It isn’t that I for one moment stopped believing in God, but rather that I lost sight of Who God is. God came too close – took up more space than usual – and wouldn’t let me take a step back. God got BIG, and my soul had no scope fit for magnifying. I couldn’t draw God into focus.
I grazed the hem of the garment of Great and Mighty, and it made me feel so small. Like, bacteria small. What is one, single
bacterium in a galaxy the size of ours? Or in a universe that holds over one
hundred galaxies within it – and those being only what we are aware of? And
then factor in time, and how much less than a
breath in it we are? What is man,
that God is even remotely mindful of me,
that God would have any concern for my offspring? What in the world could a God
that big – God Who breathed the stars
into space – what could a God that beyond comprehension possibly care about
a widow’s mite, or a servant’s unforgiving heart, or a finger crushed in a
punch-press or a pierced belly button? How bored would God have to be to even
notice, let alone care about what I do with my one gasp of fleeting life – let
alone bother with what goes on within the untraveled, unravelled universe that
is the mind of my heart?
I went a little Ecclesiastes.
I don’t exaggerate when I say that the BBC’s Planet Earth renewed my faith. I caught
a glimpse of God in glory veiled. I beheld Beauty. I kept saying Wow, and Wow, and Wow – and, This is too much. My brain is going to
explode. If I could really grasp this, I think I would actually die. And I
clasped a thread from the hem of the garment of Holy.
I saw the majesty of vapour – of the ruach Elohim – how God moves as breath in all and through all and
for all. I saw my place – how everything lives and dies and is renewed and
changed, world within world within world into infinity. I saw how, This is not all about me.
I saw Love, and how small we make It, and how It’s nature is
to magnify, to draw close, pulling us
into God’s view, not the other way
around. I saw how Love makes us larger than life.
I saw how very, very much we do not understand – how base
our thoughts and words and actions are if they are empty of Love.
Because God IS Love. That invisible, mighty Force beyond
parallel Who moves between people, Who leads us to choose to be together, Who asks
us to choose to know another and causes us to ache to be fully known by another,
Who invites us to pick dandelions, and to dance on couches, and to sing around lampposts,
and floods us with happy just to
stand on the street where someone lives; that Force Who strengthens our will to
march and to fight and to lay down in trenches and to die; that Force that says
your will, not mine – This is Love.
This is God – not God’s activity. God. This is God in us, moving through us, to fulfill God’s purposes on the earth.
And Love put on skin and came among us so that we could see
what exactly that word means.
And God tarnished the reputation of a terrified teenager to
show that Love is never concerned with what
people think. And God grew from a cell in her womb, made her swell, made
her stretch, made her squat on her knees in pain to show that Love is not above
wounding, that it comes with a cost, that it demands space to move and to grow.
And God melted into her arms, and fell asleep on her breast, her milk pooled in
his mouth and warm in his belly, and he let himself be fed and nourished by a
girl who did not know what she was doing.
In everything God does in us, in every way God moves among us, God entrusts
Himself – God entrusts Love – to people who do not know what they are doing.
And we really do not have the faintest idea what we are doing.
We have yet to understand the most obvious.
God is patient, God is kind, and is not jealous; God does
not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; God does not seek His
own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not
rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things,
believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. God never fails. ~ 1 Corinthians 13:4-8
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