In her poem The Voice of God, Mary Karr writes:
The voice of God does not pander,
offers no five year plan, no long-term
solution, nary an edict. It is small & fond & local.
Don’t look for your initials in the geese
honking overhead or to see thru the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious crap—
put down that gun, you need a sandwich.
I found this poem delightful because it touches on precisely what I often neglect about the voice of God: the smallness, quiet, often even ordinariness. We are looking for hurricanes and earthquakes, for signs and wonders, but God as often—more often—speaks to us in the most mundane circumstances and ways, in the quietest nudges that we miss or disregard as unimportant.
When a friend of mine came to me recently, going through significant personal crisis, I found I could not advise her on any significant action. There was no “one thing” that would solve the problem or even really put a dent in it, nothing that didn’t seem impossibly overwhelming to implement as a solution. So I counseled her, a la Elisabeth Elliott, to do the next small thing, whatever that was, and then the next small thing after that. Micro-steps through major misery.
These micro-steps, too, can be where we encounter God.
We almost always meet Him in the small, the insignificant, the unexpected place. We expect him to show up with a thundering YES as we debate over whether or not we ought to take that job, when in reality He has been perhaps been present in all the circumstances leading to it—and in the counsel of family members and friends, in our Scriptural understanding of what work is or should be.
I have been thinking about this ever since I glanced over a Christian website recently and saw headlines that read, reductively, as follows:
How Christians Should Think About AI
Does [Movie Title] Glorify Christ—or Subvert His Truth?
[Political Decision] Reflects Act of Faith For Some
I’ve always resisted this sort of thing: I believe it is wise and fruitful to give any secondary interpretation of Scripture or of Christianity broadly a skeptical glance. Relying on a publication to tell me who to vote for, what movies mean, and how I should feel about social and cultural developments feels a little bit like outsourcing my own mind. I have Scripture and my church, as well as centuries of theology and doctrinal interpretation to hand; I’m not sure I need the opinion of a two minute magazine article.
But I’ve realized that my other issue strikes at the heart of this matter of “small things.” I think what I am coming to realize is that if we take care to ourselves in a matter of “small things,” the large issues generally sort themselves. In other words, it is my meeting-with-God and living in a Christlike way in the micro-steps that determine where I stand on the large one. Every move I make orients me to something. I don’t need to determine a grand sweeping statement-of-faith position on everything that wanders into my field of vision; people can deduce it by what I live.
I’ll give you an example.
Christians everywhere are feeling some kind of way about AI. Media makes it seem as though we all need to take some kind of a stance, to say that AI is either an amazing ministry tool or the Antichrist or something that will bring us to Christ or something that will pull us away.
In the meantime, in my daily life, I have had to make a series of small decisions and actions focused on AI. These have been colored by my understanding of Scripture and doctrine, so at various times I have determined:
- That because the worker should be paid for his wages, I’m not comfortable using AI to produce art or supporting AI that uses artists’ works without their permission
- That I need to ensure that my students understand the principles of academic integrity
- That while I might need to use AI for certain things at my job (as long as it falls with my spiritual and ethical scope) as required—for I am a woman subject to authority—I also choose not to use it on my personal time, because I want to steward God’s creation well and don’t love the environmental impact
Read the above together and that starts to sound like a stance on AI, right? But I didn’t take the stance and then try to bring all my actions into line; I lived out my faith and my stance on the topic emerged from my actions.
The world likes to reduce us down to major opinions, to questions that can be answered in five seconds, to a “this-or-that” answer for every issue we encounter. I find that Christians in particular can be drawn into engaging with these at great cost and frankly at little value. In fact, without care, debating these questions and defending our answers to them can start to feel like being Christian. And this isn’t the case.
What I’m trying to say is: having an opinion is easy. Living one isn’t.
And every day, in small decisions and tiny micro-steps, we live who we are and what we believe. The way you treated that person who begged you for money on the corner is in some way what you believe. What you do with the technology at your fingertips is what you believe. The way you treat the person who disagrees with you is what you believe. The litter that you drop two blocks from the street trash can is what you believe. Your attitude to those above and below you is what you believe. The way you spend your money is what you believe.
In job interviews, my favorite part of the process is asking candidates about the sort of supervisor they are. They pause; they rhapsodize about humility and service, about bringing out the best in others, about the importance of collaboration. Sometimes they talk about management and leadership theories they know.
I almost never take notes. Quietly, in my own mind, I think: I want to interview the people you supervise. Because those people? They’re the people who know. They will have encountered your humility and your collaborative spirit and your service mindset–or the lack of it. We’re not what we say. We’re what we do.
Thinking back to Mary Karr’s poem, I wonder: is God apparent in my “small & fond & local?” In the things I do and say, in my engagement and actions and everyday choices, what broader beliefs, assumptions, and ideas are emerging? Who do my actions say that I am?
Is God present in my small quiet behaviors?
If not, He’ll be absent from my big ideas and opinions, too.
Samaritan's Song 