When God speaks it is usually into our personal lives.  Someone we love is diagnosed with cancer. Some unforeseen act of kindness touches the heart.  An act of insensitivity makes the blood run cold.  We fail a friend, or a friend fails us, and we are appalled at the capacity we have for estranging the very people in our lives we need the most.  Or maybe nothing extraordinary happens–just one day following another.  We sleep, we dream, we wake, we work. We remember and we forget.  God is there, speaking to us.

To attempt to express in even the most insightful and theologically sophisticated terms the meaning of what God speaks throught the events of our lives is as precarious as to try to express the meaning of the sound of snow falling, or leaves changing colors or the spectacle of the setting sun. But I choose to believe that God speaks nonetheless, and the reason that God’s words are impossible to capture in human language is they are ultimately always incarnate words.  They are words fleshed out in the everydayness no less than in the crises of our lived experience.