Ideas for the project have not been hard to come by. Plans, even, have assembled themselves and clamored for my attention. I’ve greeted them coolly, shown them to their assigned corner of my imagination, and waited for them take root or take flight or neither.
It was during one of these waiting periods that my sister-in-law started the conversation that ended the cool receptions. “You Willettes are always going on about calls — this person feels called to that, God seems to be calling me to such-and-such. I’ve never said that and don’t honestly have any idea what it means!”
Forty-five minutes later we came to a natural collective pause. We’d all told — each of us, including my sister-in-law — stories of God at work. We’d all laughed and cried and marveled at the movement of God in our lives, together and apart. “I read book after book about God,” I said, “but I’m just now realizing that I don’t know the stories of how God shows up in the lives of the people I care most about.”
Every human soul is a letter in the name of God. That’s how the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah puts it. It’s not that each of us is a little part of God — we’re part of God’s name. So to know what and how to call God, it helps to know a lot of souls. That’s why I want to spend my summer interviewing people for their stories about God.As a follower of Christ, I’m interested in how God reveals Godself in big and little ways to each of us, every day. As a believer that God is too big for any one religion, I want to hear the stories of how those around me came to know — put succinctly — that God is and God cares. The labels they put on God are just that: labels. What I feel drawn to is the experience people have of God showing up — bidden or unbidden, welcome or unwelcome, effable or ineffable. In my own life, I know God challenges and consoles, stirs up hungers and lays out sustenance. What does that look like in the lives of my relatives and friends — and of complete strangers? Does God custom-make a pedagogy of love for them too? Are they as surly a student as I am?
