Scott Langdon [00:00:17] This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. A dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him. Episode 150.
Scott Langdon [00:01:03] Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast where this week for the 19th time, we bring you our series: What's On Your Mind? I'm Scott Langdon. We bring you two emails this week. The first is the conclusion to Jenny's email from our previous What's on Your Mind episode? And the second is from Chris, who brings to us a perspective that might be as relatable to you as it was to Jerry and me. And by the way, if you do find this or any other episode relatable, we sure would appreciate it if you share it with your friends. Also, if you'd like to ask a question or share your story of God, please drop us an email at questions@godanautobiography.com. We love hearing from you. Here now is What's On Your Mind. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Scott Langdon [00:02:00] Welcome back, everybody. This is What's on Your Mind, and this is the chance that Jerry and I get to share some of the emails that you send in to us, your experiences with God, your ideas of God, your struggles with God, your questions about what we do here at the program. And last week, or I should say the last time we did one of these episodes, the What's On Your Mind series, we talked with Jenny, and Jenny has been somebody who's come a time or two with some different emails. And Jerry, I'm so glad to be back with you to pick up on what Jenny had given to us last time we were together.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:02:38] Yeah. Yeah. Well, Jenny wrote at length and told us these intense, intense experiences and we discussed them because it was very rich communication. A lot to think about. So people should go back and listen to the previous What's on Your Mind, but then she continues in this interesting way that those intense experiences, you might say, come to an end isn't quite the right but went on pause, and then she starts by explaining God sent her to a quiet time. And then, experiences were renewed. And so that's where we pick up with Jenny. And Jenny, I think will give us a lot to talk about, Scott.
Scott Langdon [00:03:21] I do think so as well. She already has, and she's given me a lot to think about all week. And in the weeks since we've done the last episode that we've been preparing for this one. Jenny, when I read through her emails to us, the way she articulates her experience with God in this sort of personal way is something that you share. Obviously, you have a very personal experience with God, and one of the things that I found interesting and we'll pick up with this second part of this email here, is that bit of time out that you suggested. God sort of had a little bit of that with you. It's sort of, it's this progressive way of relationship building, I guess. You know, God sort of appears to you, and you talk a bit and, you know, however it happens and there's a time where, you know, you resist or whatever it is that He seems to be away from you. And then an experience like we heard in one of the last episodes where God whispers to you, it's like a gnat in your ear, and the meaning of that sort of encounter, it seems, was God saying, "Listen to Me, even when I whisper." So in other words, it's- I'm not coming and going. I'm kind of always there. It's up to you to tune in and hear me?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:04:41] Yeah. I'm often told to pray more because I tend to have my to do list each day and I go on and of course I have God in my mind, you know, because most of what I'm doing is really following up on what I received in God: An Autobiography, and following up on things I've been told to do. But I have to be reminded. You know, the ideal thing for me is to start the day with prayer and in fact, to somewhat pray my way through the day. But of course, I tend not to do that. I just chip, chip, chip through my to do list, and then God occasionally has to say, whoa, slow down, fella. You know, you have a partner here who's the senior partner, and we need to spend some time together. And also, I often get concrete help and guidance where, you know, I don't quite know what I'm doing or I'm puzzled or maybe I think I know what I'm doing, but I'm a bit off beam and I get a corrective when I pray. And this is the main thing I'm told.
Scott Langdon [00:05:49] Hmm. Hmm. Well, Jenny in her experiences with God were getting to a place where she was, you know, needing a little bit of time to sort of sort things out or what have you. And she, as she articulates the experiences, expresses it as a bit of a pause that she goes on. So we're going to pick up with Jenny's email and she writes in, she says this:
Jenny's Letter [00:06:18] “Then I let the experience go, for half a year. It was as if my spirit were a plot of ground that had produced a large harvest and God was letting it lie fallow for a season, to recharge and regroup. Then God returned, but deeper than before. My love for Him was deeper, I trusted Him more completely, I knew His voice very well. A great deal of both my anxiety and my pride were gone, leaving me open, present to Him and receptive. My experiences with God began to become more visual. I had had a vision of a room once- corresponding to Jesus saying that in the Father’s house are many dwelling places. I was in the habit of resting in and talking to and worshiping God at night, before I fell asleep. As I was doing this, I began to find myself in that room. This was disconcerting, at first, but by then, I had much more perspective on the mystery of the presence of God, so I was able to simply accept the experience.”
