Posted by jason on January 09, 2003 at 12:54:49:
...trying to piece things together...
"...yeah, brother, I have to spend time with God every day. I feel Him in the room with me, and I can almost reach out and touch Him..."
I remember one of my fellow church-goers telling me in the early days of my "Christian Walk." There were many at my church that would make similar claims, leaving me to examine my own pathetic state in quiet shame. Since them, I have had precious few "nearly tangible" experiences, and I wonder if those stories reflected the same types of experience.
On Sunday, a discussion was sparked about worship, and how inconsistent our feelings can be. I imagine that feelings during worship ran the gamut. There are, however, moments in our lives when we do feel that "special touch."
"You mean that God came down from heaven and stopped the bullets."
In the movie, _Pulp_Fiction_, Quentin Terentino creates a situation where two characters experience a brush with almost-certain death, but are spared. Jules Winfield (played by Samuel L. Jackson) believes that God performed a miracle and spared his life. Subsequently, he decides to quit living as a criminal, and "...walk the earth...get[ting] into adventures..." Vincent Vega (played by John Travolta) does not share his partner's opinion and gives him a hard time throughout the movie.
I wonder if I would prefer my godometer to go off whenever He gets involved in my life. Whenever he stops the bullets or parts the Red Sea, I would like to acknowledge that. My life would be so much clearer -- I would know exactly how things settle, and it would be easier to make decisions. It would even be easier to make mistakes. If I chose door number 1 and the godometer was still, it would be a simple matter to just step back and open door number 2... and on and on until the meter when off again...
Many of us struggle with decisions, and where we stand with God. We wonder if He hears our prayers, we wonder if He is leading us this way or that, and we wonder sometimes why He would allow certain things to happen to us and not others. At times, I wonder why some people experience things more intensely than I do. I even wonder why it is that I spend so much time thinking about these things. If I step back and look at this as a whole, I start to realize that there is a common thread in all of these thoughts, questions, confusions, ponderings, ad infinitum. It is that God is at the center.
The reason I was concerned about my early Christian "deficiencies" was because I wanted an intimate relationship with my Maker. The reason I think through things to the infinitesimal essence is because I want to know Truth. I question myself because I want no enmity to exist between us. I seek perfection, because He is Perfection perfected -- by the same token, I seek forgiveness, because He is Love. This is worship - acknowledging God for who He is. Whether we are conscious of it or not we worship him by living our lives according to the desires which He has instilled in us AND by availing our desires to be molded.
J