Network Unavailable

Sunday 9/29/2013 5:38 AM

I ran this morning in silence.  I have an app that tracks my running progress and allows me to listen to the music on my phone but this morning my playlist was not playing for some reason.  When I left my house I noticed the normal cloud cover was missing and the sky was very clear.  The moon was between the constellations of Orion and Gemini, near the planet Jupiter.  As always, the starry sky suggests the power and grandeur of God to me and I thought about the incredibly large universe and my insignificance in it.  David’s words in Psalm 8, “What is man that you are mindful of him?” came to mind.  When I got home I checked out my phone app to see why my music hadn’t played and I discovered that my normal playlist had been changed to iRadio.  My phone simply said, “Network unavailable.”  Evidently when I updated my operating system this morning it changed the settings on my phone and the music didn’t play because I did not have access to Wi-Fi during my run.

When I sat down for my devotions I started by reading Psalm 19, my assigned psalm for the week.  It begins with these words, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.  Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night that reveal knowledge.  They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from then.  Yet their voice goes out into al the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”  Later in the psalm it talks about the law of God, describing it as perfect, trustworthy, right, radiant, pure, firm, precious, sweet and rewarding.  It seems as if God communicates with mankind through his creation and through his word.

I also read an excerpt from The Untamed God, by George Cornell.  He writes, “The Bible is the record of those divine breakthroughs into human history.  ‘God’s search for man,’ it is described, rather than being our search for God.  And its accents are considered a key for discerning the continuing divine activity in the present.  Unlike most religious literature, it is not chiefly a collection of noble sayings, but a drumroll of events, people, struggles, great and terrible, of frailty, doubts, and heroism, of the ultimate might of right.  Scripture isn’t meant as scientific exposition or as mere history.  It is ‘salvation history,’ a universal spiritual drama of an overarching compassion and concern for human integrity, of an unwavering love that seeks an answering affirmation.  It is a vivid, sometime parabolic account of God’s persistent, unrelenting quest for us and our stumbling, often faithless response.”

Over the past few months I have been struggling in my relationship with God.  I have gotten out of my normal routine of running and having a time of quiet reflection on God’s word each morning.  As a result I do not hear the heavens declaring the glory of God and I don’t hear about God’s compassion and concern for humanity by reading the Bible.  George Cornell would say that God is continuing his unrelenting quest for me but I am unresponsive.  Like my phone, I have changed my operating system and now I am not receiving direction in my life.  I imagine that if God had an app for me it would say, “Network unavailable.”  It’s time to get reconnected.