Scott Langdon [00:07:30] I'd like to stop there for just a second and talk about that up until now, a couple of points I highlighted as I was going through. The first, kind of going back up to the beginning, she says,"I let the experience go for a half a year," and then she says, "it was as if my spirit were a plot of ground that had produced a large harvest and God was letting it lie fallow for a season to recharge and regroup." Now, I didn't grow up in Oklahoma, but I went to college in Oklahoma. I got out there when I was 19 years old and ended up meeting my wife, Melissa, there, my first wife. We had our children there and I lived there for almost 14 years before I moved back up here to the northeast Philadelphia area. And I learned a lot about Oklahoma and the Dust Bowl. And you know, from my wife, Melissa, who was born and raised there, and a lot of my friends who were born and raised out there and how the Dust Bowl could happen and how it hasn't, you know, how we've corrected it. The idea of just planting a field again and again and again and not allowing it the time to rest and sort of take in the nutrients it needs and just well, this is my job to be fertile soil for corn, say, but if I just keep no rest, no part of the process, the growing and the harvesting is only part of it. The developing and the waiting for the season is the other part of it. And Jenny talks about this in such an interesting way as she talks about it with regard to her spirit.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:09:04] Yeah, that's fascinating, Scott. And it's so, you know, there are all these wonderful metaphors and analogies and the best ones are really concrete, like the one you just explored and that she introduced. We're like-- One of the things we are is like a field, you know, where things can grow, but they grow out of nutrients. And of course, God, you might say, is like the sunshine and the rain. But we also ourselves sometimes need to lie fallow. We have our own internal development. We need to let things settle sometimes to get - she shortly too talks about -perspective, and we need to get perspective and we need to process things. People don't just wham, bam, you know, this is the experience, now here are my conclusions. We have to take in wow. And I went through that. There were six months also in my case. Mainly, I was told something that disturbed me greatly and it meant, you know, it was like a bridge too far. You've given me this, that and the other thing. So many things that didn't quite make sense to me that certainly weren't where I started out in thinking, and this was one thing too many. You know, it's as though you break the camel's back or something. But the six months, various things happened that are recounted in God: An Autobiography, but I had to process it all. And how does this make sense to me? And also, you know, we're living a life, you know, I'm a kind of a thinker, but you're mainly living a life, so you have to appropriate it as a full personality. And how does this affect how you live? And I suppose you went through something like that, Scott, in this Oklahoma context.
Scott Langdon [00:10:53] Yeah, yeah. It is this idea of the, you know, the fertile ground always wanting to be the fertile ground that produces, that produces, that produces. And you can use that analogy in every aspect of your life, whether it's your work or whether, you know, whatever it is you want to produce, produce, produce. And yet sometimes you can get lost in like, what is it that I produce? And sometimes, if we're going to take this analogy a little further, sometimes that same field can be used for different crops, and that in and of itself is something. So in other words, maybe you're producing something a little different for a while. And then back, you're fresh again to produce the original thing or whatever it might be. Being open to being used as this field means sometimes rest, sometimes distance, sometimes, you know, it's a different crop.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:11:49] Yeah, doing something different.
Scott Langdon [00:11:51] Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:11:51] And one of the things she says is part of what she got out of lying fallow, this would be one of the reasons God comes back deeper- why? Well, she'd given up a lot of her anxiety and her pride, and you can make that long list. These are often some of the most important obstacles, the most common obstacles to taking in the divine presence, but it's a long list. And I always say and we say in our discussions, get the distractions out of the way. These are distractions. The reason you can't take in what you need to be taking in for your spiritual sustenance is you have anxiety, you're worried about it, you've got pride. You've got-- there are pride of beliefs. You may have a belief system that this would disturb. Well, you've got to loosen that hold on the elements of pride. You may even think, "Oh, I've had these amazing experiences and this makes me super-duper special." I went through a moment like that and immediately the line went dead. And I was told, "No, you're not super special anymore than, (what is it?) the paint, or the brush that Leonardo happened to use." You know, it's like all the other brushes. He grabbed one at random and he did something with it. The brush did nothing, and I'm just the brush. And so, anyway, all of those things can get in the way. And she became more open, present and receptive.
