Hearing God In All The Non-Religious Places

I was about to go to sleep, but couldn't wait to write this:

Just got off the phone with Madison. It was awesome. The Lord definitely knew what He was doing when He had us lead that trip together... Mostly because it wasn't the trip- it's how God is still actively moving because of the spurring on that happens every time we're around each other. A very iron-sharpening-iron thing.

Here are a couple things I got from our conversation that I feel the need to blog:

We need to listen to the Lord for what He is really saying, not what our religious ears are hearing.

'religious ears' : By this I mean the phenomenon that happens when we've seen God move a lot. We've started to feel like we've figured out what God is trying to say because of an association of a particular word, event or situation to a past one. 'Well, last time this happened, it turned out to be this...' should never be the end of our interpretation of His Voice. I do believe God brings rhythms, patterns, and repetition in our lives (I'm the king of finding repetitions to be God's urging), but failing to consider that God may not be merely repeating Himself in any given situation is to quench Holy Spirit. Let us take each new conversation, interaction, season, and change in our lives as new moments, new and unfiltered avenues for God speak to us.

I've experienced a lot of weird situations this summer. I'm not accustomed to either living in Africa or on the road around the US for 11 weeks. It's not normal for me to meet a bunch of new people, most of which I will never see again, spend a few moments with them, then understand that we both have very different lives to go out and live. From the child in the African hospital that I spent minutes praying with to the camp staff of Wildweek I spent 5 weeks around, each new person I met this summer has a home very disconnected from mine. But, with the Kingdom mind, we can see that God has intricately crossed our paths with another person for some reason. Since there is no such thing as coincidence, it becomes more apparent, clear, and common that God is up to big things in small places. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say all these 'small' relationships with these 'random' people involve the very same home. As believers, sons and daughters of the Lord, we are home only in the Lord.