Am I hearing God’s whispers?

We were reading some Greek myths with my daughter this week. We love them, she loves them. There is the one about Prometheus stealing the gift of fire and being punished for it. My husband pointed out that the discovery of cooking with fire was a huge shift in our evolution. He was fascinated by the idea that this thing we understand through science was already deeply understood by the ancients.

He was equally fascinated by a punishment by flood, which in the Greek myth lasted nine days and nine nights (rather than the 40 days and 40 nights in the Bible). This got my daughter thinking about the knowledge that is passed down the generations and gets mixed up along the way, which made her think of Chinese whispers. So of course, we played that game. When it was my turn to come up with a word, I said: ‘Love’. She heard me correctly and said the word to her father, who just heard a whispered breath.

Which in turn got me thinking about our relationship with God the father. He, I believe, is saying: ‘I love you,’ but by the time it gets through to our human ears, we just hear the whisper of a breath. My daughter suggested that actually we just hear the word ‘you’ which struck me as true and sad. ‘I love you’ turns into ‘you’, which turns into ‘me me me’…

Commitment-Phobe is a Christian

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This is an extract from an article that was published in the December 2019/January 2020 edition of Reform

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