Scott Langdon [00:13:24] Well, I found it really striking that this keeps coming back as a theme in the Life Wisdom Project episodes, whenever you have a guest on, you talk about this in your story. It's a feature of my story, and virtually everyone that I talk about these matters with. And that is when Jenny says part of what you were just quoting, "A great deal of both my anxiety and my pride were gone, leaving me open." Every time there is a line goes dead or something happened, it's because there's a closing, it seems. That's how I have perceived my experience and how I'm seeing other people talk and hearing them talk about their experiences, which is when it seems like the line is dead, it's because there's a closing. And so when her anxiety and pride are gone, there's an opening. And now a- I realize I'm present to Him and I'm receptive. And what goes on from there, from the openness, is for Jenny, her experiences become more visual for her. That's how it's come into her. Me, it was more auditory. Me, it's been recently the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:14:35] Okay.
Scott Langdon [00:14:35] In a way, ironically, through the medium of YouTube, which is traditionally a visual medium, so you would think it would be more visual, but it's actually in many ways the auditory of it. I'll have my headphones in and whatever, but it's, and we've talked about this before on the program some, I don't speak German, and yet I don't need to. Like, in that moment, there is something about the music, but it's not just the music and the instruments. It's the music, the instruments, Bach, who wrote it, but it's the players who are playing it. The singers who are singing it, the director of the choir who put it all together and then even go deeper with it, it's the people who work behind the scenes and then make the video, and then they put it out and on the Internet. Who made the Internet? Who made this computer I'm working on? Everyone is united to give me this experience of joy and peace, which is God. But everyone is involved to bring it to me. So it's hard for me in this day and age with our technology, which I talk about so much, to just not walk around in wonder about all of the ways that God is trying to get to me and who is involved in making it happen. It's a miracle to me.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:15:50] Yeah. That's a wonderful perspective, Scott. That, you know, my experience was not in any religious tradition context. I'd grown up in a tradition that I left behind. I was a lifelong agnostic. And also since I'm a deep introvert and a thinker, you know, by occupation and personality, that tends to be kind of alone. You know, a singular activity. But of course, that singular activity depends on the whole history of culture to have come about, including the technology you're talking about, and the kind of economics. Somebody is growing food. The farmers in Oklahoma, some of them are growing food that reaches my table to keep me going. And you're right, we're all-- one of the most fundamental facts about human nature is we're radically dependent on each other. None of us is remotely self-sustaining. And here I'm not talking about metaphysical doctrines, or something. I'm just saying in the most basic terms of life, we're all radically dependent on one another and, of course, on the physical reality that we inhabit as well. And we talk about the ecosystem a lot these days, but this year, this house I'm speaking from right now was built by somebody out of materials from the world, you know, out of lumber and so forth. So that's an important perspective. And that, of course to a kind of somebody of atheist temperament, none of that is suggestive of anything remotely divine, spiritual, or anything like that. But if you just change your-- tilt your vision a little, then it just radiates through it all. The spiritual presence and meaning radiates through it all.
Scott Langdon [00:18:25] For Jenny, the way that was radiating, the experience that she was having was becoming more visual. And she started to realize, you know, she was having these situations at night when she was worshiping God at night and was doing this and was finding herself in this room that she had sort of imagined in her mind. And as she's having this experience with God, she's in this room, and she found it disconcerting. And this is what I highlight about this in the last bit of the first section we just did, she says, "It was disconcerting at first, but by then I had much more perspective on the mystery of the presence of God, so I was able to simply accept the experience." So there's this openness that she has, and then there is sort of a second part that I have found I have been not guilty of, but have done, which is sort of resist the experience. You know, God, can you give me an answer? And then here's the answer, and I go, no, not that answer, or not that way, or whatever. But the key seemed to be she was open and then she just simply accepted it. That's something that you probably relate to, I would imagine.