Today’s Readings: Psalm 25; Genesis 28:10-22; John 10:7-17; Hebrews 11:13-22; Psalm 23
I went through a stage in my spiritual development where I assumed that God and God’s ways looked pretty much the way I thought they should look. When I heard that God was associated with a word like justice – I just knew that meant eradicating all of the “isms” that ate away at the soul of our society. When I heard that God was associated with a word like mercy – I knew that meant a willingness to cut us human beings some slack. When I heard that God was associated with a word like love – I knew that meant there existed a passionate connection between Creator and Creation. I spent years assembling a picture of God by pulling all of these attributes together. Without realizing it, however, I came to assume that the essence of God was defined by only two things: warmness and fuzziness. And God wasn’t just warm and fuzzy in a general way; God was warm and fuzzy in the ways that fit my understanding of those words. But then I encountered something years ago that challenged my warm, fuzzy notion of God. I saw a television show that detailed the lives of carnivorous animals. It showed lots of examples of the hunt and kills in which the animals engaged. The life-cycle that I saw portrayed was anything but warm and fuzzy by my standards – and yet it was one that was necessary to maintain life. In other words, those uncomfortable scenes of nature reminded me of the wisdom of the psalmist’s words as contained in this morning’s first psalm. The psalmist wrote: “Show me how you work, God; school me in your ways” (Psalm 25:4 from The Message). While I would personally like to believe that the fullness of God can be contained simply within my own preferences and comfortable levels (that would be within what I call “my warm, fuzzy zone”), once again I am reminded that God is much bigger than that. God spills over into aspects of life that I might otherwise not like to see or acknowledge. It is at such moments of awareness that I can begin to let go of my own attempts to define God on my terms, and open myself to being schooled in the vastness of God’s ways. So where do you come down in all of this? Do you worship a God that is safe and comfortable within the confines of your “warm and fuzzy zone”, or do you open yourself to being schooled in the vastness of God and God’s ways as well? Til next time…
I went through a stage in my spiritual development where I assumed that God and God’s ways looked pretty much the way I thought they should look. When I heard that God was associated with a word like justice – I just knew that meant eradicating all of the “isms” that ate away at the soul of our society. When I heard that God was associated with a word like mercy – I knew that meant a willingness to cut us human beings some slack. When I heard that God was associated with a word like love – I knew that meant there existed a passionate connection between Creator and Creation. I spent years assembling a picture of God by pulling all of these attributes together. Without realizing it, however, I came to assume that the essence of God was defined by only two things: warmness and fuzziness. And God wasn’t just warm and fuzzy in a general way; God was warm and fuzzy in the ways that fit my understanding of those words. But then I encountered something years ago that challenged my warm, fuzzy notion of God. I saw a television show that detailed the lives of carnivorous animals. It showed lots of examples of the hunt and kills in which the animals engaged. The life-cycle that I saw portrayed was anything but warm and fuzzy by my standards – and yet it was one that was necessary to maintain life. In other words, those uncomfortable scenes of nature reminded me of the wisdom of the psalmist’s words as contained in this morning’s first psalm. The psalmist wrote: “Show me how you work, God; school me in your ways” (Psalm 25:4 from The Message). While I would personally like to believe that the fullness of God can be contained simply within my own preferences and comfortable levels (that would be within what I call “my warm, fuzzy zone”), once again I am reminded that God is much bigger than that. God spills over into aspects of life that I might otherwise not like to see or acknowledge. It is at such moments of awareness that I can begin to let go of my own attempts to define God on my terms, and open myself to being schooled in the vastness of God’s ways. So where do you come down in all of this? Do you worship a God that is safe and comfortable within the confines of your “warm and fuzzy zone”, or do you open yourself to being schooled in the vastness of God and God’s ways as well? Til next time…
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