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Listening For God: A Ministers Journey Through Silence And Doubt

Amazon.com Price:  $9.74 (as of 01/05/2019 13:08 PST- Details)

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Description

Right through the past two decades, Renita J. Weems has been noted and praised for her writing, galvanizing national speaking, and pioneering scholarship in the field of Old Testament studies. Yet in the middle of her celebrated work, she was experiencing a profound spiritual crisis permeated by a hollow, painful silence that seemed, at times, to mark an irreparable rupture in her communication with God.
In this deeply affecting book, Weems addresses the believer’s yearning for God through periods of inconstancy, vacillation, and disenchantment. Her own spiritual disquietude will be familiar to all who struggle to care for faith at the same time as the details of daily life — negotiating with children and spouses, caring for ailing parents, living up to professional expectations, developing hobbies, managing finances, and planning for the future — compete for energy with one’s relationship with God. In sharing her own strategies for redefining mundane rituals so that they contribute to reverence and devotion, Weems offers a beacon of light for all believers struggling to listen for God amidst the din of worldly demands and distractions.
When a preacher has a crisis of faith, the ramifications can be terrifying. How are you able to lead a congregation to God, when God has withdrawn His presence from you? A couple of years ago, Renita J. Weems, one of the crucial nation’s leading black women preachers, hit a spiritual brick wall that she describes in her stark, lyrical, and incessantly amazing memoir, Listening for God: A Believer’s Journey Through Silence and Doubt. The book is a collection of prayers, journal entries, and meditations that discuss her initial anger at God’s absence in her life and her gradual willingness to “[accept] the silence as a new way of communicating with the divine and [learn] to perceive God in my life in new, amusing, laughable, glorious ways.” In contrast to the many spiritual memoirs that relate new believers’ intoxicating experience of divine intimacy, Listening for God (like C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed and Madeleine L’Engle’s The Irrational Season) stands out as a careful and honest description of the spiritual desert in which many mature believers find themselves stranded, to their dismay and surprise. This book is further distinguished by Weems’s frank commentary that, as a wife and mother, she couldn’t just up and meditate for an hour a day, or go on extended retreat. “If God was going to speak to me,” Weems writes, “God would just have to do it amidst the clutter of family, the noise of pots and pans, the din of a hungry toddler screaming from the backseat all through rush hour traffic, and the hassles of the workplace.” God did, and Weems captures the divine noise with a near-perfect combination of wit, pleasure, and respect. –Michael Joseph Gross

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