~Part 3 - My Re-Thinking

 (Update - BEFORE YOU BEGIN READING Part 3, know that I heavily considered whether to include this section or not, or even whether I should rewrite parts with my thoughts as they are now.  It has been many years since I first wrote and as I continue to grow and re-think, I have some alternate views already.  I understand that the things we believe have come about by various interpretations and it is not my intention to be divisive.  These are simply some of the conclusions from that year and because they are sort of the meat of my story, I have decided to include them.)

Glass Wall – SHATTERED!

Part 3 – My Re-Thinking

Many aspects of my faith continue to perplex me, but regardless, I have increasing mental clarity.  Furthermore, where I previously sat guiltily tongue-tied, I can now ecstatically talk your ear off, if you’d let me.  Rather than shutting down and attempting to slink away, controversial topics now perk up my ears and heart and tease me to speak up.  This happens best when I am in an environment where I know grace and the utmost respect will be given for one another even as differing opinions are shared. 

So, in order to whet your appetite for a reading of He Loves Me and hopefully to create a longing for the God that I am coming to know, here is a glimpse of what I have been grappling with through many months of sleepless nights and thought-filled days:

(These next sections are summarized directly and indirectly from He Loves Me, the Transition audio series, and then mingled with some of my own thoughts.  As you read, please remember this phrase, "I could be wrong, but it seems . . ."  I am in no way declaring this as truth.  These are just little stops along my journey.  I will always be moving forward in my learning, but also backing up to reconsider what I thought was true.)

 

God – (I struggle the most, here in these sentences.  I write and rewrite.  Nothing I compose does Him justice.  He cannot be summarized in my measly paragraphs.  And yet, He is the reason I’m here, the reason my heart sings, and so I try . . .)    If “God is love,” and love is the list of traits described in 1 Corinthians 13, then wouldn’t God also be characterized by those traits?  Therefore, God is patient, God is kind, God does not envy, God does not boast, God is not proud, God does not dishonor others, God is not self-seeking, God is not easily angered, God keeps no record of wrongs, God does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth, God always protects, God always trusts, God always hopes, God always perseveres, God never fails. God is like Jesus: loving, healing, comforting, self-sacrificing, co-suffering, unconditionally forgiving, not holding sins against us.  God does not destroy but gives life and hope and brings peace.  In addition, if the traits of God’s Spirit are those listed in Galatians 5, then wouldn’t the eternal God also perfectly exemplify Himself as flawlessly loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.  We may not be able to always see or understand, but this is the character of God, and not just most of the time, but forever and always.

God loves you.  He always has.  There is absolutely nothing you can do to stop Him.  Even if you don’t want Him to; even if you don’t like that He does.  He has always loved us, whispering His affections into our ears.  You might think He doesn’t love you, but that perception of Him is not real.  We cannot look at our own wonderful or awful circumstances and define God by the good or bad things that we think he has bestowed upon us.  We cannot let our feelings and circumstances define God because we will never truly know Him that way.  His love is steadfast, unchanging, and un-conditional.  We forget what that really means - without condition, never changing.  His love is the same for you and for me.  It doesn't matter what you have done or what you will do, He will always love you always.  From eternity past to eternity future, GOD WILL LOVE YOU - Period! That is who God is. 

You began in the heart of God.  Love brought you forth.  God is not a detached sovereign commanding your obedience and needing appeasement, but a loving Father who wholeheartedly wants a relationship with you.  He treasures you.  ("We misunderstand this when we take solitary passages scattered throughout the Old Testament and read them through the construct of the fear and shame that had not yet been dealt with at the cross.")  Truly, “He wants to be the voice that steers you through every situation, the peace that sets your troubled heart at rest, and the power that holds you up in the storm.  He wants to be closer than your dearest friend and more faithful than any other person you’ve ever known.”  This would all be presumptuous had it not been His idea.  He is the one who offered to be our loving Father.  God has been inviting us - you and me - into the same wonderful relationship that He has known with Himself (Father, Son, and Spirit) for all eternity.  That should take our breath away and jolt us into joyful euphoria, but I’m afraid that in our continued misunderstanding, we are glazed over, emotionless, unable to even begin to fathom the depths of this love that we have been invited into.

