listening to God, listening to one's life

Among the many things that seem to be engendering big, noisy announcements in these internet-saturated days is the relationship between God (or no God) and history. You may have come across the idea of "dispensationalism", whether you know it by that term or not -- the idea that the God of the Bible has fixed a series of seasons or epochs through history, culminating in the "last days", when history will end.

Like so many abstractions drawn from Scripture, I find dispensationalism to be suspect, at the least, if not wholly indefensible. The idea that history has discrete seasons, and that wise Church leaders know them, and know which one we are in -- and, therefore, know who is "doing Christianity right" in relation to the season -- has always seemed flimsy to me. It has also seemed to distract from the basic priority of discipleship: "make disciples" by loving one another after the pattern of Christ's love, seeking not to be served but to serve; welcoming the stranger; seeking peace and pursuing it.

At most, it seems to me that if God needs to lift up a disciple or disciples to be prophetic, or to show the way, or to inspire other disciples, God will do that in spite of our relative ignorance about history. Not many of the Biblical figures whom God called understood what they were getting themselves into. And those who had some notion seemed utterly convinced that God must be making a mistake -- they were too young, or too green, or too insignificant to affect history.

All this leads me to return to an emphasis on listening to God as best one can, and listening to one's life. Where is there energy for contributing? When is there opportunity to show Christ's love in a servant mode? How do I, in my own little slice of time and space, show compassion, kindness, faithfulness?

In the midst of war (which is to say always) and strife (which does not take a vacation) and peril (for it visits someone somewhere all the time), we can pray for peace, and reconciliation, and well being. And we can keep awake to when those times come -- historic or everyday -- for us to be God's answer to someone else's prayer.

In Christ,

Lee