<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">One summer day two years ago, at a cafe and used bookstore in northern Michigan, my pastor and his wife stumbled upon a book that changed them, and later changed me. </span>

<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">They discovered it among a pile of books at the table where they sat down with their coffees. The book is called <span style="font-style: italic;">A Tree Full of Angels: Seeing the Holy in the Ordinary</span>, and was written by a woman named Macrina Wiederkehr, who has lived in a monastic community for many years. Barb and Jim began reading the book together the summer I began seriously sorting out my faith and going to their church. I began reading it that fall.</span>

One winter afternoon about six months later, Jason ran into the library on his way out of town for a business trip. He picked up the first non-fiction audio book that was well designed, and checked it out, without even stopping to read the synopsis. The book was <span style="font-style: italic;">Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith</span>, by Rob Bell, a pastor not much older than us. A few hours later, Jason called me from the road to tell me about the book. I could tell by his voice that it had already changed him. Not long after, it began its work on me.

I love books for how they can suddenly appear in your life—on a library shelf or a cafe table, or in the hands of an acquaintance—so unassuming yet so packed with power. <strong>I love that mere words and stories can be written down by one person and then alter the path of another.</strong>

<strong>I also love how a single book can speak to different people in different ways, or even to the same person in different ways, at different points of their life.</strong> I'm not one to talk about angels other than the ones written about in the Bible or in songs, but I love the idea of Book Angels, flying around with the perfect words, perfect placement and perfect timing.

Over the past couple of years I've been working to pay extra attention to relatively small and random things that suddenly appear in my life. More frequently I'm getting that light-bulb-accompanying "Ah-ha!" that comes with suddenly gaining some new perspective on the big picture. God seems to be feeding me bits and pieces of the story, sharing crumbs of insight about what's been going on the past decade or so of my life. I'm happy to report it makes <span style="font-style: italic;">way</span> more sense than I imagined it could, and that I'm filled with hope and confidence about all the pieces I still don't understand.
<h4>Does God really talk to us?</h4>
Talking about <span style="font-style: italic;">God</span> talking is tricky. Loads of people just immediately conclude anyone who thinks God speaks to them is crazy. Others figure maybe God talks, but only in rare, very specialized circumstances, like to Moses in a burning bush, with a loud, audible voice. God doesn't whisper or hint, right? He booms!

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<strong>Personally, I always assumed God had all kinds of creative ways to talk to <span style="font-style: italic;">other</span> people, but with me he was silent.</strong> I was getting the silent treatment until I could get my act together—until I grew up and started doing daily devotions that would eventually take me through the entire Bible. I didn't take it personally. That would have been as silly as a 13-year-old feeling hurt about not being able to get a driver's license. I just figured I wasn't ready for God to talk. I wasn't mature enough. I didn't know enough. I couldn't be trusted to make the most of whatever words he might give me.

<strong>What I'm beginning to realize now, though, is there are God-sized whispers and trails of crumbs and hidden pearls of his metaphors all over the place.</strong> I'm sure they were there before. The fact that I wasn't ready to see and hear is true, but God was talking, sure as anything. He wasn't giving me the silent treatment.

<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Macrina </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Wiederkehr writes that the heart of her book, <span style="font-style: italic;">A Tree Full of Angels</span>, is </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">"...trusting the God who speaks to us in our experiences at every moment." She believes there are crumbs everywhere, and that although our tendency is to go looking for the whole loaf, enough crumbs, if gathered up, will more than feed us. Crumbs, burning bushes, angels with books—call them what you want. God is talking.</span>
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As a result, I'm busy trying to listen. </span>

<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">I'm also finding I can decipher <span style="font-style: italic;">now</span> messages from <span style="font-style: italic;">then</span>, back when God was talking but I didn't know enough to listen. It turns out, actually, it's not a "then" and "now" thing at all. I'm pretty sure it's all connected, and that <strong>God is even less linear than I suspected. </strong></span>

<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">This "loaf" landed in front of me just recently, in the form of some people who were in my life ten years ago, went away, and then reappeared. First, on Thursday, Jason and I spent the evening talking with John and Debby. </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">They were spiritual mentors and parent-type figures to me and a group of my friends after college. They always went deep, which I wasn't always in the mood to do. In the midst of my moves away from Michigan, then back, then to Illinois, we fell out of contact. Then one day I saw John's </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">name in the acknowledgments section of the book <span style="font-style: italic;">Velvet Elvis</span>—the very book that began making Jason's and my faith real. John and Debby were still in my life after all.</span>

Then, two days after our evening with John and Debby, Jason and I went to <span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">the 50th anniversary celebration of Reba Place, the church he went to as a kid in Chicago. (John and Debby, we just learned, have ties to that church stretching back 25 years, but that's another story.) At the reunion, Jason introduced me to some of his early mentors, who he hadn't seen for years. As it turns out, they all know my college roommate Sheri very well. Sheri happens to be the Christian friend I felt most betrayed by after my divorce, so we haven't talked for years. And then boom. In connecting with Jason's past I'm confronted with my own. Meeting people who are a part of Sheri's life now, and who were a part of both her life and my new husband's life ten years ago, is much more than just a "small world" moment. It draws a solid line connecting my new life of faith with Jason to a person from my past, who had shaken up my faith—in ways that were painful but very important.</span>

<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">So John, Debby and Sheri are back in my life, so to speak. And Susan, Mark and Eileen are back in Jason's life (and have been in Sheri's life and are now in my life). The diagram gets rather messy, which is why I'm starting to assume we're all connected somehow in God's big, non-linear, crumb-filled story. </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">
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