all the lovely half hour on top and god talked back i let my tongue go loose and from it there flowed poetry far more beautiful than anything i ever composed it flowed without pausing and without ever a failing syllable for half an hour i listened astonished and full of joy and gratitude [00:02:34]

i wanted a dictaphone for i knew that i should not be able to remember it and now i cannot why someone may ask did god waste his poetry on you alone when you could not carry it home you will have to ask god that question i only know he did and i am happy in the memory but it's wonderful how out of this he learned a presence of god with him and a speaking voice that then he became this world figure yeah inventive uh of a technique for teaching people to read that is still used [00:03:29]

the very lovely story about how he taught one chief of the morrows to read and the chief out of gratitude asked if he if there's anyone that he wanted him to kill because that was one way that the morrows tried their love language yeah in fact i think in gary chapman look that's one of that's the sixth love language you know the thing is that it it seems so private and yet you can't contain it and it was so public i mean he would say in a it was another little book learning the vocabulary of god [00:04:18]

he would say that little child that can't read is that you speaking to me god which led him to this great right off literacy yeah yeah and uh that that that it his great work came in the area of language you see is actually tied right into the issue of communication and intimacy that comes through that conversational relationship that that he was walking into with god i loved his uh definition of a mystic which i thought was so memorable he said a mystic is somebody who believes when you talk to god god talks back [00:05:11]

and it puts it so simply because either that's the case or god doesn't talk back and i know for me and i think it's probably true for a lot of people i tend to be so suspicious put off by the abuse of god told me some language that i would tend to go to the other extreme exactly close myself off from the possibility yes i think that's what most people do and so you know you know really even in the bible era i mean paul had to tell right and say despise not prophesy [00:06:06]

i think he had to say that because there was so much holy baloney going all right that he said now you know test thing don't despise it test what is true i mean hold fast part of what was so helpful to me and i think dallas that you heard about this and hearing god i know cs lewis wrote about it lol book talks about i love he says the reason that there are so many human beings is god is running experiments with all of them to see how much of me can this person carry in this moment [00:06:37]

and that thought that was so helpful to me is that communication is simply guiding somebody's thoughts exactly you know that all the communication is is guiding somebody's thoughts because we're finite we have to use finite means we have to use sounds or written images and then because that's happening because i'm making these sounds you're having thoughts that you would not otherwise have but because god is infinite he can guide our thoughts without needing to have any finite means in between [00:07:02]

and that means it really it becomes very possible that i could be having this thought because god is guiding it and there's still a mystery to it but it's not so confusing then no you you know one of the things that's so lovely i mean we can't be on signal hill and and in that kind of context but that little book he wrote game with minutes was this sort of practical one that all of us yes and i and i always found it such a delight that he called it a game right how many minutes can i be aware of god's presence [00:07:53]

and at one point in one of his writings he would put these were journal writings and at the top of the journal entry he would put 50 conscious seventy percent yes whatever and i used to go conscious of what until you know he was playing this game with minutes but you know that's one of the most encouraging thing about this though for those of us who think we're modern and up to date and all of that is that he he was an extremely well-educated person in the social sciences especially and in psychology [00:08:04]

and that he would put a percentage on it yeah try to get precise with it absolutely well unfortunately speaking of minutes we're to our last minute so that's it for now i'm sorry dallas you had a really profound thought no doubt it was everybody who's watching this video is gonna have to go into eternity never having heard it perhaps perhaps god will talk to them [00:08:04]