In my life, there are those times when God has kept quiet.
He has been lost in the stillness....and I am left to genuinely seek him, to ponder over the things of my heart truthfully.
...waiting for a real feeling to take hold.
It is during these times that I say I want peace because I am becoming impatient with His silence. But honestly I have wanted a numbness......the absence of feeling.
The mystery of an infinite God being that intimate with my emotions means that I might not get the feeling I was looking for, but some other emotion that is not easy to control.....fear or passion.....despair or desire.
Paul writes* in hope that we would have the power to “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.” How could we pretend to know those measurements unless we have traveled them? We must hike down into the depths, but we cannot control what is down there....
In our daily lives we shy away from mystery. Planning every second of our lives is not hard work, it is merely busy work. It keeps us wrapped up in the mundane, easy-to-understand components of our lives. As for me, I like that tight grasp on the controllable. It makes me feel accomplished and relaxed. It is easy.
My question is this.....is being contained in our calendar really moving us forward? Is it moving us anywhere? Yeah, the car is moving but you’re buckled in nicely.
The adventure and the intrigue are nowhere to be found in that kind of planning. There is nothing to wonder about.
God is mysterious. I want a life of mystery.
(Originally published at Coffee House Pastor on 6/15/2011)
