prophecy

God speaks to us through prophets. I don't believe this most of the time because if I believe what a prophet says to me and that it is from God, then I would have to listen and amend my life accordingly. It is easier to just leave God out of the picture all together and live a life that is based on earning and spending, minding my own business, and relying on social structures and common sense. If God even exists he has more important things to do than to be worried about me and my life.

Now and then things break apart and then God's speaking to me through prophecy (in the Bible, the signs of the times, or in church) is what I earnestly want. When we lost our first kid in childbirth because she got tangled up in her umbilical cord and died,  I really wanted God to tell me it was a terrible mistake and that she wasn't really dead. He was silent. A woman from next door who had gone through the same thing many years previously and had to carry a baby she knew was dead to full term told my wife she had made it through and life in the face of such a great loss was possible. My wife wrapped her pain around her like a dark blanket and stayed in the suffering of loss for a long time afterward. I gave up on her and on God and went about my life in a semi-Buddhist existential funk getting more and more isolated from her, other people and reality. We buried the body and would visit the grave in Bucks county now and then and I would howl. I worried about her being cold in the ground.

I had a stroke 10 years later. It changed me and when people asked me why I'd had a stroke, I said it was the wrath of God, more as a joke than anything else. My personality changed and I found the anger of the frightened and after a year, my wife left and I was alone. I rejoined a fellowship that helped me stop drinking by giving me connection with other people, many of whom did believe in God. The tension between wanting to be alone and hating loneliness worked on me until I met another woman who is a born again Christian. She began to work on me with the Bible. One cold spring day I was home from work with bad lower back pain.

It was one of those where it hurts to sit, to stand, or to lay down. Moving, sneezing, farting all hurt. I was reading the book of Romans which had previously meant as much to me as reading the stains on the carpet or the frost on a window. It said something about Abraham trusting that God would to what he promised. I wanted to kneel on the floor and pray but a voice inside me said, "Do nothing." The pain vanished like a candle being blown out. Poof.

I concluded it was God and took it as a sign of his power.

So I am open to the idea that he can speak to us through the Bible when he is ready and circumstances have made us ready to listen.I hear the arguments already but against them all I know the pain disappeared.