Sin – Sin absolutely matters to God.  It’s a hereditary disease - in all of us, in every single person created since Adam.  Sin is destroying us.  It’s killing us, eating away at our souls, devastating the world around us.  We don’t have to look far – inside ourselves, even – to see the repercussions of this powerful spreading cancer.  Nothing we can do will stop it.  Nothing we can do will cure it.  We are doomed by its power.  Sin brings death and is its own punishment.  It wreaks havoc in our lives and plunders those around us.  It diminishes us.  It diminishes others.  It is dark, hideous, shameful, condemning, and catastrophic.  It lessens our love, dulls our conscience, deceives and blinds us to truth, and keeps us enslaved to its power.  You know; I know.  We’ve all felt its gripping clutch and resulting shame.

Sin separates us from God, but not in the sense that He can’t come near us because of it.  God has never hidden from sinful man - not in the Garden, not on the Damascus Road, not in the home of Zacchaeus, and certainly not in the person of Jesus Christ who reached out and physically touched sinful people – God, friend of sinners.  “In Jesus, we see God seeking friendship, something people had always missed as they only thought to appease Him.  God had become someone to avoid, not embrace.”  In Jesus, “God was sitting down with people . . . and they were not cowering in fear.”  Cloaked in flesh, God did something the Jews could never imagine Him doing.  He was hanging out with people, desiring company, conversation, and friendship with them.

Sin certainly does make us feel separated though.  Engulfed by our own shame, we tremble in fear, pulling away from Him, believing the lies that we’ve got to clean up first before he will have anything to do with us.  He knows that and is already here to meet us right where we are, sin and all.  Our sin and shame deceive our minds and threaten to prevent us from being reconciled to Him in the relationship that He has always desired.  Like Adam and Eve and their prickly fig leaves, we pitifully try to cover our disease, hiding and avoiding God, when all the while He has come for His daily walk with us.  No, God is not hiding.  We are!  He is Emmanuel, God with us – right NOW, in our miserable, sinful state, eager to help us walk out of it.

Our minds are fallen and we stumble around in our darkness, unsure who we are, and subconsciously unsure who God is.  God loves his creatures and yearns for authentic relationship; one birthed out of love and not fear.  The problem is, our bottom line is fear and always will be until it is addressed.  Not talking about it doesn’t fix the problem either.  We hardly know it is there, but deep within us, there is an unknowing about God, a subconscious seed of doubt that continues to keep us in bondage.  We think we are free, but we are not, as long as we fear.  Did you know that Perfect Love drives out fear?  And did you know that Perfect Love has a name?  And when you let Perfect Love be your ultimate picture of God, your fear will be gone.  And when your fear is gone, you will fall head over heels in love with God.  And as you get to know Him more and more and more, as closeness and intimacy grows, your fear will dissipate and your serving Him will turn from obligation into acts of love toward and for Him.  Your heart will undergo transformation that you previously tried so hard to make happen. What’s more, your heart, eyes, and hands will open and turn outward to extravagantly loving others because you will no longer be inwardly concerned about how God feels about you on any given day.  You will rest in the security of His love without ever a doubt.  You will be free.

The cross fully revealed God’s love and that love is what will draw us to Him.  If we do not understand His love, we may come to Him out of obligation or fear.  That might be a starting point, but it is the bottom rung of the ladder.  As we understand the depths of his love for us and feel safer with Him, we will gradually draw nearer to Him, wanting to know Him.  But we DO NOT come to know God by leaving our sin first.  We turn to Him in our sin because without a relationship with Jesus Christ, we will NOT forsake our sin.  It is impossible.  For the same reason, it is necessary that we love and grace people to Jesus rather than judge and condemn them.  We ought to be safe places for people, where they can learn to trust God more and more.  Deep down, we all know that we are broken.  The last thing we need is “righteous people” nagging us about it.  We need to undoubtedly know that there is a living God who deeply loves and cares for us despite our sinfulness.  He wants to untwist what sin has twisted.  We don’t come changed.  We come as we are, to be changed.  We can try hard to stop doing or start doing, but it will be fruitless.  LOVE has a name, and in relationship with Him, change happens.

Wrath – I previously thought that wrath was the opposite of love and thus could not reconcile the two in relation to God.  But wrath is directly proportionate to love.  The deeper you genuinely love, the increased potential for greater wrath.  Indifference to a prickly human relationship reveals a lack of love for the other person, or none at all.  Wrath can point back to an outpouring of great love for something or someone.  In most cases, we see the sin-twisted version in ourselves, arising out of selfish desires for something we want, fighting to keep what we suppose is ours, or justifying our ambition to preserve and uphold personal dignity, which likely, is only a façade of the true us anyway.  We swiftly blow gaskets because we have been taken advantage of, swindled, insulted, or victimized in some way.  But God’s wrath is not self-seeking or vengeful as I had doubtfully concluded.  Instead, it is for our benefit and it authenticates the unconditional affection, care, and loving concern He has been declaring to us for millennia.  Without the furious love of God, we would have an indifferent, apathetic, passive Omnipotent.  True love cannot really exist without the underlying possibility of fury.  Where there is no love, there is no wrath.

