as quiet as He needs to be

I've been wondering about God's silence lately and I'm rediscovering his gentle voice in my life. I'm beginning to wonder if God becomes more and more silent as our lives come into pace with his and louder and louder the further off we are. I'm not so sure that this is the rule for all humans and actually I'm quite sure that it's not as Jesus rarely did anything the same way twice and never abdicated formulas for anything. (maybe prayer but that's arguable) So I've just read an article about Mother Teresa and her struggles with doubt. The premise of her experience is that she heard from God all the time. She heard a specific call to go to Calcutta and as we all know, she went. MT tells us that God has hardly spoken since she arrived in Calcutta some 50 years ago. This has understandably led to some considerable doubt in her spiritual life. I find a great deal of comfort in knowing that even the Great Momma T has experienced this. I know what she's feeling and it's so whack that God operates the way He does.....(or maybe it's me thats whack), but the point is that guys like John Eldredge always talk about these little things that they know are God, like finding a huge elk skull in the brush as He walks through the woods. You can also note my dolphin experience the other day. Things that most men would consider luck or coincidence. I ponder the validity of these things and I hold my very own experiences in suspicion while reveling in the beauty of their truth. I don't know why I feel entitled to celebrate the truth of the miraculous in my life while harboring some doubt as to whether or not God is directly behind it, but I do. All this to say that God has been ever real in my life this past week and yet I've been so terribly unfaithful to Him of late. I actually worked this past week which is due in part to the fact that I'm about to raise some support and I felt like I needed to be a part of that. On the other hand I just enjoy manual labor to some degree and how cool is it to be paid for hanging out with your boys , building stuff, and getting paid for it. Anyway, I held an incredible amount of guilt for my poor discipline in a few areas and yet I knew this guilt was from something beyond me. It has to be God. The things that I'm dealing with have absolutely zero to do with my relationships with other people on this earth and yet I'm feeling so horrible about myself. I suppose that is some sort of evidence to my faith and if there so exists this faith then why is my affection towards Jesus so very well forgotten these past few weeks. We are currently discussing movement beyond emotion at Visio Dei. So what does that mean. I suppose it means that as long as we're doing GOOD THINGS in our community and our world b/c we feel moved by some video with a kid crying over his dead brother or some song on Sunday morning that really felt good to sing; our efforts will not endure. They will exist only somewhere within our convenience. There must be something much deeper at the core of our movement. There must be a deep conviction that something must be done and you are the one to do it. What will move us to point? It must be a living God that has literally blown you away with his love for you. We may be the type of people that just want to help, but where does a long lasting conviction really stem from? I'm going to argue that it stems from a love that we've already been given. I don't know how someone continues to stay true despite 50 years of silence from the God that drives her. I don't get it but I certainly have to applaud it.