I found this article absolutely Fascinating,
for two reasons. One, the 80 millisecond lag interested me because it
seems that lights always take much longer to go off than that for me.
That is to say, when I flip the switch that turns off the light, it
looks like it takes almost a full second for the light to "run out." I
couldn't imagine what the electrical excuse could possibly be for it,
but it's probably just my brain. There are all sorts of implications in
this article for people whose brains have a lag between one part and
another, and for people (like me) who have especially high thresholds
for attention spans and focus.
The second aspect, yet the trigger that
brought me into the article, was the idea that things happen, but our
brains lag until they've Formed the perception of it. As a Christian,
I've always looked for some kind of analogy to explain to people how one
"hears" God, because the word "hear" is so very audible, but the
experience is pretty much guaranteed not to be. That is, God doesn't
talk in your ear, he talks to your spirit, but the experience is not
subjective - he is not you, he has his own words to say and, for the
most part, they are not what you expected or particularly wanted to
hear.
The analogy I've come up with is that
when you "hear" him, it's the immediacy and the echo of someone who's
just spoken. You know, like when someone at the next desk tells another
friend, "Our English test has been moved up to this afternoon." Wait!
What??? You were doing your own thing but the echo of those words are
stamped very clearly in your mind. Or perhaps an announcement comes over
the loudspeaker at Walmart, "Will the party meeting Darcy Milbanks
please come to the Service Counter to pick up Mr. Milbanks." You may not
be meeting anyone as you browse the cereal aisle, but the words catch
your imagination a moment later as you recall, "Darcy Milbanks. That's a
bit unusual for around here. I wonder what that's all about."
The voice of God is something like that.
I'm not hearing it audibly, but I'm perceiving it as if the words still
hung in the air between us.
There's a second aspect to the voice of
God that is ALWAYS true: He never disagrees with Himself. He will never
say anything or ask you to do anything that doesn't line up with
scripture. Count on it.
Now that you know that He always agrees
with the Bible, you want to know where the best place is to hear Him?
The scriptures. Just go read them. Read them so you are familiar with
all of them. Don't worry about understanding them all, just read them
all until you know all the stories really well, can recognise when
someone is quoting the New Testament or the Old Testament straight away
and (this is when you know you are starting to know the sound of his
voice) you know when someone is misquoting the Bible. When you know
someone has inserted words that aren't there, or has left out the the
big context of a scripture so they can bend the truth and whine about
their pet peeve instead, then you know you are beginning to recognise
God's voice.
I heard someone make a great analogy
once about knowing the scriptures and hearing the voice of God out of
them, and it really is true. Imagine you had a little wireless teletype
machine, one that you could use to send messages back and forth by
radio, but the only messages you could receive would be the ones you had
letters for. So if you only had five letters of the alphabet on your
machine, you could make out short little words and do some little
abbreviations of some others, and you could get some kind of information
going back and forth.
Well, imagine if you got five more
letters of the alphabet on your teletype message machine, what an
explosion of information you'd have in your ability to send and receive
message traffic! It's the same way with the voice of God, He is going to
talk to you first out of the Word. The message of salvation is the same
as it's been since that first day Jesus came out of the grave, and
that's the first thing God is trying to get over to you. After that,
He's trying to talk to you thru all the other things He put in those
scriptures - and if you will go add those to your receiver, He can talk
to you out of them, just like adding alphabet keys to your typewriter.
The Holy Spirit is your teacher and He
is present with you always, and will never leave you. You don't have to
go to every church in town or graduate seminary or hire a tutor to teach
you about God. Read the scriptures, talk about what you are reading
with your Father God, and let the Holy Spirit instruct you from the
inside out. If you are listening to Him, don't be rehearsing all the
time what you used to think, just observe what's going on in the Bible
and follow along with what He is saying in there. You'll learn if you
LISTEN.
(Don't worry, worryworts, the Holy
Spirit always leads us to be in the company of fellow believers.
Remember that in the scriptures?)
