Ashleigh Martell's Blog
Extreme Creative Planning / 10.14.08, 01:04 PM
Every Monday through Thursday, our camp staff gets together for the hour before the kids arrive to plan, pray and just get ready for that day of camp. This year, staff are expected to turn in their plans two weeks in advance, so we’re using that free hour wisely! A couple of days ago during that hour, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to relate a couple different games to various Bible lessons, since games are much harder to parallel with a moral than crafts. One of the lessons caught my eye in particular…
John (one of Urban Promises interns who plans the Bible lessons that I match activities to) planned a Bible lesson for one Thursday that talked about God’s love and went on to a bunch of different tangents, one of which concerned the different ways God talks to people. Since we were just listening to outlines, matching the activity and moving forward, I didn’t give the lesson too much thought until I got home, but it’s something I think is pretty cool.
Face to face, prophets, the Bible and other writings, preachers, coming to earth and living an example, prayer, small “coincidences”, internal nudges that we call our “gut” – God uses all of these to teach us new things, remind us of old things, beat us over the heads with things we can’t seem to understand. From this, I got to thinking: why does God use so many distinctive ways to communicate with us? I mean, He created us (Genesis 1:27, John 1:3), He knows more about us than we ourselves ever will (Matthew 10:30,31), and He’s the One who’s planned out our lives and knows our every thought, action, impulse from our past and future. (Ezekiel 11:5). He could’ve simply created us to talk with Him through one mode… and wouldn’t that be simpler? Imagine if God simply communicated with us through sermons. We’d have a heck of a lot of good speakers! And we’d know exactly where to go to learn about our Creator. So, was God just being difficult? Is He indecisive?
Nah. I think it’s pretty clever. I know this a bit of a tangent, but I started thinking about how unique each one of us was made. We all think differently, look differently, react differently and essentially live differently than everyone else. And there are an insane amount of us living on this globe! That’s some creativity. So if there’s this much diversity in our world, it makes sense that God would give us a diverse group of ways to hear from Him, right? I think so too…. And as out-there as this is, once I came to the above conclusion, I was reminded of learning styles.
We hear all throughout school how “everyone learns differently”. We’re forbidden from making fun of someone if they draw things out to understand them and we get reprimanded for saying someone is weird if they use a hundred flash cards for memorizing. As we progress through school, we’re forced to try out every single type of learning habit possible – from memorization, to acronyms, to drawing, to singing, to writing, to reading and reading and rereading to acting out what we’re studying. By college, we’re expected to know which study habit works for us and how we best learn new concepts. I don’t think learning from God is any different. In fact, I think learning styles relate to the ways he speak to us as well –
(Ways God speaks to us)———> (Ways we learn):
Face to face —————>bold, one on one attention
Prophets———————->through other, more educated people
Bible——————————>by reading
Sending son——————>acting out, seeing an example first
Coincidence——————->applying what we’re learning to everyday life
Prayer——————————>consistently thinking/reminding ourselves
Preachers————————->hearing what we’re studying spoken out loud
So I know it’s kind of iffy and a bit of a stretch, and I probably left out a few, but it was neat to see this. And it’s something to think about… I mean, if this were true, even in a small, barely there way, how would it affect the way we looked at these ways of communication with God? How would it affect our time with Him? How would we focus our time differently? Would we develop more intentional habits? Would we be able to let go of some frustration in an area that we didn’t feel like we were receiving answers?
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