When you put an emphasis on experiential learning together with an appreciation for the holistic nature of reality, you get several interesting configurations.

Thoughts become related to feelings. Wisdom, in the sense that one comprehends how things work best, becomes related to the ways a given person is situated over time. Spirit becomes related to body-becomes related to mind -becomes related to the contexts in which a person works out his or her life.

Spirit is the dimension in which God communicates to human beings. It's the cell phone of connection to God. Since body and mind are connected to spirit, and there is one, whole person, God's "cell phone" can affect how a person feels, what he or she thinks, and how the body functions. Spirit also affects our relationships as this whole person interacts with that whole person in the larger context of life, which is a spiritual field. God says that we live and move and have our being "in" Him. That is true whether one has placed trust in Christ or not. There is no way to escape the spiritual dimension for God is Spirit and He has created us in His image.

We also all have spirit. As someone has stated, we are spirited bodies. That means we all have that cell phone that God has given us by which we can "get the message" from God. Of course, not everyone has his or her cell phone turned on, and for some of us, we think our cell phone is turned on but we've let the batteries run down so low that our cell phone has gone dark.

When that happens to a person, it's like you just feel it in your gut that there's a message "in there somewhere" but you can't make your cell phone work for you and you start looking for other ways to comprehend. Maybe you see some significance to the way the wind is blowing, or the look on a person's face, or you sense a longing that won't go away and life seems to lack meaning. Perhaps you see more to a coincidence than you might otherwise see.

Maybe you see a bird fly across your path, find a feather, see a dead animal, not hear from a friend, see the same person popping up at social gatherings, and so on and so forth. In this same regard, some people use the Bible in such a fashion.

They do things like throw it down on the table and read wherever the pages happen to open to. They might think that a certain verse was meant for that day. They might think many things, actually, but just how was that book meant to be used? Not, certainly, as a talisman or a bunch of old bones thrown on the dirt floor by which a person tells the future.

Some people have likened the Bible to an "owner's manual" for life as a human being. That's a bit simplistic to me. I think it misses the point and diverts one's focus from God to the Bible. We worship God, not the Bible. We depend on God's power to bring things about in our lives, not on our own power to make things happen (if we only had the recipe or the formula to follow). So, what is the Bible?

To go with the cell phone metaphor some more, the Bible is a text message from God that you receive on your cell phone (spirit) and it only makes sense when the "voice" of God's Spirit helps you to decipher its otherwise cryptic shorthand.

Without the text message, your understanding of God would be incomplete, but without God's Spirit, your own spirit tends to wander around trying to make sense of everything, including that weird text message from God called scripture. And when you really get down to it, the main thing is the cell-phone connection with God through spirit.

With such a cell phone connection in hand, a person can hear from God while looking at the sunset, watching children play, reading a novel or watching a movie. As long as you are engaged in life, and as long as your cell phone hasn't gone dead, you can hear from God and move through life in relationship with Him.

It has taken me some time to understand the relationship between the Bible and the Spirit, between God's Spirit and my spirit. And it was not until quite recently, while editing a book on gestalt psychotherapy, that a couple of those chapter authors wrote something that made me realize that our entire environment, our "field," is spiritual in nature.

I felt as if God were ringing me up on that cell phone to say, "Look at this, Phil." If spirit is the medium in which God communicates with me, then God's cell phone is always on for me, and I can hear from Him in what might seem like the most unlikely of places or circumstances. This doesn't diminish the importance of the Bible; it just puts it into proper perspective.