I know it has been quiet here for a few weeks. I simply have been swamped with book donations in the library that needed sorting and processing. I was almost done with the 7 boxes of books that came in just before we headed for Alabama when 2 huge boxes of books appeared one day last week. No notification of who donated them. I have a pretty good guess though. Most of them are non-fiction, many about Israel, some on prophecy. One little book was a Haggadah for a Messianic Jewish Seder. God’s timing can be remarkable. Our retirement community was putting on a Seder supper last night led by a Messianic Jew. I processed this little book and put it in the hallway display Monday afternoon. Somebody picked it up right away.
In the evenings I have been reading Mike Erre’s Astonished: Recapturing the Wonder, Awe, and Mystery of Life With God. I had loaded it on my ipad when it appeared in the free Kindle books list several months ago. It is well worth spending money on though.
He talks about the status of current American Christianity. We like to shrink-wrap God into doctrines, traditions, institutions to make God less mysterious to us. Yet it is the mystery of God that leads to worship. We try to fit Him into labels and categories, to fit Him into our boxes, but He is a God of surprises. Jesus was not what the religious people were expecting in a Messiah. They missed out because He did not fit into their boxes. We miss out sometimes, too, because we fail to look for God with eyes of faith and expectancy outside of our boxes. Modern Christianity has become the means to give God structure, shape and understandability, but faith requires us to live with mystery and tension and paradox.
Which brings us to the thought that we experience periods when God seems hidden to us. It is true that God sometimes has to prepare us for His moving in our lives. The timing isn’t right for Him to reveal certain things. However, we are often the reason we don’t see God working. There is trouble with our heart (do we really want to see?) or our heads (how we look at the world). We want to see more of God, but in manageable doses. We don’t want disruption to our perceived comfortable and safe lives. We may be hanging on to certain sinful behaviors and thoughts that we know God wants gone.
Desolation (the felt absence of God) is as much a gift to God’s people as consolation. Desolation draws us deeper so that we pursue God for His own sake, not the benefits we might receive. It matures our love for Him. Do we want true relationship which means going through the hard times together with God or are we wanting a Blessor who imparts gifts according to our preferences and agenda?
In our culture we view life with sacred/secular dualism. Sometimes God’s presence and work go unrecognized because we only expect to see Him in what we designate as our sacred places and times, e.g., in church, during prayer and devotional reading. Whenever we predetermine how or where or when He will reveal Himself, we run the risk of missing Him. We fail to see that God can and does meet us in the everyday, the ordinary, and the common. He is in the mundane as well as the dramatic. Our culture hungers for the sensational and extraordinary and is blind to God’s work in the ordinary events of our lives.
We can also see His working through the practice of remembrance. We need to look back and reflect on His presence and activity in our lives and the lives of others. We can read signs of what God is like by spending time in His creation rather than being constantly involved in the busyness of life. It is our own “blindness” that keeps us from recognizing God’s presence in all of life.
There is so much in this book. The nature of lament; discussion of faith and surrender; what real treasure is and how what we treasure causes fear or confidence. I highly encourage you to read and reflect.
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