Jesus and Joy
I'm a cerebral person. A reasoner. A lover of words. I expect God to speak to me in words. In specific, rational statements. He certainly does that. He gave words to Moses, even wrote them on stone tablets. He spoke words through the prophets in the Old Testament, and to the disciples hundreds of years later, giving specific instructions about where they should go and what they should do. But I'm beginning to understand that God's messages don't always come on the cognitive level. Often they don't involve words at all. Sometimes they're simply dim impressions. A fleeting sensation of thought, a vague idea, taking form in bits and pieces, over a period of time. Lately I've been getting a kind of wordless perception that involves "Jesus" and "joy." The first whiff of that breath-taking combination of words was just a fleeting impression of Jesus being joyful, for some reason, or for no reason in particular tha