One of the spiritual gifts of writing devotionals is that it gets you looking for devotionals in your life, those moments when God is speaking to you. My hope is that by reading any devotionals (my own are included in Daily Guideposts) you discover how God is whispering and/or hollering to you.
Take what happened the other day on the subway during my commute to work. I was reading the Gospel of Luke and had come to a passage where Jesus said, “None of you who are unwilling to give up all of your possessions can be my disciple.” (Luke 14:33)
Gosh, I said in both exasperation and prayer, this is really hard, Jesus. All I can say is, yes, I’m willing, but you are going to have to show me how because I don’t know how.
It seemed that in the passage all Jesus was asking for was my willingness and that I could give Him, but how it could possibly work, He was going to have to show me. I would love to be rid of my obsession with possessions–to stop worrying about having enough money for retirement or fretting about how to pay off our home equity loan. But how?
Show me how, Jesus, I prayed again.
At just that moment a homeless guy comes walking down the car, asking for money. Not only was he disheveled and sorely underdressed, he also looked pretty strung out on drugs.
What, am I supposed to give him money? I wondered. I couldn’t fathom doing that. God only knows where it would go. (Funny, how we use that phrase, “God only knows…”)
Then I remembered that I had an energy bar in my bag, something I’d specifically put there for this purpose. If he was hungry, it would give him some sustenance. “Hey man,” I held it out to him. “Do you want this?”
He took it and moved on.
The whole incident, as brief and unexpected as it was, seemed a response to my prayer. I’d asked, hadn’t I, “Show me how to get rid of my attachment to possessions?” Jesus was hollering right back, “Listen, pay attention, be honest, talk to me, I’ll show you. Step by step, I’ll teach you.”
I don’t know if I’ll write this up for Daily Guideposts, but it was a holy moment and when you write devotions and read them, you start looking for such instances. “Would this make a devotional?” you ask yourself. “Would it help anybody else?”
Whatever devotional volume you might read–and we’ve got a couple, including Mornings With Jesus–the practice of looking for moments when God is speaking to you makes you aware of how often He’s saying something. If we’d just listen.
I’ll bet He said something to you today. It might even have been in something you read.
