Ten minutes before I had to leave for the airport freshman year of college, the zipper ripped out of my suitcase. It was not a high quality bag, and I was trying to fit in everything I owned (I significantly violated the weight limit for checked baggage). I overestimated the strength and size of the bag, and in a last ditch effort my roommate sat on top to keep it shut while I zipped it. As soon as she got up, the zipper’s stitching burst open. (Duct tape quickly solved this problem, yet befuddled the TSA agents who decided to randomly search my bag – I hope they enjoyed the dirty laundry!)
Although I grew up in church, my concept of God was very small. I knew mainly four things about God - He was love, He sent His Son for me, He lived in heaven and He wrote the Bible. (Maybe I knew a few other things – I should give my Sunday school teachers more credit…but still, it was a skeleton understanding.) It all fit very nicely and neatly into my faith suitcase.
My world expanded as I grew older; I studied science in college and made new and interesting friends with novel opinions about everything. Instead of trying to figure out how God and my faith meshed with those new things, I ignored the dissonances for as long as I could. I tried to cram everything into my nice, neat faith suitcase. The older I got, the more frayed the edges became, and the harder it was to keep my view of God so small; the suitcase was going to burst open.
My own narrow knowledge and understanding restricted what I was willing to consider or accept about God and His character. We try to contain our understanding of God in neat little parameters of our own invention, but those are limits that God does not actually provide.
Eventually, I started reading my Bible (for real). And talking with other people who studied their Bibles. And reading books by people who had studied it longer. Talk about needing someone to sit on your suitcase to close it!
I wanted all of my life experiences and all of my Bible studying to fit nicely and neatly into my concept of God. Manageable and small, I wanted an answer to every question. No exploding zippers, no duct tape.
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| Photo Credit: Flickr user Vllseskogen, Creative Commons |
Maybe knowing God isn’t like packing a suitcase at all. The longer I seek Him and desire to know Him, the more I get the sense that knowing God is more like exploring the rain forest. At first you notice a few key things: trees, rain, heat. But if you’re willing to search and seek, question and dig for answers, you will discover more and more: a gorgeous flower, a powerful waterfall, a fearsome panther, the way things work together. Curiosity will require more searching: How do all the dead leaves and bugs disappear? A microscope might provide a new perspective, and climbing through the trees would yield unexpected discoveries you may not have considered from the ground. The more you know, the more beautiful it is, and the more deeply you enjoy it. Even if you stayed and lived in the rain forest for a lifetime, you still would never search out all of its secrets, never know every niche and nuance. There’s no way you could pack a rain forest into a suitcase – anything that might fit would never represent the totality of it; an essay or even a book could not contain it. It’s just too much!
So it is with God. He is just too much!
Pastor Dirk’s encouragement this week is that when our world collides with our nice neat picture of God, we shouldn’t fight it and grow discouraged by the collision. Rather, that we should seek the scriptures to let God speak into the confusion, and let our minds be blown.
He is bigger and wilder, so much more than we can imagine. He is more generous, He loves more fiercely, His justice is greater and He is more powerful than our minds can comprehend. Discovering Him will take the careful study of a lifetime. When He speaks, He expands our expectations and deepens our love.
On this side of eternity, we won’t ever have all of the answers about God and how He moves and works in this world. Our knowing will always be partial, a poor reflection. For all of us who know and believe Him though, the day will come when we will know Him in full; we will know Him face to face!
The loose edges of my understanding of God are becoming more comfortable. I’m learning that He is so much more than I can imagine; to box Him in is to create a God in my image.
Like the Bereans in Acts 17, let’s search the Scriptures daily to know Him more and hear Him speak, all the more when our world collides with our understanding. I want God to speak into my small and squashed ideas about Him, and burst them wide open.
[Robin Bupp is married to Caleb, and they are from many places east of the Mississippi (but are calling Michigan home for the foreseeable future). A former high school science teacher, Robin is slowly turning the two Bupp kiddos into tiny nerds while they teach her lots of things, including humility and patience.]
So it is with God. He is just too much!
Pastor Dirk’s encouragement this week is that when our world collides with our nice neat picture of God, we shouldn’t fight it and grow discouraged by the collision. Rather, that we should seek the scriptures to let God speak into the confusion, and let our minds be blown.
He is bigger and wilder, so much more than we can imagine. He is more generous, He loves more fiercely, His justice is greater and He is more powerful than our minds can comprehend. Discovering Him will take the careful study of a lifetime. When He speaks, He expands our expectations and deepens our love.
On this side of eternity, we won’t ever have all of the answers about God and how He moves and works in this world. Our knowing will always be partial, a poor reflection. For all of us who know and believe Him though, the day will come when we will know Him in full; we will know Him face to face!
The loose edges of my understanding of God are becoming more comfortable. I’m learning that He is so much more than I can imagine; to box Him in is to create a God in my image.
Like the Bereans in Acts 17, let’s search the Scriptures daily to know Him more and hear Him speak, all the more when our world collides with our understanding. I want God to speak into my small and squashed ideas about Him, and burst them wide open.
[Robin Bupp is married to Caleb, and they are from many places east of the Mississippi (but are calling Michigan home for the foreseeable future). A former high school science teacher, Robin is slowly turning the two Bupp kiddos into tiny nerds while they teach her lots of things, including humility and patience.]
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