Eavesdropping on a Personal God

A woman I heard about tried a prayer experiment. She had already decided she wanted to do less talking, more listening for a larger voice. She sat in a chair and tried to imagine the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the room sitting around her, conversing and communing. “I wanted,” she said, “to eavesdrop on the Trinity.”

That approach might have taken some imagination, but I admire her willingness to try. Much of the talk in the church I hear about the Trinity, the belief that God is three in one and one in three, trips us up on the math. But the Trinity represents a picture of immensely good news.

To live with an awareness of three persons within God tells us that we can expect more than an encounter with a vast, solitary aloofness. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are on speaking terms. God lives in communion, as a loving center of celestial interaction. Even their names, while they should never limit God, point to a family-like familiarity that points to their interrelating.

The woman’s experiment with speaking in the presence of God reminds me also me of a phrase I like: “conversational prayer.” It may seem redundant. After all, prayer is conversation. But to describe prayer in that way reminds me that I am engaging in a personal dialogue. “We don’t need to use high-sounding words or try to structure our sentences to impress anybody,” someone once put it. “I like to think of the Lord as sitting in a chair near me,” she went on, “and I am conversing with him.” There is something not only simple in that picture, but freeing.

And to think of praying as communication between persons tells us that our life before God has less to do with ornate and eloquent speech and more to do with being part of a conversation into which we get invited. We can focus on relationship, not form. We can fashion our words knowing they are heard and noticed. They meet with a God who is not only personal, but in some way communal—used to living amid a relational delight and inviting love.