LISTENING FOR GOD: A Minister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt - Hardcover

Weems, Renita J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684833239 ISBN 13: 9780684833231

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1999

Synopsis

A respected black woman preacher offers a stirring chronicle of her personal crisis of faith, giving prayers and meditations that can restore spiritual belief and showing how faith has a clear place in the day-to-day world. 50,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

Review:

When a preacher has a crisis of faith, the ramifications can be terrifying. How can you lead a congregation to God, when God has withdrawn His presence from you? A few years ago, Renita J. Weems, one of the nation's leading black women preachers, hit a spiritual brick wall that she describes in her stark, lyrical, and often 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 observation 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 during 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

About the Author:

Renita J. Weems is a writer, Bible scholar, and minister, and the author of Just a Sister Away and I Asked for Intimacy. She lives with her husband and their daughter in Nashville, Tennessee, where she also teaches Old Testament studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684833239
• ISBN 13: 9780684833231
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208