Talk to God; He really does want to hear from you

 

I was talking to my dog the other day when she told me …

Wait. The first part of that sentence is ok. According to a quick Google search, “One estimate from the Institute for Environmental Research and Education suggests at least 80% of people talk to their pets, including dogs, across age, gender, and socioeconomic groups. More specific surveys of U.S. pet owners find that 55% of cat and dog owners have regular conversations with their pets, while a 2024 survey of 1,500 American pet owners reported that 84% of respondents regularly talk to their pets like fellow humans.”

Talking to my dog is one thing. But “she told me” … that’s a something else.

The idea of having a conversation with animals has captivated humans for centuries. You remember Hugh Lofting’s 1920 story about Dr. Doolittle, a physician who could speak animal languages? It’s been turned into movies and TV shows and musicals.

More realistically, remember the gorilla Koko, who achieved quite a bit of fame back in the 1980s for being taught sign language? Koko was said to a have had a vocabulary of around 1,000 words, using an adaptation of the American Sign Language (ASL). But there was a lot of controversy over just how much Koko actually was able to communicate and how much was a trained reflex to her handler. Koko apparently could communicate at a very basic level, which is remarkable; unfortunately, much of whether she actually “communicated” was doubted because her handlers and trainers were the ones interpreting what Koko “said.”

I grew up on stories of talking animals. It’s politically incorrect now, but I was read and later read for myself the Br’er Rabbit stories as a child, the story of a clever rabbit who was a notorious trickster, out-smarting a variety of others by his wits rather than muscle.

I am a dog lover. I talk to my dog as if she understands what I’m saying. And indeed, my dog is trained well enough to understand words like “heel” and “sit” and “shake” and “down” and “place” and “go get your toy” and even “wait.”

Truthfully, she doesn’t understand “words;” rather she recognizes sounds that she has been trained to respond to in a certain way that brings a reward. But she really does seem to want to please, to figure out what I’m trying to tell her. Sometimes she’ll even go through a series of responses to see if what she is doing is what I’m asking of her.

I was thinking about this as I was trying to communicate with God.

In my faith, we call it “prayer,’’ and a 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study said 44% of U.S. adults report praying every day (a number that is on the decline). A 2024 Barna Research report said that 84% of U.S. adults have prayed at least once in the past week.

Apparently, a lot of us feel this urge to talk to God, even if it’s that simple cry of “Help me, God!” when we’re in trouble (basically what we call “foxhole prayers”).

It seems only natural. The Genesis creation story essentially says God created man to have someone to communicate with, that before sin entered the world, God regularly walked and talked with Adam as a friend. Nothing seemed more natural for Adam than for God to show up and say, “How’s it going?” and for Adam to tell God about what he’d been doing, and for God to listen and respond, since it takes two to communicate.

I can hear Adam seeing God and saying, “I saw the most amazing creature today. What is it?” To which God would reply something like, “It’s pretty cool, isn’t it? You tell me. Give it a name.”

But since what we call “the Fall” – when Adam and Eve decided they could do something outside of God’s parameters – God has been increasingly remote, and it’s become easier to wonder if He’s listening, if He’s even there.

Some people make fun of prayer. But then, many of those same people make decisions for their lives based on cultural trends, media reporting, instinct, hormones, superstition, horoscopes, listening to “experts” … seeking guidance from somewhere.

I admit I struggle with prayer. I wonder what to say, and if it really makes any difference. But then, Jesus prayed. And for me, in its simplest form, that’s reason enough. If I’m trying to be like Jesus, then I need to pray like Jesus (so I pray, but whether I actually pray like Jesus – probably not).

Sometimes I feel guilty for asking God for so much. Then I think about the famous “Lord’s Prayer,” when Jesus’ followers asked him to teach them to pray. It’s really a list of asking for things – give me food, forgive me when I screw up, protect me from evil. So maybe those quick “Help me, Jesus!” prayers that so many of us say without thinking are not that far from being what’s expected.

I wonder if, in many ways, in trying to communicate with God we’re not like Koko, or our dogs, trying hard to please our teacher/master/owner. Sometimes we don’t have a clue what is expected of us in a specific situation, but that doesn’t stop us from trying both to figure out what God is saying and how to communicate in a way that elicits some response from God.

There are all types of prayers and, I believe, a place for all of them: for formal prayers, for communal prayers, for written prayers, for spontaneous prayers. We know from reading the Bible that we can be formal or casual with God. We can be awed by Him, but in the next minute be angry with Him. We can thank Him for giving us what we have and then ask Him for things we don’t. It can feel like we’re really communicating one day, then within 24 hours wonder if He’s even listening at all.

But then, isn’t that how we communicate with friends? With the people closest to us?

Isn’t that probably the way God and Adam communicated in the beginning?

