An interesting thing has occurred in our marital journey, we’ve been struggling with some decisions and have sought some fairly intensive pastoral counsel in order to work through those decisions. My wife has come up with an analogy she uses to describe God’s leading, we’re “trying it on” operationally for a time. The analogy is; that God’s leading is like an outline with Roman numerals for the first level, regular numerals for the second and lower case alphabetic charactors for the third, and so on… We are not denying that God’s leading can extend to the second and third levels, but what we are “trying on” is the idea that His leading generally stays in the first level, the Roman numerals. So in our discussions we’re saying things like; “that’s a Roman numeral” when referrring to something that we believe is definately God’s leading, and then saying “that’s a ‘one’ or a ‘small letter a’ ” when referring to an issue on which we believe He gives us latitude to make our own decisions, something He’s leaving up to us to decide about.

This is significant for us, we come from a strong penta-fundie background in which we’ve been exposed to teachings that go so far as to say that “God has an exact, perfect, will for your life and if you miss it, you need to go back to where you missed it and start over”. Time and space consideration notwithstanding, this sort of approach implies that one can perfectly discern through some means the “will of God”. The “penta” side of our experience says that through spiritual means, prophecies, words of wisdom or knowledge, etc that God will lead you into His “Perfect Will”. The fundie side says that His “Perfect Will” can also be realized, but that the way you do it is by having a perfect understanding of His Word.

Now remember, we’re not the “movers and shakers” of the church, we’re not the ones who’ve gone to the seminaries, we’re simply rank and file believers. It’s quite possible over the years that we’ve incorrectly understood what was being said to us, at times we were very accepting and at other times very skeptical of what was being said to us. But we know how we think, how we perceive God’s leading, and we know that others have appropriated a similar message.

The point I’m trying to make is that there are the propositional truths, the “Roman Numerals”, but the fact remains that for “rank and file” believers there has been such a “weighty mass” (a bit redundant) of teaching that serves to “box” us into a corner. There is 24/7 teaching, great masses of books and sermons on tape and radio shows on this and that, well, to us regular “joes” out on the street simply and sincerely trying to live out God’s will for our life…these teachings seem to be defining our “regular numbers” and “lower case letters”. Something seems to be taken away from us…there must be an answer…there must be a sermon or book that tells us what to do, but what we yearn for is the mysterious and loving intimate relationship that comes from being a son of the Father, being lead by His Holy Spirit, working through our part of the “outline of our life”.

This is where the “modern/postmodern” dichotomy comes alive for me, the place where the critical mass of teaching and rhetoric gives way to the working out of the “poems of our lives” (thanks to Michael Card). Sure, there are the propositional truths, the “Roman Numerals”, but let me struggle with God and work through the subsequent levels of the outline.