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:19:41] Oh, yes. And I think one of the mistakes we see this in some people we hear from, and it's very common if you read about some of the types of churches where people really want to have a direct experience of God and so they kind of work at that, and they have a definite idea of what an experience of God should be like. And this is all to my mind in terms of what I've been told as well as my own personal experience, a profound mistake. You need to relax. You don't have to crave, see, know interaction with God. No, just be at peace and live your life and be in the world and be open. That's all you need. Just be open to it however it comes, don't decide in advance what it's got to be. That it's got to be some kind of zap, you know, or something. Maybe it will be, but it doesn't have to be. Just let God-- you relax, be open, let God come to you howsoever God comes to you and it may be different from how God comes to a neighbor and you're envying them for some more dramatic experience. Who cares? That's how God, or maybe not God, it may be their own little fanaticism. You don't know. That's hard to judge. But at least when God comes to you, if you're open and honest, one of the things I notice, I think about both the messages we're discussing today, readers, comments and listeners' comments is they strike me as very honest. And she says this was disconcerting. She doesn't just say, "Oh, I had this wonderful thing. And then I drifted into a room and it's kind of an imaginary room, and..." No, she's thinking, what? This is kind of weird, isn't it? But then the insight she has gained, that's not that easy to come by, and it requires some experience, I suppose, and you quoted a Scott, "By then I had much more perspective on the mystery of the presence of God." And so I was able to simply accept it. And you'll see over and over in hers, I don't know if we'll highlight them particularly, but she often says, you know, I don't understand this, but this is how it came to me. She never-- there's a great epistemic humility. You know, she doesn't claim to understand all this stuff, and if she doesn't understand it, she still relaxes. And oh, okay, I don't understand this, but it seems that God is driving, is leading me in this direction. In one of our Life Wisdom Project discussions I just had with the great Dutch novelist Johan Herrenberg, he referred to that section. It's where he first started having an interest. And that section in the God book where I'm told, "Come in to the heart of Me." Well, I'm thinking this makes no sense. What on earth? I thought, is this out-of-body travel are we talking about? And it sounded scary. You know, God's very powerful thing, and coming in the heart and it turned out to be like the eye of a hurricane. And it happens, the name of his first volume of his great novel that he was at that point, just writing, was something like Through the Eye of the Cyclone. And so, you know, what is this? The same thing is coming to this guy, Jerry Martin, over in America. So you have to just not insist on understanding it, but just say, "Oh, okay," you know. You pay attention to make sure this is God and not your projection, not your own religious fantasies, that maybe you have your own motives for having or your own derangement for having. So you got to pay attention to those things. I mean, I'm not high on drugs or whatever, but if you've taken care of all those things, done this task of spiritual discernment that's always required, then, as she, as Jenny says, it's the deep wisdom in a way that you could have is to simply accept the experience. And then it teaches you what it has to teach.
Scott Langdon [00:24:12] The last section of Jenny's letter goes like this, she says:.
Jenny's Letter [00:24:17] “Almost every night I am with Him in those rooms, talking, or just being together, or caught up in mutual love- that is, I worship and adore God and He loves me. He has a degree of vulnerability that is breath taking. He is filled with emotion- emotion flows naturally through Him. I don’t understand His emotion. He frequently is caught up in pain and grief over the pain and grief of this life. I don’t know if Godfeels this, at some level, continuously or how that works. But I increasingly believe that God is waiting for completion- for the brokenness of this life to be healed, to wipe the tears from every eye. He seems to be hanging between now and that time, though of course, He dwells also outside of time and so He is in all times at once. But I know that this grief and pain sometimes moves through God and He lets me comfort Him- though what comfort I can be to Him, I do not know. But He seems to long for this recognition of His emotional vulnerability and then He seems to delight in being responded to authentically. He doesn’t hold back, He gives Himself freely and completely.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:25:46] Yeah. What strikes me, I was praising the people like Jenny who write us with such what seems to be honesty, not pretending to know more than they know, not pretending not to be shocked by things that shock them, and here we see in a sense, God's honesty. You know, their fear of the great God of the universe. You might say there's some risk in showing your vulnerability and then allowing someone to comfort you. And I haven't had that experience that she's had, but I have no reason to doubt it. In fact, when I was going to speak to a local interfaith church where rather than having a creed, they have a mission which is to further each other's spiritual journey, which I thought was, when I thought going to speak to them, well, this is going to be very easy. You know, they're in my camp already. And, but when I prayed, you know, "Lord, what should be my goal in this talk?" I was told, "Tell them what they don't know." And so I talked about precisely the suffering of God. And I didn't draw on this episode, but on a different one where God says, "If you miss My suffering, you miss everything." And here, it's so concrete, the best experiences and recountings of them are almost shockingly concrete. Comfort. She comforts Him. Does this relate to anything in your world, Scott, or your experience?
