I recently ran across an article about words and language written by American novelist James Salter. In the article he described the importance of language and declared the most important task in life to be “learning to speak.” He went on to write:
Animals are our companions, but they cannot, in any comparable sense, speak. They do not have, even the most majestic or intelligent of them — whales, elephants, lions — a God. In whatever form, our apprehension and worship of God is entirely dependent on language: prayers, sermons, hymns, the Bible or other text. Without language God might exist but could not be described.
Ponder that for a moment. Without language, and even more specifically without the written Word of God, God would exist, but He could not be described. Contrast that predicament with the description of God that we do get to hold in our hands, whether as a book or on our phones, to ingest, to ruminate on, to grapple with. It is a gift to have been given a holy text that we can comprehend and that speaks into our personal lives. The fact that it speaks into our personal lives brings us to the current exercise: interpretation. With Scripture God can be described. Interpretation helps ensure we are accurately seeing these descriptions and applying them to our lives. Gentle Exercise 5 is an exercise with the second request (“God, Teach Me!”) to ask of God in a three-request process: (blog note: for the first request in the three-requestprocess, “God, Show Me!” please see Gentle Exercise 4; the third step, “God, Change Me!” will be covered in Gentle Exercise 6. I know, the exercise numbers and the steps don’t match up…it’s what happens when you have a 3-step process to explain within a 6- or 7-exercise experience.)
Thank you for being a part of this journey to lean into such a weird time as this, to listen, to feel, to hear what God is saying. Thank you for accepting the invitation to redeem this weird time that we find ourselves in, to build a dependence on God’s Word that would have otherwise not happened, a dependence that will be with us long after the worldwide Covid-19 fever breaks.
Prayers!
Barry Shafer
barry@inword.org
Gentle Exercise 5: “God, Teach Me!”
Get all the gentle exercises, so far, here.