“Events in daily life can be interpreted as a dialogue with God”
In an article called A Model of Mormon Spiritual Experience by Kevin Christensen, he mentions this paradigm where “…you begin interpret external events as God speaking to you, and you answer through your own actions.” (p.11)
This added a bit of enlightenment to the same way that I currently have come to view my daily relationship with God. A few pages later Kevin mentions this quote which gives a little bit better understanding of what he’s getting at.
“One understands oneself to be addressed [by God] through events … A person replies through the speech of his life; he answers with his actions. Events in daily life can be interpreted as a dialogue with God.” – Ian Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms, 55. (p.18)
In the newer Karate Kid movie, Jackie Chan dramatically states to his young student, “Kung Fu lives in everything we do, … It lives in how we put on the jacket, how we take off the jacket. It lives in how we treat people! Everything… is Kung Fu.”
In the same manner, the process of being born again and fully converted to God causes us to see and respond to things differently. It is the difference between trying really hard to force yourself to act a certain way and the grace of enabling and understanding brought about by a true relationship with God that allows you to see clearly and empowers you to act in faith.
The rest of the article is absolutely worth the read, it has some amazing thoughts that I’ll probably comment about on another post:
Thanks for writing this up and sharing the paper Kevin produced. I wasn’t aware of it before, and I found it interesting. I am going to go back and dig deeper through the footnotes now. The paper really resonates with my experiences and I think has just added a few new resources to my studies. His use of ‘embrace’ a few times, and in different ways, strikes deep. It was interesting to read a review as thorough as his, some of my own observations and experiences flowed right along with his ideas. Pass along my thanks to Kevin as well… Read more »