"Well, God told me..."

"I get frustrated when people say things like, 'well, God told me...'. How do they know what God is saying? I've been praying about this for the last few months and I don't 'hear' God telling me yes or no. Yet they can so easily say "God told them." I go back to the scripture about God being with the righteous and I wonder if it's because I'm not righteous enough that I'm not hearing from God."

For a while now, I've been mulling over this part of the conversations Steve and I have been having over the last few months, trying to come to some conclusive thought about what it means to hear the voice of God. The reality of it is simply, I just don't know.

Steve brought up something the last time we talked about this. With the stuff he's been going through recently, he's wondered if it comes down simply to the fact that he could choose to say, "well, God told me to do this" when really HE was the one who made the decision because blaming it on God would be an easier way for people to not hate him or the consequences of his decisions.

It was something I resonated with because it wasn't too long ago that Heidi had to try and explain to the 3Ts why Jael was moving away from them. The conversation went something like that...

Heidi: Well, the government wouldn't let Jael stay. (referring to the immigration offices)
Toby: Well, I'll go kick them in their privates.
Heidi: Tob, I think even if the government would let Jael stay, I'm not sure that she would want to...
Toby: Well, I'll go kick them in their privates anyway.

It was a slightly humorous conversation (as are most conversations in the Freer-Fry household), but the realisation that I had actually CHOSEN to leave broke my heart. I couldn't blame it on immigration, or on God's will or anything of the sort. The reality was, I could have found a way to stay in Anderson (find some job that would basically sell out my soul and my calling, marry an American citizen just for the sake of staying, you name it). But ultimately, I made the decision to say yes to Westside Christian Fellowship. If I believe that God is a god of free-will, then of course I was the one with the free-will to choose to leave.

To try and explain it as God's will would probably be as blasphemous as saying I've figured out the way God thinks, at least about this situation.

I finally got to watch The Hunger Games recently. Scene after scene of Seneca Crane, the gamemaker dictating what to throw in to alter game-play left me wondering if that was how God manipulates our life paths. Not that God would throw fireballs or mutts our way, but it left me wondering if, for so long, my understanding of the way God works had been limited to the imagery of God being a gamemaker that controls the circumstances in our life path. When the reality is, if God simply IS, God probably wouldn't be overly-anxious about when we wander of the "right" path. If we are the imago Dei, then you'd think that surely we would have enough smarts to get ourselves out of being stuck.

Came across this NPR article a few days ago. Still mulling over this thing about hearing from God and the possibility that I've wandered too far off the "liberal" end of the continuum. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.