Consider this: “God’s wrath against sin is a reflection of His love that cannot look away unconcerned as sin destroys us.”  As the lover of our souls, He desires to save us from this devastation.  Never having heard it defined this way but loving how it explains so much, “Wrath is the full weight of God’s being, brought against that which destroys the object of His affection.”  We - PEOPLE - are the objects of His affection.  We are the recipients of His great love.  He seeks to consume the sin that is rapidly and powerfully overwhelming us.  Seeing the consequences of our sin and their devastating effects will hopefully cause us to run to the only One who can set us free.  Therefore, wrath is what cleanses sin in us.  It is the chemotherapy for our cancer - a cancer so rampant in every bit of us, in every place, inside and out.  Wrath does not stand in opposition to God’s love but works with it as a cure.

The Divine Conspiracy of the Cross – Somehow, somewhere, in my old thinking, I got the idea that Jesus died for God so God could forgive us, love us, and come near to us.  I understood that Jesus was my pure spotless covering, so that when God looked upon me, He would not see the pile of dung that was me.  Jesus was saving me from God, was what I thought.  We always say He died for us but then also say things like

God is too holy to look upon sin.  Our sin alienated us from Him and now His holy justice must be satisfied.  We messed up and God is mad, hurt, disappointed, or offended.  (We call it holy anger and say that His wrath is justified, none of which made any sense to me as I cowered from Him in my shame.)  Therefore, God had this great (or not so great) plan to send His only Son to earth, to put Him on the cross in our place, and to take out all His angry vengeance on Him so that we could go free.  Something pure and guiltless had to be punished by God and so Jesus suffered our punishment to curb God’s righteous anger toward us.  God would punish an innocent victim to appease His wrath so that we could now enter His presence.

 

In my small mind, this spoke of a fracture in the Godhead and deep in my subconscious, failed to compute.  How was this any different from the fake/false gods of old who incessantly required appeasement and ultimately human sacrifice?  (Different and yet, the same.)  Isn’t our living God exceedingly distinct from pagan gods who are born in the human imagination and necessarily appeased out of our dark well of guilt and shame?  Isn’t that the whole purpose of the Bible, to show us in unfolding revelation, who our God is, and to draw a line between Him and the rest of whoever or whatever it is that we worship?  In my old thinking, could I really say, “There is no One like you, oh Lord?”  Sadly, I could not.

 

Where does all that leave us?  It did leave me grateful to Jesus for stepping into my place, but it did not cause me to fall in love with God.  It severed the Godhead for me and created a split personality – good cop, bad cop – Jesus as my dear protector, and the Father as the distant punisher.  What human would willingly accept the friendship of another human who required brutalizing his own child in order to offer forgiveness?  (Can that even be called forgiveness?  Isn’t true forgiveness ceasing to be angry and not requiring payment - my payment or your payment on behalf of me?) There is a chance we might agree to enter that kind of relationship, if the alternatives were hellish, but it would be a relationship wrought out of fear, ingenuine love, stifling instead of flourishing.  There is no fear in True Love.

 

