"Hey you! In the Garden down there!"

The last few days I’ve been thinking about how God speaks to me. Lots of people talk about lots of ways that they hear God’s voice. I don’t hear a spoken voice. Here’s my deal.

Most days, God shouts at me.

I’m not a very good listener. That’s why it’s good that God shouts at me.

I meet and know a lot of people who are rather intuitive and who hear God speaking directly to them. That’s not the case with me.

It seems that the way in which God has chose to speak to me—or perhaps the way that God has taught me to listen—is much more indirect. God speaks to me through grace.

In a way, God seems to be saying “don’t do as I say, do as I do.”

When I say God talks to me through grace, I mean that I see God in the blessings in my life—big and small. And when I pay attention to the fact that God is talking to me, I realize God is shouting.

The crazy, colorful blooms on the sunflowers at Perkins are not a whisper. They are a loud shout. So are the ten-foot tall sunflowers in my neighbor’s plot. I am amazed at them, and wonder at how they spring forth so tall and confident among an otherwise messy field that a few crazy souls are attempting to cultivate.

Sunflowers are a blessing. They are God’s grace in physical form.

So are pumpkins that grow from fingernail-sized seeds into twenty-foot vines with huge leaves and numerous basketball-like fruits. Vines that love the burning sun and humid July heat, heat that makes the rest of us wither and retreat to dark shade, hoping for a cool breeze.

Seven-foot tall corn plants are God’s grace. Even complete with Japanese beetles to be caught and aphids to be out done, the corn is amazing and beautiful. It has nourished—provided grace if you will—to hundreds of generations of people in the so-called new world for thousands of years. It did so before Christ, and it did so to those who knew nothing of him.

These are some of the ways God has been shouting at me lately.

The shouting happens nearly every day. Some days it seems to be with great frequency, almost unending. Sometimes I hear. Sometimes I listen. Rarely do I understand. In the best moments, I am guided to wonder.

Lately I see God’s grace in the routine growth of the plants at Perkins, and the passing of the summer days and all the weather summer brings. Yet God also shouts at me through other acts of grace throughout the year.

Perhaps the biggest wonder is why—when I recognize this—I don’t just set aside the activities at hand and listen a little better, perhaps trying a little harder to understand more completely what is being said. Why don’t I just drop what I am doing and listen? Why does my busy mind and our busy culture, rather than God’s shouting out, direct my actions? Is all the business of everyday life really more important?

I desire to do a better job of stopping, listening and wondering. I need to try harder. It starts with stopping. It starts with stopping the other voices that shout at me and beg for my attention for their own sake.

I don’t desire to echo God’s shouting. The world about me does enough shouting. I desire to share the acts of grace through which God is revealed. I need to make it a habit of doing as God does, as God acts, sharing grace.

Stop. Listen. Wonder. And share.