May 24, 2006

• Wow, tonight was another concert at the High School, the orchestra. For the first time I could see my son play his sax, because he got to stand in the back. Usually we are lucky to see his shoes and maybe his fingers on the instrument. I have to tell you that it never ceases to amaze me how well the bands play, so professional, but yet having fun too.

  
  

  We just got home in time to watch the end of American Idol, and I am not surprised at the winner, but I think that all the top ten did so well.

  
  

  Well, I am on week 10 of the Beth Moore study and will share some of that with you after I have done a bit more of the homework. But one thing I noticed, a lot of it has to do with God’s glory. A few years ago I would have bristled at the idea of God getting glory, but now it is what is right, that He gets the glory. I have grown so much in how I view God.

  
  

  Speaking of viewing God, I am currently reading Your God is Too Safe by Mark Buchanan. I can relate to what He is saying. I think that because of my insecurity I so want to pin God down to an understandable space. I want to know how He will react and have it be the same way every time. It doesn’t work like that, and God seems to enjoy surprises. I think of Joshua and the battle at Ai, where Joshua wanted to do the battle as in the past, and God had a different idea. Joshua lost the first battle at Ai, and then listened to God, and won. I have to remember that God is bigger than my tiny imagination and that I need to let Him be God.

  
  

  On page 31 he says, “The safe god asks nothing of us, gives nothing to us. He never drives us to our knees in hungry, desperate praying and never sets us on our feet in fierce, fixed determination. he never makes us bold to dance. The safe god never whispers in or ears anything but greeting card slogans and certainly never asks that we embarrass ourselves by shouting out from the rooftop. He doesn’t make us a kingdom of priests, only a colony of Uzzahs.
       A safe god inspires neither awe, nor worship, nor sacrifice.
       A safe god woos us to borderland and keeps us stuck there. He helps us escape reality.”

  
  

       Buchanan mentions Aslan from Narnia and points out that Aslan is not safe, but He is good.

  
  

        It is something I have to deal with, that God is not always going to lead me to safe territory, but will be Good. Sigh, that is hard for me. I keep having that struggle of wanting a safe, predictable sense of God, and the need to realize that God has more for me than my limited imagination can imagine. The trusting of God is growing, but very slowly.

  
  

       Page 32-33 “It is a strange habit of ours, that we fling so widely to the extremes but rarely find the middle. God’s wrath and sovereignty we easily caricature into tyranny. And God’s kindness and tender mercies we just as easily transmute into mere niceness. Meanwhile, the God who actually is–the God whose ways of speaking and acting and being are disclosed to us in Scripture—continues through Christ, “Full of grace and truth,” to come among “that which is his own.” And as before, “his own do not receive him” because they do not recognize him.” (John 1:10, 11, 14). Scripture elsewhere tells us that the “ruler of the air has blinded our eyes” to the truth. But one of the main ways the devil has done that is through the cult of the safe god. The safe god has pretty much killed the power of recognition in us, and so when the real God comes into our midst, we mostly don’t even bother to look up.
       The safe god has no power to console us in grief or shake us from complacency, or rescue us from the pit. He just putters in his garden, smiles benignly, waves now and then, and mostly spends a lot of time in his room doing puzzles. Who would leave borderland for another kind of god? The excuse I hear most often when people continue in confessed sin is: “I think God understands. The kind of God I worship isn’t all hung up about this.” It’s as though God were a half-daft old uncle, hair sprouting from his ears, a but runny about the eyes, winking at our little pranks and peccadilloes.
       Well, that’s nice.
       But God isn’t nice. God isn’t safe. God is a consuming fire. Though he cares about the sparrow, the embodiment of His care is rarely doting or pampering. God’s main business is not ensuring that you and I get parking spaces close to the mall entrance or that bed sheets in the color we want are—miracle!–on sale this week.
       His main business is making you and me holy. And for those of us who love the borderland more than holy ground, whose hearts are more slow than burning, that always requires both the kindness and sternness of God.”