Gratefully, now, I recognize that “God was (thoroughly) in Christ,” on the cross, “reconciling the (whole) world to Himself.”  He did not give Jesus.  He gave Himself in Jesus.  God already loved me, no conditions.  He was not the sacrifice God needed to love me.  He was the sacrifice I needed to be set free from sin and shame.  Every person that has ever lived has been infected with the cancer of sin.  It is killing us, destroying us, our loved ones, and the world around us.  God’s fury towards sin, which flows out of His great love for people, is the curing chemotherapy for our disease.  Father, Son, and Spirit conspired together.  The needed amount of chemotherapy (wrath) to cure my cancer (sin and shame) would destroy me before it cured/cleansed me of my disease.  So, Jesus became my cancer (sin), “despising the shame,” and took the chemotherapy (wrath) for me.  Sinful humans can’t last a second during the process of God’s curing wrath, but Jesus could.  Death could not overcome the sinless Christ.  Being without sin, Jesus was my only hope of bearing my dose of cleansing wrath. “The soul that sins (us) shall die” but “He who knew no sin (Jesus) became sin for us.”  Therefore, because of His great love for us, Jesus (God) laid down his own life in our place.  He took our sin disease into Himself, and it was confronted by healing, cleansing wrath.  We have death flooding through our veins, but Jesus has true life teeming in His.  Only in Him are we cleansed of our disease.  He took the chemotherapy for our cancer - chemotherapy that would have destroyed us before it could fully cleanse us.  Only in Jesus can our sin and shame be cured.  Only in Him can we overcome the power of sin in our lives.  Jesus took our sin into Himself so that wrath could destroy sin and remove our shame.  But this ONLY happens in Him.  Only in Him will we find our cure because it is in Him that sin was fixed.  Sin is a reality; wrath is a reality; God took it into Himself for us.  We can either welcome His way or reject it, but it is the only way to be cured.  Think about it.  Has any person, any god, ever done anything like that for you – given their life to accomplish your forever rescue?  We can keep trying to cover our sin and shame by appeasing our imagined gods or by numbing ourselves with the fleeting and unsatiating pleasures of this world OR we can take the outstretched hand of Jesus, who has already taken our disease and cured it within Himself.

 

The B-I-B-L-E – Looking back upon my past ambitious attempts to conform myself to Christ, I also realize I had blindly elevated the Bible above Jesus.  Reading the Bible as if every word were dictated from the mouth of God left little room for dependence on the Spirit for insight and interpretation.  Because following the rules has always come easier for me than cultivating a relationship, I had unconsciously scooted the Bible to the forefront rather than believing that Jesus could and would guide me daily.  I think this happens subtly but with frequency.  Maybe we are blind to it.  Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  He is the capital T, Truth.  The Bible is not the Truth but it contains the truth about the Truth.  The Bible points us to Jesus.  Jesus is the pinnacle of all things and Scripture should bow to Him.  Jesus’ teachings have often been trumped, past and present, by the rest of Scripture.  But Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, and therefore, the only One worthy of our worship.  Yet, many of us have slipped into worshiping our doctrines or the Bible by making it our final authority.  Rather than Jesus being the MAIN character, we have made the Bible the main character and made Jesus submit to it.  I have observed this as I endured the preaching of Old Testament sermons where the text was taught without ever mentioning the name of Jesus.  Oh, “Jesus” was in the Fellowship Hall and in the opening and closing prayer, but not mentioned once during the message.  And there in my seat, I recoiled.  My insides burned as my heart and soul reacted in opposition.

 

The created has taken the place of the Creator in our lives.  Unaware, we have made an idol out of our Holy Book.  I unknowing did.  I needed to put the Scriptures in their proper place and that was to elevate Jesus Christ above all else, including the Bible.  (The Bible is very special to me and I have an incredibly high view of it, even more so now than before, as I learn from Bible scholars about the ancient multi-genre library that it actually is and how to read and understand it in the context and culture of the time that it was written.)  Now that I understand Jesus as my Truth and the Bible as the book about the truth, I have great confidence in who Jesus is and “thoughtful uncertainty” that Scripture has been interpreted accurately as I consider that God has perfectly revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ.  God’s character is like that of Jesus, and I adore Him for that.

 

Relationship vs Religion – One of the major roadblocks in my spiritual life was my misunderstanding at the correlation between trust and transformation.  Consequently, I was left with the only thing I knew to do – strive hard and strive well.  Not realizing that my behavior would change as I developed trust, the “how” of a growing relationship always escaped me prior to reading He Loves Me.  (I mean, after reading dozens of other study books, I thought God’s method for spiritual growth hinged on my obedience – more obedience equaled more Christlikeness.  It was exhausting and while it may have looked good on the outside, the inside was still dingy.)  I had misunderstood faith/trust, thinking it more as a swearing-of-allegiance and not realizing it as the catalyst that would draw me closer to my Lord.  Not just a one-time trusting Him as my Savior, but a moment-by-moment trust in Him in the midst of my every circumstance, even when it is dark, and I can’t see or feel Him – a daily trust that will untangle the twisted and straighten the crooked in my life. 

Jesus’ last moments on the cross perfectly exemplify this trust amid His perceived forsakenness.  Some of His final words were, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” followed by, “Father, into Your hands I commit my Spirit.”  How do you commit yourself to a father who has truly forsaken you?!  You don’t, unless of course, you only feel forsaken but positively know and trust the infinite faithfulness and unconditional love of your Father - that He would NEVER forsake you – Ever!  Jesus fully trusted His Father even as sin deposited the very real weight of feeling abandoned – that is our model.