Scott Langdon [00:27:23] I was thinking about that. And I think the way it relates to my experience is that what I have come to lean into and understand a little bit more recently, and by recently I mean the last, you know, since we've started working on this project and I've started to look more expansively into what other religions have to say and how they express different things than what I grew up expressing. What I grew up understanding often, and the language that was used often, was that God was somewhere and I was a different-where. God was there and I was here, you know. I remember a Cookie Monster episodes from Sesame Street with I think it's Annette Bening, and they were talking about here and there. And cookies are here, Cookie Monster, you know, here, cookies there, now Cookie Monster here with cookies. You know the idea. But I always had that as a concrete notion that God was somewhere else and I was here. And, you know, to win favor or not win favor, God comes to you or not, and sometimes capriciously, it seems. But what I relate to more now is the notion that everything is God. That in a sense, so let me explain it this way: if I write a short story of fiction, every character in that story is inextricably connected to me from the milkman that the main character waved to in the morning. That milkman is my creation. Everything about that milkman, I love him or her or, you know, I'm detailed into. Now, this particular story might be about Joe Smith, and so it seems that the milkman is, you know, just ubiquitous and there's just no... but he's very specific to me because I've created him. And so that way of looking at God and me, then I just see everyone else as this sort of living movement of God. And so there is no place where God is absent. So even in these places where it feels like there's a period of time where God is gone and I'm here, it seems like that, but that's not reality. When we talk about what's real and what's not, it seems as if God is gone, but that's not reality. You know, if my wife has gone out to work and she's not here, that's real. That's reality, right? But the idea that God would be in that same kind of position, not here while I'm here, that's not reality. And so for me, any problem or goodness or bad thing that happens, good thing that happens, it's all God-connected. And Jenny seems to articulate a similar feeling when she says, "God is caught up in the pain and grief over the pain and grief that we're in." So just like if somebody I love is suffering with cancer or a breakup or whatever, I have pain and grief over your pain and grief. It's just like that for God.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:30:39] Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting how sometimes the various theological doctrines, of course, I'm aware more of the high theology, of the history of theology in the doctrines they come to, and often they contradict. They would contradict this totally. God is infinite and all powerful. God is everything in that sense, you know, not in the sense of all over the place, though they also tended to say that. But God has-- is perfect, infinite, couldn't possibly have vulnerabilities. And in fact, she said a little before that something about God having experiences and feelings. That God is so full of feelings. Was that in the part we just read or a little earlier?
Scott Langdon [00:31:33] Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:31:33] Anyway, there's a theological doctrine called impassibility or something like that denies, flatly denies, that God could possibly have an experience. And it creates a theological puzzle that Anselm, the Great Anselm, who invented faith seeking understanding as the definition of theology, puzzled over that. Well, if God doesn't have feelings, to love kind of involves feeling, and that means in what sense does God love us? So it seems to even block the concreteness of divine love and he solves it, if it's a solution, doesn't seem to me like a solution, but, you know, he's trying to work within a theological framework and sort of philosophical framework that, well, God doesn't actually love us, but it feels to us like love. Well, if I thought Abigail doesn't actually love me, but it feels to me like love, this is not what I'm seeking. Right? This is not very satisfactory. Anyway, that's a side thing, but there is somehow this tendency to start with some conception, and it can be theological, or it can just be some notion. I see God constantly defined as infinite, and infinity is a very puzzling concept actually, and doesn't actually mean very much. I think in God: An Autobiography, that kind of description is rather rejected. And they often say things like, "You can't understand anything about God because God is infinite." Well, how did you know God is infinite? You know, it's sort of self-refuting, and wait a minute, why don't we just do what Jenny does? We're not going to worry. We're not going to presume that we know in advance that God is infinite or perfect or omniscient, or can just do anything He wants or is impervious to our experience. We're going to see what comes along. I responded to the whole prayer, which includes what we discussed last time, but this is sort of helpful as a recap also, and it carries us through the current prayer: “Jenny, judging from my own experience, what you write reaches to the heart of life with God, and of His life with us.” (This is a quote from her) “God bends down to where we are,” Yes, and lets “our own selves” be “the lens” through which He lets Himself be seen. Just so (Jenny). God relates us to “intimately, authentically, as two people do.” Yes, and that — relating to us — is, one might say, the essence of God, what God is. (And of course, I'm told that very early in the book.) Not distant, not impersonal, not impervious, not the God of the textbooks, but a God who is so shockingly personal, that even a word like “vulnerable” is not out of place.”