There is a classic book called “The Practice of the Presence of God,’’ by Brother Lawrence, a French monk who lived in the 1600s. It’s a short book, simply written. It is primarily about Brother Lawrence’s “practicing the presence of God” (as the title suggests) daily, while washing dishes or sweeping or walking or just going about his daily life.

Brother Lawrence writes “We must try to converse with God in little ways while we do our work; not in memorized prayers, not trying to recite previously formed thoughts. Rather, we should purely and simply reveal our hearts as the words come to us. … Talk to Him often; forget Him a seldom as possible.”

Sometimes I realize I’m not sincere when I pray. Often, I wonder if I’m doing it right. But I think the very fact that I recognize those things - I believe God wants my authentic self more than the idealized version I have of myself. So I keep talking.

It’s complicated. There are all kinds of reasons to wonder why we pray, if we can actually “change God’s mind” or if there is a gray area in God’s will where he allows us to intervene or if in reality (as I was taught years ago) we pray until God changes our mind into conformity with his.

There is a lot of research that shows real benefits of prayer, on mental, emotional, and even some physical health outcomes. Studies indicate prayer can reduce anxiety, depression, and stress by lowering cortisol levels and promoting relaxation, greater emotional regulation, resilience against depression, and a stronger sense of purpose.

More than anything, I find myself just talking to God. Maybe to God I’m on a level of Koko, or my dog (as smart as she is!), except He does understand me. I’m amazed that the God of the Universe wants to have a relationship with me.

And with you.

And more than anything, I want to keep the lines of communication open.

Jazz and predestination vs. free will

 

Do you remember the first album you bought?

Maybe the better question is, do you even remember record albums?

Music has always been a big part of my life. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in the family living room, listening to music on the big Zenith stereo console - basically a piece of furniture that oriented the entire room. My mother loved music, and one of the first LP (long playing) albums I remember was her recording of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

The first album I remember buying for myself was Blood, Sweat, and Tears, the one with the song “Spinning Wheel.” I tended to go for those bands that were more than guitar, bass, keyboard and drums. I liked horn sections, maybe a by-product of listening to so much Gershwin when I was younger, or the Big Band music my father listened to on the radio in his truck.

Listening to an album back then was an event in itself. You gently placed the vinyl record on the turntable, set the needle on the first groove, then sat on the floor in front of the speakers and studied the album cover and what were called liner notes while listening to the music.

Liner notes were writing found on the back or inside cover of the album or, later, the sleeve that protected the vinyl record. They might include a message from the band, something about how the record came to be, and then usually a list of each song including who played on each recording. There would always be studio musicians who weren’t part of the formal band, but who played specific parts of the recording, and if you studied enough liner notes, as I did, you began to see certain musicians who played on multiple recordings, whose names became as familiar to me after a while as the actual band members.

That’s where I learned to look for musicians like Steve Lukather, Carol Kaye, Hal Blaine, Dick Dale, Dave Sanborn, Richard Tee, Leon Russell, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Wynton Marsalis – those are just some of the many names that, after a time, I felt I could recognize their style regardless of the record. Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band played on a ton of records that were not Springsteen.

Muscle Shoals, as Lynyrd Skynyrd sang, had the “Swampers,” a bunch of white, Alabama-bred country musicians who played country, rock, R&B, soul – anything and everything. They were on something like 75 gold and platinum hits and brought musicians from all over the world to record in this studio on north Alabama.

More than a few went on to have successful careers as headliners. Grover Washington Jr. – I developed an affinity for jazz – was one of those great stories. He was scheduled to back up saxophonist Hank Crawford on a studio recording session, but for some reason Crawford didn’t make it and the producers had Washington Jr. step up and take the spotlight. Washington went on to be a star in jazz and R&B in the 1970s-1990s.

In the late 1970s, a friend and I went to see Rickie Lee Jones at this club in Buckhead (Atlanta, Ga.). Jones was popular at the time with her song “Chuck E.’s in Love.” But when we got there, we realized David Sanborn was playing in her band, and we were more excited to see him than Rickie Lee. We were big Sanborn fans, who was so distinctive you could pick up his saxophone style on any number of records, until he became so copied that a generation of saxophonists were sounding like Sanborn derivatives.

The Rickie Lee Jones concert demonstrated that you might buy the tickets for the headliner but the people in the supporting roles, the backing musicians, were as important to the quality of the song as the lead.

I thought of this the other day when reading the Apostle Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians 12, “For just as the body is one and has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body …” and “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you.’ Nor can the head say to the feet, ‘I do not need you.’ On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” He goes on with this idea, saying “If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

In a sense, being a Christian is like being in a band. There are many parts to the music – vocals, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, horns – and depending on the song, their individual part may be big or small. I remember a percussionist with Spyro Gyra who played a number of instruments, from conga to triangle, and was fun to watch because of the way he seemed to scramble from one instrument to the next within the context of a single song. You wouldn’t pay to see him front a band, but his contribution to the music (as well as the live show) was undeniable.