  
  

  He goes on to say that neither the safe god nor the tyrant god is the real God. that He, p. 33 “…is far more loving and comforting than the safe god. And the true God is far more fierce and fearsome than the bullying and petulant god of our imaginations. But His anger is not irritability: It is the distillation of His justice, His hatred of evil. It is what we would want, even demand from a good God.”

  
  

      Have you ever thought about how you view God? I know that as a kid I thought of him as very distant. I once wrote a philosophy of life comparing life to an industrial clock, you know the one with the big numbers, and sweep hand and dots to mark the minutes. I talked about how some people tarry in our lives (minute hand), other sweep by but never touch our lives (hour hand), and then others go quickly through our lives (the long arm of the sweep hand that measures seconds) but God was the short arrow on the sweep hand, moving by quickly but never touching the people (the dots which are the minutes). I also wrote a story comparing God to a little boy playing in a sandbox, building worlds. His parents come out and say, “That is nice, Johnny, you built one world that could sustain life, but these are too close to the sun, those are too far away. It’s time to come in and eat, go wash your hands. You can try again tomorrow.” Well Johnny (God ) washed his hands of the earth, walked in and never came back.

  
  

  I felt that God just didn’t care. And that translated to things like God created us, but we are on our own now, God has His special ones that He cares about, the rest are just swept under the rug, God hates me, and I am my own god, I am the ruler of my destiny, and as Robert A. Heinlein said in his book Stranger in a Strange Land, “thou are god”. I worshipped many idols, many gods, and looked for something that was tangible, that I could trust. And failed miserably.

  
  

  I know that for a long time I was furious at God, raged at Him when I first started coming back to Him after 40 years of doing my own thing. I remember after being saved apologizing to God, and got the answer, “That’s ok, at least you were talking to me after 40 years of ignoring Me.” I don’t thing God would tolerate that kind of rage now, but at that time it was the beginning of dialogue.

  
  

  I also realize that for some time my prayer life was praying and having in my mind a mental agenda of how God was going to accomplish what I was praying for, and when it didn’t happen the way I thought it should, when things did not happen the way I thought they should, I assumed it was because God wasn’t answering, or didn’t hear, or didn’t care. Now I realize that God likes to move in His own way, His own time. I do bristle that sometimes His time seems to take a long time, but now, in retrospect, I am grateful for some of God’s “no” answers, and love the way He surprises me with results.

  
  

  Beth Moore once talked about a time when many things went wrong in her life, and she prayed, but no response, then after a while, God resolved a bunch of stuff all at once. That sometimes He likes challenges, and that He likes to knock down our giants (problems) with one fell swoop.

  
  

  I have to be honest, God is definitely not safe to me. I sometimes wish I could feel His presence more, but in retrospect, I now see the fingerprints of his working in my life, and this current study of Breaking Free and the words that are coming out of my mouth are surprising me, to see that there is far more faith that I thought I had. I am beginning to trust God in ways that I never thought possible.

  
  

  I really don’t know what God has in mind for my future, but I do know that life without God is not an option for me. I have lived life without God and with God. With God is far better.

  
  

  Faith is tough. If we had a physical manifestation of what we were having faith for, then it ceases to be faith and becomes reality. I think we move not only from Glory to Glory, but also from faith to faith in our walk with God.

  
  

  I wish I could say that I am completely settled in my mind regarding God’s seeming lack of presence in my childhood when I needed Him so much, and He didn’t seem to be doing anything. I wish that somehow He had done something that would have let me know He was there, and maybe I wouldn’t have spent 40 years running away from Him, and ignoring Him. Sometimes, even though I know God has used that miserable past for Good, I wish His recruitment methods were less hurtful. Yet, there is a part of me now trusting that one day this will all be sorted out. I have to trust His sovereignty, because if I depend on myself and my ideas I will only end up in trouble.

  
  

  Thanks for listening to my rambles. I do have to say that I count my blessings that God has intervened in my life, and I do like learning about Him and learning how to walk the way He wants me to walk. But it is not an easy path for me.

  
  

  I hope you have a blessed evening.

  
  

  Heather

  • 11:04 pm
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