The God Who is Not me.

I've been reading Donald Miller's Through Painted Deserts. Now I'm starting on Searching for God Knows What. Good stuff. I loved Blue Like Jazz when I read it a few months ago. Mostly I love the writing, but I love his honesty. It really lays bare the very human side of interacting with divinity. He described interacting with God as a dance in which we are continually getting our toes stepped on as we learn to dance with Him. He described his own bruised feet.

I was painting a house this week, some friends helped out. We got talking about my delusions of seeking divinity.

"So maybe I should start my own cult, you know, become a divinity and all that."
The girls didn't like that much "Yea you could be a natural Charlie Manson."
"So you guys wanna have a cool-aide party later?" I chuckle knivingly.
They challenge my comment "Umm I think that was Jim Jones...."
"No maybe that guy who thought Hale-bop was an alien spaceship."
"Whatever, just go pick up some cool-aide and a bottle of arsenic." I go back to painting. "Thus says the Jason."

Thank goodness I'm not God. I read this David Foster Wallace story about this guy who was in a mental institution. He went crazy after his sexual fantasy world became bigger than he was, he couldn't fit together the logic of the entire cosmos that demanded him to control every atom. So he went crazy.

The more I've been walking with God the less understandable He has become. At one time my God was simple, in a box. At some point along the journey He stepped outside of my box, to which I responded with a bigger box, then another step, and a bigger box. I've come across all sorts of "This is God" or "If you do this then God will do this." God is good, God is wrathful, God is just, God is unchanging, God changes his mind?, God is one, God is three, God tells the Israelites to kill men women and children in Canaan, God tells his followers to love even their enemy, God cannot tolerate sin, God is tolerating sin for a time, God is merciful, God allows suffering. He's really a confusing mess really... to us. The confusion doesn't scare me, I'm not sure why. I just trust Him, I just trust that he is good. I trust Him when He says that if I accept His Son who comes on behalf of Him, and who is Him, if I walk with Him, get to know Him, I am His child, his little kid.

He is the one that holds it all together. He's the one who set up the plan of salvation. No matter how I end up looking at things, they are still his plans that will be carried out in His will. I don't have to figure out His plans, He just wants me to relate to Him and share the love and grace He gives to me with those around me. I don't have to 'prove' God exists or that He is good. I can tell them, but in the end He's the one whose gotta do the convincing in the hearts, and they have to recieve it. If God is an intellectual enterprise, then too bad for all the mentally handicapped, or uneducated, or illiterate, cause they aren't going to get all the close to God's heart right? In the end what will Jesus say? Well to some who did all sorts of signs and had plenty of knowledge He said "Depart from me I never knew you." It's about relationship with this way bigger than us, complex to a frustrating degree, unlimited, divine being. To say we are an ant farm to the human is an insult to how beyond us the maker of this material world is.

God be bigger than me, cause if you can fit in my box, you are no God at all. Teach me to trust you, experience or not, feeling or not, understanding or not. Thank you for the life you have given. Thank you for guitar, Delta Blues, Piano conciertos, molassas cookies, literature, and blazing sunsets. Oh and beautiful women... ok just one beautiful woman. Thank you for the realization of your existance, thank you for the gift of being able to trust you. Thank you for walking with me, and teaching me to dance.