I really like this analogy in the context of jazz, or at least of a live performance, where no song is played exactly the same way twice. Everyone knows the melody and the rhythm, but there is usually space for a featured musician to add notes or runs or riffs that weren’t written into the original score. One person may have the featured instrument, playing what he’s led to play, but the rest are basically staying within the music as written, holding everything together

Jazz is one way I resolve the theological issue of predestination vs. free will or foreknowledge. In live jazz – the best way to hear it – everyone is playing the same song and knows how it starts, where it’s going, how it’s going to end. But along the way, individual musicians have freedom to experiment, to try different notes that hopefully contribute to the overall sound. But still, that individual freedom is curtailed somewhat within the limits of the song they are playing. The overall song is predestination; the individual experimentation is free will. God wrote the music, so He knows where it’s going and how it’s going to end, even as He takes great delight in the individual talents displayed within the structure of the song.

A casual listener may not realize how important the bass player is, or what the percussionist adds to a song (“More cowbell” as the famous Saturday Night Live skit goes), and at times certain individuals may not be playing at all, sitting back while other musicians take over.

To Paul’s point, in the church we all have a part to play. Some are more obvious than others. Sometimes, as in music, the part we play might change. If it’s your turn to solo, you do so; but at the same time, if it’s your turn to rest – a very important part of any musical score – you have to do that as well, because if you decided to just jump in and play whenever you wanted, the whole song would be ruined.

We won’t all be Dave Sanborn, adding something so distinctive everyone notices even when we’re supposed to be in the background. We can’t all have our picture on the cover of the album. That doesn’t make us any less important, because certainly the person that wrote the music, that envisioned the total sound, appreciates how important each part is to – in the case of music – winning that Grammy.

But, as Paul writes, “God has placed the parts … every one of them, just as He wanted them to be, so there are many parts, but one body.” (I Corinthians 12:12).

So, learn your music. Hone your craft. Know that even if you never get to be the headliner, the producer – God – knows the part He has written just for you and applauds every note you hit that adds to the heavenly sound of His music.

Is the 'Scarlet letter' is now the 'scarlet video'?

 

His father found his “stash.”

Now “stash” can mean a lot of things, depending on where you live and the time period. In this case, it was the late 1960s, in a pretty conservative suburb of Atlanta, and the ‘stash’ belonged to a 6^th or 7^th grader who lived down the street.

His ‘stash’ was a Playboy magazine (as racy as anything we knew existed back then) that my buddy had gotten somehow, and a deck of playing cards that featured pictures of nude or semi-nude women. This was hot stuff among a bunch of church-going boys back in those simpler, pre-internet, pre-cable TV days.

But he’d hidden this stash in the drop ceiling of his basement, which seemed ingenious to us but in fact turned out to be a rather poor hiding place. Drop ceilings were drop ceilings because they allowed easy access to the plumbing and ducts and electrical stuff that ran beneath the main floor of the house, and when someone went to check or fix or change a light – well, that’s how this kids’ father found his stash.

Honestly, I wasn’t good enough friends with this kid that he’d let me actually see this treasure, but I heard about it from other guys in the neighborhood who said they’d seen it and, I will admit, I was curious.

The point is, I remember this guys’ father finding this stash of what we’d now probably call “soft porn” (if even that), although it was pretty hardcore to us innocent kids of the 1960s. And getting caught by your dad in something like this was a definite “oh, nooooo” moment. When we heard his dad had found his stuff, we were all afraid for him, imagining what our own parents would do to us in the same situation.

What his dad did was one of the most incredible acts of fathering I have ever seen. I’ll get back to that.

I thought about this the other day after reading a story about “crowdsourced shaming.” It’s a phrase for people getting caught on camera doing things they shouldn’t be doing. You know, like that couple at the Coldplay concert that got caught on the kiss cam. It was obvious by their nervous reaction that something was amiss. People being what they are, searches were done and it turned out these two people worked at the same company, were married to other people, and were having an affair.

Just a week or so ago, a couple was filmed kissing on a bench in New York’s Central Park. When they saw the guy filming them, they became nervous and asked him to stop. He didn’t, and soon posted the video online. Within a few hours, internet sleuths figured out these two were partners in a New York law firm; one of whom was married to someone else. The video got more than 2 million views on TikTok before being deleted, and stories were written about it.

According to this article I read, there are people with their cell phone cameras who go looking for this stuff. People who look like they could be having an affair are common targets, as are public drunks, people whose clothes reveal too much (either intentionally or not), and people who find themselves in embarrassing situations. These videos are then broadcast over TikTok or whatever social media is popular, and the subjects of these videos find themselves in for a public flogging.

