Not Everybody Connects With God the Same Way

Twice a month, 12-15 people gather at our house to learn how better to recognize and experience and follow the Holy Spirit. We call the group "Flowing in the Spirit." We met this past Sunday and I'd like to share a little of it with you.

The conversation was around the different ways in which different people most easily experience the presence of God. One of the books I’m reading is Sacred Pathways, by Gary Thomas, who also wrote Sacred Marriage (“What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?”). He points out that many people feel frustrated or even guilty because the ways in which they are advised to grow closer to God don’t seem to work for them. For instance, we are often told that to grow closer to God, we just need to lock ourselves away in our prayer closet for longer and longer periods of time each day. Thomas says this works great for some people, but not at all for others, and it’s not a problem with those others, it’s just that God made them differently.

This was illustrated by the group discussion. Among the ten or so people there (several were away, it being August), we identified at least five or six different main ways in which different ones of us connect with God.

After that discussion, I briefly outlined the nine ways Thomas has identified as how different people connect with God. Then we made a two-part assignment for next time, which will be Aug. 23. The assignment is:
• Try a new way of connecting with God. Pick one of the below that you haven’t done much or at all, and try it.
• Think about what “connecting with God” means to you. How do you know if you have connected with God? What are the signs? How can you tell which of the below works best for you – and what does that mean, “works best?”

Here are Thomas’ nine pathways, very briefly summarized. For a more detailed discussion see the book.
1. Naturalists: don’t need buildings, books or bands. Learn about God from watching nature, feel close to God by being in nature.
2. Sensates: experience and love God through their five senses. Want to be lost in the awe, beauty and splendor of God. In worship, they want their senses to be filled with sights, sounds, smells, feelings, tastes. Love intricate architecture, stained glass, classical music, formal language, even incense and the feel of kneeling or holy water.
3. Traditionalists: love God through ritual and symbol and sacraments. May have a very disciplined life of faith, they like structure, they may not like change to the way they do things in church.
4. Ascetics: love God in solitude and simplicity. They want nothing more than to be left alone with God in prayer, without pictures or music or liturgy to distract them. Their worship is primarily internal.
5. Activists: love and worship God through their actions. These actions are often confrontational, standing for God against evil and calling sinners to repentance. They may experience God most deeply as they lobby or picket or march for a cause. They see church as a place to recharge their batteries for the real worship which takes place out in the world.
6. Caregivers: love and worship God by taking care of other people, like Mother Teresa.
7. Enthusiasts: love and express God with mystery and celebration, clapping and shouting “Amen” and dancing. May feel they haven’t worshiped if they aren’t experiencing and feeling and being moved by God’s presence.
8. Contemplatives: love God through adoration. May often refer to God as their lover, and use images of a loving Father and Bridegroom. Focus is not on understanding or serving God, but loving God as purely and deeply as possible.
9. Intellectuals: love and worship God best when studying the Bible or grappling with theological concepts. They may feel closest to God when they first understand something new about him.

For most people, one or a combination of a few of these feel very natural and good, and some others don’t help at all. Others are more able to experience God in a variety of these ways. I personally feel that one way of measuring our spiritual growth is by our increasing ability to worship in different ways. It is good to try different ways just to see if one works for you that you never tried, but it is also important to recognize that none of these ways of approaching or worshiping God is more or less spiritual than any of the others. In other words, individuals or denominations that focus on social action in serving God are neither more nor less spiritual, by that fact, than those that focus on silent prayer or doctrinal understanding. Structured liturgical worship is not necessarily more or less spiritual than free-flowing charismatic worship. We need to encourage and support each other in all of these.

I'd love for anyone reading this blog to join us at our next gathering - just email me for details. But whether you can or not, I want to encourage you: if you just haven't seemed to be able to get the hang of connecting with God, try a new way. God for sure wants to connect with you!

Kayak Camping the Outer Banks

Recently my son Jed emailed me with an invitation. Could I break away and meet him in the southern Outer Banks of North Carolina for a couple days of kayaking and camping?

When your grown son, who is in the Army and lives 800 miles away, extends an invitation like that, you do whatever it takes to make it happen. I loaded the kayaks on the car, he got in his truck, and we met in Havelock, NC.

The next day we put into the water at the Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor center, he in the 15-foot sea kayak, I in my very impressive 8-foot flat-water yacht, which I have named “The Brain of Pooh,” after Pooh Bear’s honey jar boat. We had our camping gear, 5 gallons of Gatorade, and 3 gallons of water. Camping at CLNS is primitive, with no water or other facilities most places.

The weather was beautiful, the water warm, the breeze brisk. It was glorious – at high tide. Unfortunately, most of the times when we needed to land or depart it was low tide. That meant dragging the kayaks across grass and mud and shallows, sinking sometimes to our knees. When we could float, the breeze was often so stiff that we had a hard time keeping our course. (My kayak has no rudder, and Jed’s legs are so long he couldn’t use the pedals on his.) At one point we found ourselves towing the boats through sharp-edged cord grass up to our knees, then carrying our camping gear several hundred yards across Core Bank through marsh grasses up to our eyes. We felt like Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in “African Queen.”

The real excitement, though, happened the first night. We had set up camp on the sound side of Shackleford Bank. After a yummy meal of canned chili, canned potatoes, and canned peas all mixed together (kayak camping is different from backpacking in that the emphasis is on bulk, not weight), we watched the fire die, the sun go down, the wild horses wander and the beach come alive with thousands of fiddler crabs. Then I started toward where I had laid out my sleeping bag. As I walked toward it, my headlamp trained just ahead of my foot, the beam of light suddenly illuminated a textbook example of a copperhead snake – one of the most poisonous snakes in North America.

Jed verified that was what it was, and while he kept the beam of light on the snake (which wasn’t at all worried by our presence), I carefully removed my sleeping gear. We retreated to the other side of the point and slept on the sand just above the high tide line. Perhaps surprisingly, I had no trouble at all falling asleep.

What are the odds that I would choose to go up to bed just as the snake chose to come to that same place? What are the odds that it would be just where my headlamp shone, at just the time that I shone it? What are the odds that I would have, a few days earlier, decided to buy a headlamp to take with me, rather than the tiny squeeze light I usually used? What are the odds that I would have bothered to use the lamp instead of my normal practice of moving around camp by moonlight? Had any of those things not happened just so, I could easily have stepped on that poisonous snake, or gone to bed only to find it already nestled in my sleeping bag. And we were a two hour night-time paddle from help.

Statistically, the way you calculate a combination of odds is that you multiply the individual odds together. Multiplying the odds against all those things happening just as they did, the result is either an astronomical coincidence, or answered prayer. I firmly believe it was the latter, because I had bathed the whole trip in prayers, for guidance, good weather, fun, and especially protection. Maybe that's why I was able to go to sleep so easily.

I actually used that experience as a sermon illustration this past Sunday, in a sermon I had already planned to preach, called “Deliver Us from Evil.” (You can download an audio podcast of it from trinityannapolis.org.) We don’t often hear about how to pray prayers of protection, but it is a very practical thing to know and do.

I’d rather not go through something like that every time I need a sermon illustration. But God is good, and God answers prayers. And kayaking the Outer Banks is a lot of fun!