So much of the cross was previously muddled for me but now, in the increasing certainty of my Heavenly Father’s love and the example of trust I have from Jesus, I understand how my trust grows as I live daily in the security of His love.  Then, out of that trust, my relationship grows.  “Into thy hands I commit my spirit” – a trust that grows so strong that it trusts even in darkness, blindness, and obscurity.  Trust that will pull me out of my stagnation and thrust me into a thriving life with my Best Friend, God.  As I begin to grasp this incredible love, I will live my moments trusting in Him which will lead to becoming increasingly like Him.  It’s going to take a lifetime.

Love and then trust are what lead us into relationship.  But in our Christianity, we can be so caught up in “do” and “don’t,” “shall” and “shan’t.”  We are proficient at plucking out rules for accountability.  That is easy.  A book is tangible and seemingly black and white.  Relationship takes time, is difficult, and often messy.  We trust Jesus for our eternal rescue, but then work arduously to conform ourselves and others to what we think the Christian life looks like.  In many ways, we have made Christianity a religion.  We say it’s not.  We say it’s a relationship, but the world isn’t fooled.  We are no different, pledging allegiance to, yes, the true God, but then packing ourselves into the Christianity box.  We tend to join religious institutions or endeavor to proof text our doctrines and then, when we think we have the correct set of beliefs, we shun the beliefs of others.  It’s our interpreted truth against their interpreted truth.  We speak with arrogant confidence leaving no room for humble uncertainty.  (I hope I have not come across that way, but I will admit the possibility.) We act like modern day Pharisees – We’re in, they’re out.  We’re right, they’re wrong – dividing, grouping, and labeling, refusing to worship with “those people” because they aren’t perfectly likeminded.  Maybe it would do us some good to humbly dialogue with others who cause us to ask questions about the things we have always believed, so that we will take it to God who can sort us out and teach us truths about Himself.

Jesus didn’t come to give us a better religion.  He came to be in relationship with those who want Him, those who desire His companionship through this complicated, troublesome life.  Religion tells us to be like Jesus.  In relationship, we can say, “Jesus, what are we going to do about this?”  We invite Him into our lives but then quickly slip into performance, whitening and polishing our outsides, all the while our insides remain anxious, stagnant, empty, and boring.  We know transformation doesn’t work that way, yet not knowing otherwise, we continue to do for God, hiding our own emptiness in busy religious living, all the while missing out on genuine friendship with Him.

God wants to draw us out of our bondage to religious obligations and show us how to live in trust moment by moment.  The Christian lingo of “trust,” “relationship,” and “holiness” sound so familiar to some of us but do we really get it?  No more obligatory godliness.  No more holiness first to get closer to God.  I used to avoid God for days, weeks even, because of the shame of my failures, thinking I had to feel repentant and “get my heart right” prior to approaching Him.  But now I know that I can turn to Him immediately, in my sin even, and talk about the brokenness in my life.  It’s not a squeaky-clean Christian that God wants.  He knows us all too well.  His desire is to live in relationship with fractured humans that He knows will fail day after day after day.  I am one of those failing, broken humans, and I find comfort in knowing that my God is smiling upon me.  He is willing to dirty His hands and untwist my mess as I dialogue with Him about my sin.  We get to run to God in our worst moments – even if we don’t yet regret the choices we have made – inviting Him into the darkest places of our heart and asking Him to change us.  When we understand His far-reaching hand of love, we will fall increasingly in love with Him.  Knowing True Love will transform us from the inside.  As we are transformed, we will lose our desire to do the selfish, greedy, prideful things we used to do.  Discovering the depths of God’s love will drive us to a greater passion for Him, resulting in more freedom from our bondage to sin. We will live unconditionally loved in a way that incarnates God in the world.  Others will see the radical love of Christ in us and want what we have.  Most people want nothing to do with religion and when they do see religion, feeling condemned and judged by us, they won’t want any part of it – dull and depressive!  Previously, as evidenced in my own life, that was me – inwardly dying a slow death and outwardly passionless and boring in my spirituality.

