God is not Done Speaking Yet

Over a year ago the UCC church down the street from my Meeting had a big banner which said:  "God is not done speaking yet".  At first I thought rather smugly "Well Quakers know that the Truth is evolving, that is why we have testimonys and not creedal statements."  But I eventually came to just appreciate the sign as a good reminder that we have to keep listening to hear and know God.

The summer issue of Friends Journal is on Testimonys and has challenged us throughout the issue to not put a rich deep history, most of which was lived without any such concept of testimony's, into neat little boxes.  It challenges to keep living in the Root of those testimonys and not in their fruit.  It demands of us that we not make them things and as such creedal statements instead of living testimonies.

Parker Palmer, the well known Quaker theologian, many years ago wrote of the cross that it is the intersection between the vertical now of God, and the horizontal here and now of our lives as we live them on this plain.  It is a powerful intersection.

Both that cross and that issue of FJ ask us, as the Peace testiomny does "to live in that Life and Power"....yes the one that takes away the occasion for all war, but also the one that can invade our being and reorder it, that can center us in a second, that can fill us with Love, and give us the courage for powerful action.  There is a decision I have made throughout my life, over and over again, that I want to live in that center...and yet over and over again I find myself somewhere else and having to return to the attempt to live in that center.

I can bring my body to Meeting for Worship, and I can sit and think about my problems.  But when I do that I am doing that out of the old habit that I am author of my life.  It is an entirely different thing to bring those problems to The Holy One, to ask for guidance, to submit them in prayer, and to sit still wait listening to hear the answers from a God who is still Speaking.