God Speaks: The Book, Mountains, and Music

I had that nagging feeling for weeks, "Where is that bible!? Where was I the last time I had it?"

Over the past year, I've become accustomed to reading God's Word online or via an app on my smart-phone. I couldn't even remember the last time I actually held the book in my hands. I had looked here and there, but never really dug for it. That is, until the nagging intensified.

One morning, I just couldn't sleep. In hindsight, I should've been on my knees praying, but instead of thinking my Creator may have wanted to have a word with me, I was just pissed to be awake. I would later realize that while I angrily longed for sleep, something awful was happening to someone else, someone I should've been praying for.

I decided I would look for my bible again. The bible. We have several in the house. I wanted one in particular. And there it was, in a bin under the bed. It took lots of lifting and shifting, along with a healthy dose of grumpy moaning and groaning, but I found it.

This bible has seen its days. It's about fifteen years old, and a paperback, split into two sections somewhere in the middle of the book of Proverbs. Because of where the book is split, it always falls opened to Proverbs: that's just physics, the law of broken book bindings.

So naturally, I was intrigued to find the pages turned to anything but Proverbs, and I found myself reading the thirty-sixth chapter of the book of Ezekiel, where God was speaking to the mountain's of Israel. They were crawling with enemies and lifeless with famine. But God made a promise to reclaim the Mountains as His own. He was going to purge the land of enemies and replenish it with rain, so His people could return and live in the mountains in worship of Him once again.

Hours later this chapter would minister to my heart when I'd learn of the horrible things two of my group-home boys did to another child. These boys are mountains, once inhabited by God, now overrun with the enemy. They are lifeless; full of death. But God can reclaim them. He can drive out the enemy and restore them, making them new, making them His again.

This story is becoming painfully long, but I don't want to miss any detail in how God spoke to me that weekend.

The next day, after a long shift at work, I sat with a co-worker talking. He's a new believer, super enthusiastic about God and, as a young man raised in Haiti and exposed to voodoo witchcraft and mysticism, he held no doubt or the slightest hesitation that the Holy Spirit could do and does miraculous and unexplainable things. Along with his enthusiasm, he's also fresh out of the military, so the more exciting our conversations about God gets, the more colorful his language becomes (which is a refreshing experience!).

"Alright, man," he said, "this is some crazy $%&!, but I feel like God wants me to tell you to get into His word. Really dive into it, and not no computer, iphone bull$%&!, but the actual book. The actual &%*$!@# book, man! Hold it in your hands while you read it! And pick up that %&*$%#@ guitar and write that @#$% and sing it, deliver that %$@#! Do it with confidence! He's giving it you."

Like I said, my chats with him get colorful, but I love them. I love the way God has used us to speak into one another's lives the past few weeks.

I didn't know how to respond. After a silent moment, I explained to him how I've had a nagging feeling to find my bible for weeks and that I had actually found it just the day before. Then I also told him about a new song that has been placed in my heart, about how writing it has seemed to trigger a lot of insecurity in myself and that I had set it aside because of that...

I'm short on ideas of how to wrap this up in a clever way, and I don't necessarily have a conclusion, just a reassurance that God is present and that He speaks, and, as with all my posts tagged "God Speaks," I want to be sure I never forget how.