Listening to God: Faith at a Bible Study

Long ago in a land far away…
.The bible study group met every Wednesday evening. As the facilitator, each week I would ‘listen’ to God to receive the topic for the next week’s meeting. God would inform me of the study topics in many different ways; via people, printed material, or any other media. And it would always be totally obvious. But that's another subject. (or is it?)
.Anyway, this one particular week no such communication came through. That afternoon I had reviewed the events of the week, checking if I had missed something obvious or subtle. As people gathered for the meeting I was acutely aware of not having a topic ready. “Hey, God!”, I called out. “Look, i can come up with a topic on the spur of the moment by myself, but that’s not the arrangement We had. You said You wanna pick these. Okay. So pick one!” One of the details of listening to God is trusting that God will come through - same as with anyone else, I guess. Trusting up to and beyond what we think of as the last moment. The word faith comes to mind here.
.The people gathered into a circle of chairs in the sanctuary. I dawdled my way over to the circle, all my senses alert for any sort of Oneness. I didn’t feel cut off from God; but neither was God speaking to me at the moment.
.I took my seat at the foot of the circle. (? ~ not sure how that works, but there it was) We did our opening prayer and our check-in. Then it was time for the meat of the matter and the Chef had still not served up the platter, so to speak.
.There’s a cool trick people like to use in listening to God. Pray for communication and open a book (typically a Bible) to a random page and read a random verse. This begets seemingly fortuitous results, yet the ‘answers’ can be amazingly pertinent to the needs of the reader.
.So I asked each person to do just that. Eight studiers, eight bibles of varying interpretations and languages, eight randomly selected pages.
.The first person read their verse. I think it was something about a guy who got stuck in a well for a week. Cool. Next verse: A bunch of people felt like outcasts in their own culture. And so it went. A bunch of totally unrelated stories. Until...
.Around the fifth random verse someone made an observation. Every verse read so far was about Faith. In fact, the word faith was actually contained in each verse. This held true for all eight readings.
.When the last person finished reading we had our topic. Faith.
.When the last person finished reading I knew what the message for me was: that God acknowledged my faith that God would communicate with us in some way. S’he did. Right on time, in the moment.
.The trick of it was allowing God to speak in any way S’he chose. No attachment to specific outcome. No limitations on the method used. No expectations of what God would or would not say. No requirements about who God would communicate through, if anyone. No requirement about when God would speak. And finally, accepting what might have seemed like a fortuitous set of coincidences, as being a serious mode of communication with the Source of Oneness.