Hello, Blogging Family! Today is Day 1 of the 5-part social media series previewing Hello, God that I mentioned in my last post. The social media videos are quite short, so I wanted to share longer excerpts of the chapters that inspired the clips here as a special “thank you” for your prayers and support over the years. Stay tuned for Psalm 16 tomorrow!

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“So you’ve said, ‘Hello, God.’ What now? You probably noticed at a young age that a conversation requires two-way communication in order to be healthy. This kind of healthy conversation often takes place between people who know something about each other and are interested in learning more.

God knows the tiniest details about us, His creatures, but we can’t begin to comprehend a miniscule part of Him, our Creator.  1 Timothy 6:16 says God “alone has immortality, [He] dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.”

Mercifully, God took the initiative to remedy this conversational inequality by speaking to us first. A lot. He’s given us sixty-six books’ worth of direct revelation, not counting dreams, visions, and miracles not preserved in the Bible.

How can we possibly respond to that? 

As our Creator, God knows our limitations and “remembers we are dust“(Psalm 103:14). He’s not expecting a sixty-six-book-long answer to His extravagant overtures…

That’s why the Psalms are so powerful. They are 150 Hebrew poems that depict people calling out to God in all kinds of situations. There are psalms of praise and psalms of grief, psalms that run to God in anxiety and others that beg deliverance from depression. We know these emotional expressions glorify God and submit to Him perfectly because they are included in His Holy Word!

The Psalms became a lifeline for me when I was relearning how to pray after my hospital discharge. The brain injury meant I could barely form a complete sentence in my head if I wasn’t speaking aloud—and forget about closing my eyes. I decided to choose a psalm and read it aloud, telling God it was my prayer as well as the psalmist’s. A few weeks later, I took to writing the psalm out in my own words. Soon someone gave me a prayer journal. 

About a year later, I tried praying “off the cuff.” It was weird. I felt like a heretic, shedding all my church-y lingo for weekday vocabulary, talking to God as if He were sitting right next to me on our oversized sleeper sofa. But Jesus has called us His friends. He wants us to talk to Him that way (John 15:13-15)…

 USE IT OR LOSE IT:

1. Read through Psalm 1. What does it tell you about God? Yourself?
2. Note anything that stood out to you for the first time, or struck you in a different way. Tell God what you noticed and how it’s affecting you (good or bad). 
3. Pray through Psalm 1 or write it out in your own words. For example:

‘Dear God, I want to trust You when You tell me that I’ll only be truly happy when I’m spending time in Your Word and thinking about You throughout the day. I don’t want to be influenced by people who don’t obey You or who tempt me to run after worldly priorities. Please fill me with Your Holy Spirit and give me a love for Your Word and the things that please You…‘”

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Shepherd Press is offering a discount on pre-orders of Hello, God, Seeking the Lord When Words Fall Short until 5/31. https://www.shepherdpress.com/products/hello-god/. Use code “HELLO” to get 25% off!