From the article: “These days, stepping out your front door in the morning means you no longer have any legal right to stop someone from shoving a camera in your face—something self-described “free speech auditors” on TikTok and other platforms will be quick to remind you. The “auditors” make their content by conspicuously filming people in public, which they have a legal right to do, in hopes of eliciting angry responses that can be uploaded to YouTube or clipped on TikTok for the benefit of people who like watching public freak-outs. If the response goes viral, they can make some money ruining lives, too.

“And they aren’t looking for good people doing nice things because that’s not good content. The cameras matter only when you cheat on your wife, argue with her in public, or have a meltdown in a Target. When you do, the iPhone will be there, filming as the comments flow in. If you’re lucky, all the commentators will do is laugh at you. At worst, they’ll track you down, doxx you, and ruin your life…”

Do these people being filmed deserve it? It’s easy to say if they were doing something wrong and chose to do it in public, they got what they deserved. It used to be called public shaming, and it’s nothing new. Ever read The Scarlet Letter?

These days, once you’re caught you may be subject to the eternal ‘scarlet video,’ that will remain out there no matter what you do to apologize and make amends.

That’s the difference. It’s one thing to be shamed in front of your community, family and friends and people you sat beside in church on Sunday; to be publicly held accountable for violating the generally accepted moral standard of the community where you live (however hypocritical those expectations may have been).

It’s another thing to be shamed by millions of people around the world that don’t know you, who aren’t part of your community, who are simply taking great pleasure at the failing and embarrassment and humiliation of someone they have never met and likely never will. This turns it into something like a blood sport. It’s a spectacle, purely for entertainment purposes – and profit for whoever shot the video and uploaded it first.

Its people being thrilled by watching the life of a total stranger come apart and feeling somehow superior, I guess, because these people “get what they deserve.”

My mother used to tell me, “Be sure your sins will find you out.” This comes from Numbers 32, where Moses is talking to the tribes of Reuben and Gad, who have decided to stay on the opposite side of the Jordan River rather than go with the rest of Israel and conquer Canaan. Moses tells them that they can do that, but if they fail to come to the aid of their brothers when needed, they would be sinning against the Lord. “But if you fail to do this, you will be sinning against the LORD; and you may be sure that your sin will find you out,” Moses tells them.

On the other hand, we’re told to be careful sitting in judgement of people. To the crowd who wanted to stone the woman caught in adultery, Jesus says, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” (John 8:7). And in Matthew 7:1 Jesus says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”

There is a lot about what Jesus says that doesn’t mean exactly what many people want it to mean; it’s not “You don’t have the right to tell me I’m wrong.” Later in the same chapter, Jesus essentially tells us that we are expected to judge what is right from wrong, and call out wrong when we see it. There are just as many verses on how to appropriately judge the actions we see.

But we’re also told to love our neighbors, which means, I think, that we’re not to take joy in calling out the sins of others. We’re not to delight in their failings. We’re called to love those people, and as Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery, tell them “Go and sin no more.” We have to recognize what sin is, and encourage people – and remind ourselves – to stop sinning. But also allow them to get on with their lives.

That brings me back to my friend’s father. When he discovered his son’s stash of magazines and playing cards, hidden in that basement ceiling, we all expected there to be a whipping that would leave our buddy’s backside black and blue, with a potential grounding that lasted until well into high school.

But the father didn’t get mad (at least, not when he spoke to his son). He didn’t threaten. He didn’t punish.

He just told his son, “Son, if you’re going to look at stuff like this, then leave it out in the open. Because if you’re trying to hide it, you know you’re ashamed, which means you know it’s wrong.”

It was an incredible piece of fathering. At that time, in our community, in our culture, the kid couldn’t have been more embarrassed. He knew it was something to hide. And he wasn’t about to have that stuff out in the open where his mother or sisters could see it. He knew instinctively there was something illicit about these pictures. And part of the thrill of having this stuff was the secrecy.

There were a lot of ways this story could have gone. But this father knew his son well enough that he had a pretty good idea of what his son would do. And his son did: he got rid of the stuff. Threw it away. The son was ashamed.

His father didn’t publicly humiliate him. I don’t know if he even told the mother (he probably did, but she never acknowledged it as far as I know). He simply made the son see that he knew what he was doing was wrong, and since it was wrong, he shouldn’t continue doing it. Simple as that.

That, to me, is correcting someone in the right way. With love. Just between the two of you, if possible.

The Bible says we are “always to be gentle toward everyone” (Titus 3:2). We are to gently confront people caught in sin (Galatians 6:1). We are, above all, to speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15).

And not take delight in another man’s failing, but to be happy when he’s been redeemed.