Oh, if only I could take my renewed vision of God back to my youth, to a place where I measured out a heaping dose of religion.  I’d take it all back and swap it out for a life-giving conversation focused on the passionate love of my God.  Remember the conversation killers about eternal destination?  Yep, I killed it attempting to share with my dear friend.  (Subconsciously torn between my duped religiosity and heartfelt kindness, I had invited him to a church retreat because I thought I “should.”  I resented myself, my leaders, and my religion because I knew he would hate it.)  After teachings on God punishing Jesus for our sins, I gave him my own law-dropping lecture – “This is what you should stop doing and this is what you should start doing.”  In that moment, I received an unmistakable indication that religion is foul.  Not even my high regard and careful concern for my friend could soften the effects of my religious vomit.  Amid my ignorance and earnest sincerity, came the honest reply, “All of that makes me feel like a stinky scratch-n-sniff taco sticker.”  I knew the referenced “well done” stickers that we had received with a chuckle in math class, but there were no smiles now.  His reply came as no surprise.  Deep down, I was nauseated with the forced words that I thought I needed to say.  The conversation felt unnatural, awkward, and brought no peace, no joy, and no comfort that I was doing right.  Rather, it cemented in my mind how I’d always felt about the twisted way of sharing Christ.  Uncomfortable and sickened, I thought to myself, “I don’t EVER want to do THAT again!”  In my desire for my friend to be saved from hell, my words were telling of my own skewed understanding of God - that my obedience, respect, and honor toward Him were not in response to His extraordinary love, but out of fearfulness in the punishments He might bring if I stepped out of line.  Religion – it’s disgusting, and yet, in my naiveté, it was the only tool for sharing my faith and the Jesus who I knew to be the Truth.  My friend didn’t buy any of it and I easily saw the repulsing reflection of my beliefs on his face.  I had offered just another religion whose god required appeasement in the way of rule following (obedience) and who would cause punishments or consequences to befall those who didn’t follow (perform) well.  Possibly, the only difference was that the god I had presented was into punishing and killing his own son in our place, which still exposes itself as child sacrifice.  Where was the good news?  People can smell religion a million miles away and it wreaks, exceedingly more than Mexican food on a sticker.  If I could have possessed, in my mental capacity, what I have gained in the past year, I would gladly relive my youth, with giddy excitement, eagerly anticipating all the conversations I fearfully and shamefully avoided.

Blind to my own religiosity, I had it so wrong – do more for God so I could get more of Him.  No wonder I couldn’t share my faith.  In my own stagnant relationship, and without a clear revelation of the cross or a reasonable explanation about how wrath fit into that reality, I was pharisaical in my approach of trying to help those I cared about conform to what I thought was the next step in this developing friendship with God.  In the first step, I knew salvation came through a trust in Jesus as Savior, but I had failed to recognize that all the rest of the steps in this journey can also be condensed into simply living in trust of Him daily. The Bible is not a rule book.  It is an ancient library of the greatest true story, inviting us to find our place beside God and to live as a child of Him, the most incredible Father in the universe.  As we live wonderfully loved, we will long to be like Him.  We will discover that His ways are better than anything we can imagine, and we will miraculously lay down our own agendas to embrace his. 

There they are – my questions, and thoughts, and a unique way of seeing the cross, and my Heavenly Father through the eyes of Jesus.  Again, I could be wrong, but these have been some stops along my journey.  I'm a seeker and a traveler and always will be. I will always be a student of the Rabbi.  I am not attempting to prove anything here.  My desire is only to share how it came to be that my heart exploded with love.  So, search for yourself.  Always be a seeker, always.  Quiet your preconceptions.  Listen with your heart.  I still am. I could be right; I could be so wrong, but I am spending time with God and trusting Him to lead me, to untwist where I am still flawed.  I am a “recovering Pharisee” and this is my journey with the living God.  It has been a wild emotional ride these last many months, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  Some might call me a heretic and I have accepted that.  (Thankfully, we aren’t burning at the (physical) stake anymore.)  Some may protest my absence of Scriptural evidence.  I continue to examine those things that I still question.  Trying to validate what I now believe, through Scripture reference, completely misses my point.  (I think that we have easily missed the big beautiful story for the up-close, zoomed-in approach that we have so often taken with our study of Scripture.) I am NOT writing to convince you, but to lovingly provoke you to do your own digging, to know your Creator, and to seek the God that I have fallen in love with.  Don’t think that I have “arrived” though.  God’s Spirit is alive and at work all around us, in us, and through us.  He still speaks and reveals Himself personally in relationships with each of us.  It is not about the what, but about the Who and I hope that I have conveyed that.  This is a mountain peak shout from the depths of my heart – Know your God and don’t settle for second-hand teaching!  Learn from others but then return to the alive Jesus for Truth.  He waits for you.

Read more in Part 4 - My Continuing Journey