Scott Langdon [00:35:14] We'd like to end this episode with a second email this week. It's a perspective that's a little bit different than Jenny, but one which I think a lot of people can relate to, at least on some level. And this email is from Chris. It's very short, it's very sweet and to the point. And Chris says this:
Chris' Letter [00:35:32] “I can see His back. He keeps it turned to me. He doesn’t speak, makes no sign I exist. I don’t like him.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:35:45] Isn't that amazing?
Scott Langdon [00:35:45] That's it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:35:47] This seems like a completely honest communication. Chris is putting his or her cards on the table. Here is where Chris is.
Scott Langdon [00:35:58] Mm hmm.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:35:58] And I responded at the time, and I thought this was so important because this is not an unusual experience. The spiritual life includes both divine presence and divine absence. And here I'm not talking about that general presence you were just speaking of Scott, but that sense of personal presence to me at a given moment, which also is a phenomenon. And okay, that happens, but there are moments where that is not present and a person may be tempted by despair. And so I respond to Chris: “Many people have times of feeling that God’s face is turned away, “hidden” as the Old Testament says. You do not have to feel God’s presence in order to pray. Just pray anyway, and tell God exactly how you feel. You can even shout and stamp! Remember also that sometimes, when people think that God is unavailable, they are the ones who are blocking the connection. Or it is there, but they are missing signals that may be faint and difficult to recognize. (And then I end with just the hope) May God respond to your distress!” And we have some reason for believing from a further limited communication with Chris that maybe Chris has moved on to a more positive place vis a vis these issues. So that was a nice feeling as well. But this in part relates to the sense you were talking about, Scott, of somehow feeling that seemed to be cultivated by the religiosity you were surrounded with as a child, that God can simply abandon you, can simply leave you. And of course, in God: An Autobiography God is both same and other as us. So in one way, God is omnipresent, as you talk about, but there's also a personal relationship, and that relationship, like a marriage or family or something, can go up and down. You know, you can move closer or farther yourself, or you may discover, as I did with the first God voice I can see now, in retrospect, I did things to be open to that voice, but I certainly had no beliefs that fit with it. So it was quite a surprise when God first spoke to me. Okay, that can happen out of the blue, that the personal aspect of God can come to you out of the blue, but often, and this goes back, often the signal is faint. It's not what you're expecting. It's not what you recognize as a divine signal. I always say the voice of conscience is the divine. That is not your DNA, that is not body chemistry. That is much more like the old image of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. They're whispering, and that is a divine voice. And it's a divine voice that you might say more or less all human beings have, unless they're pathologically wicked. We all have those kinds of moments, and so one thing to do, you know, what I'm trying to think of with poor Chris and others like him, which includes, you might say, even the most spiritual people at moments where they just feel, where did God go? God is not present. Spirit-- Chris is not an atheist. The back is turned, you know, the back is turned. And so it's a God Chris does not like. He feels no love, not even presence, not even acknowledge that he exists. God just ignores. He's making noise and God just keeps the back as if nothing, as if Chris is saying nothing? And so I always think, what can you do? What can you do concretely? And for me, prayer is a main way of relating to God, so I tend to start there, but there are many other ways as well. But I try to say, just pray, and I always say, any honest prayer is fine. It doesn't have to be a sanctimonious prayer. It doesn't have to be a pious prayer. It doesn't have to be a traditional prayer. It can be a complaint, but address the complaint to God in a prayerful mode, not just stamping around your feet and telling your friends or something, but in a prayerful mode. Say, "Lord, why will You not acknowledge me? Why are You always have your back to me? Why is that? Is there something wrong with me? I'm no worse than the next guy over." We're all sinners, you know. Nobody's perfect. I'm not perfect, but you don't have to be perfect for somebody to acknowledge that you exist, and decide to communicate with you. We make that decision with each other all the time. You get to know people and you like them or don't like them, but you relate to them, right? So why isn't God doing so? Let God know that you're angry, that you don't like God. Just be honest. Lay it out there and see what happens.
Scott Langdon [00:42:21] Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.
