I am a mere speck, a glowing flicker, a passing moment.
Make much more out of it and the world gravitates around me. My hands outstretch with expected readiness to receive all that life somehow and for whatever reason seems to owe me. Me. Diminish this truth to an ignorable, insignificant value as if I do not matter in the grander scheme of life unfolding, and no recognizable worth blooms. Fruitless seed barren. Miscarried dreams. Me.
The truth sets outside, apart from us.
In my life floating, freely successful by my account, God became more of a tame, latent, distantly ambiguous form in days mostly uneventful and unneeding of his activity. Very simply, much of my life did not demand faith or trust or belief in anything outside of what I could control or withstand. Each day unfolded compartmentalized and organized into a sort of list defined and measured by goals, expectations, desires, dreams, fears and so on. Heaven a packaged, rationalized part of my consciousness. I, the center, shaped my world with moral cues creating boundaries and cause and effect like expectations.
Do this and expect that. Don’t do that and get this.
A simplistic conscious driven mental eco-system influenced by Jesus, but mostly led by me. Smeared footsteps in the mud of life’s decisions, predominantly mine, determined by what seemed right through my filtered, earthen understanding.
I AM. i am not.
I will never grasp the full depth of God’s continually active love for me or the width of grace with which he finds me. Lying low in dust collecting old on the floor broken, mishandled by my own doing, lost again, a sight of sure pity, a mound of a mess ...again, his grace races deep all the way below me and rises. Barnstorming straight ahead sure of conquer and success when the day is mine, my spine straightens with pride, eyes glaze confidently, my glass raises hastily, he waits knowing fully that I will need him soon completely ...again.
In his rescuing and reaching and my lifting and lostness, a shift occurred moving me from the center of all, me as the holder of life, to the peripheral of me, the beginning of God. This is one of the main running themes in the book I am writing: God as the unmovable center faithfully maintaining, always unchanging. Tragedy awakened me. Love found me. Grace did the lifting. It was the shifting of God out of my life as ‘my god‘ and the re-entry of God into my context as the center and source of life sustainable.
Here is an excerpt from one of the chapters I am writing called, ‘Epilogue’:
If he is merely the god of my life, he is subject to accountability and my judgment. If he is only my friend, he exists only for my comfort and entertainment. If he is only ‘he’, then I am much more on my own in this universe left to fate and chance and a cosmic swelling tide than I ever imagined. However, if he is indeed the God of the universe, if all is subject to his existence as the source and creator and author of life, then I am a piece of the fabric of his cosmic creation. I am sustained as part of all that he is sustaining. I am well taken care of no matter the terrors that threaten.
"You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you." John 15:16