I Just Feel Like God is Saying.
My wife owns a small business, manages a payroll there, maintains a sterling reputation with her work and is the central system of organization to everything I love in life — our three kids and our home. We met really young and have never left each other. She grew up in a Pentecostal church and I didn’t, so I had no reference point for things like prosperity teaching, speaking in tongues and Jericho Marches upon walking into it.
By the time we were in college we’d found a place that was ostensibly much different than the church of her youth. Most everything at the Pentecostal place was the color purple, and written in big, bold letters and concerned with power and glory and manifest destiny or some otherwise real magnificent bullshit. Our college place was much less regal, seemingly much less concerned about appearances and it wasn’t loud. I loved how quiet it was. There was no dude with a collection of conch shells blowing sounds to heaven, chapters of the services weren’t marked with screaming and yelling or punctuated with exorcisms and on no occasion(s) did anyone grab you by the arm and drag you to the front of the room, closer to God. Our college place had a lot of coffee in it, and its charismatic tendencies were low-key, polite even. When folks there talked to God it was unassuming, almost parenthetical. When they talked for him it was as casual as a daydream.
I just feel like God is saying …
Their orientation to divine things seemed like a perfunctory flip through something they’d read before. Nothing was off putting; no one was a jerk. They were a Charismatic church, but one with its shirt tucked into its pants.
I just feel like God is saying …
As I’ve said before, I’m a recovering Charismatic who has an interest in recovery writ large, but most of what I’m learning to rearrange is — as a premise — the room between those seven words; (people who believe in) a very talkative god.
