God spoke also through circumstances. What a skeptic might interpret as coincidence is understood as God’s intentional decision to direct the congregant’s attention. For example:
“Everything in my life right now is focused on trying to get to England, and I needed to get some ID pictures. So I was really anxious—the money hasn’t really come together—and one afternoon I just felt like God said, you need to get up and go get those. Go get those ID pictures that you need. I was like, that’s totally inefficient. I don’t have a car, so it’s like walking half an hour to Walgreens and another half an hour back. Like, I could do this later and combine it with several things I need to get done. But I felt it was a step of faith to do this thing. So I did it—grumbling. Then on the way there and back I ran into three people I knew, and I felt that there was a kind of pattern, and that I was in the right place at the right time.”
These ways of recognizing God are widely shared in many forms of Christianity. More specific to experiential evangelical Christianity is the expectation that God will speak directly into the mind, by placing a mental image or thought or sensation there. For example:
“T’m praying for someone and, you know, they say their situation, what they want me to pray for. I start praying and start trying to, you know, really experience God, and, you know, I see these vivid images, and I’m explaining these vivid images and what I think they mean and, you know, sort of checking in with the person, you know, does this
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resonate with you? They’re like “oh, my gosh, yes! How did you know that?”
Most congregants find this process of pulling out specific thoughts and ascribing them to God baffling at first: again, the process violates the basic human experience that the mind is private. A congregant commented: “now I know that the ‘something’ is God, God’s voice. But I didn’t at all have words to describe it at that time I didn’t understand. It was very confusing.”
The social world of the church taught specific ways to differentiate between mental events that are God and that are not. This technique has been taught in the church since the earliest time as “discernment,” although the content of the word and its rules has varied with the era. In the modern experiential evangelical church, the rules of discernment are more often taught by example and gossip than explicitly. Nevertheless, there appeared to be four principles. A thought might be said to come from God if: the thought was unexpected; the thought was consonant with God’s nature; the congregant had additional confirmation (one “tested” the thought); and one felt peace during the experience. The process was understood to be ambiguous, and left room not only for the congregant to be wrong, but for different congregants to disagree about whether God had, in fact, spoken in a particular manner. One afternoon, a woman spoke in front of the church explaining that God had spoken to her and told her that she should carry out some mission work in a lovely part of Mexico. The man sitting next to me said drily, “God sure wants a lot of evangelizing in Puerto Vallarta.”
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