Monday, March 31, 2014
Every morning God calls me on my smartphone. At 8:00 a.m. to be exact. And He’s always on time. It doesn’t matter if I’m traveling or in the middle of eating breakfast or fast at work catching up on emails. He always calls. For that I'm deeply grateful.
Sometimes if I’m in another room when God Calls, my wife calls out to me, “Steve!…God’s calling.” This arrangement has its downside, of course. If I happen to be missing God’s Call because I'm out of the room, that’s bad enough, but now I’ve also got my wife reminding me that I’m missing God’s Call! (See what I mean?)
So how does it work? My daughter’s pastor gave me the idea in her sermon one Sunday when she was talking about how Scott Peck (author of The Road Less Traveled) learned the difference between “praying” and “being available to God.” You can read Scott Peck’s story in my previous post, Part 1.
After hearing and seeing that there IS a difference I decided to test it out. So in my Quiet Time the next week, I worked it out with the Spirit, asking “when would be the best time to be available to God every day?” We chose 8:00 a.m. So I set a reminder on my phone to go off every morning at 8:00 a.m. and labeled it, “Time with God.”
Now you might say, “wait a minute, that’s not God calling… it’s just you setting an alarm to remind yourself to pray.” In the beginning, that’s what came across my mind too. But after doing this for several months I’ve come to see that God is actually at work through this system. Even though it’s a human creation, God can and does work through it. Just like He works through all of the ideas, technology, discoveries, culture and structures that we create. Even the printing up of a Bible on pieces of paper, using ink, and binding the pages together between two pieces of leather—is a relatively new invented technology. And God has no trouble working through this new technology—speaking through it, even.
It’s reassuring to hear God Calling each morning, without fail. It reminds me of the character of God: God’s faithfulness, for example. Unlike a friend who may quickly give up after a minute or two, God’s Ring never stops until I turn it off. Or, His unfaltering love for me—He calls me just the same the very next day even after I have traveled to a breakfast meeting the previous morning and had to hit the “Dismiss” button while in the car. (It’s unnerving to hit the “Dismiss” button when the phone message reads, “Time with God.”)
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