To be Known

(inspirations from the shower)

We need to know God as a living, breathing Person. Indeed, he is truly Alive, deeply Inspiring, and the only person whose very existence, with-in and with-out, needs no external Cause - he IS, and just IS! A living, breathing person, He is not merely a system of concepts or collection of traditional ideas, or a secret knowledge exposed in waves of revelation. We do not approach Him in a hierarchy of logical steps, magical incantations nor well worn formulaic statements - He has taken the first step, and condescended relating Himself with us, personally. Ought we not do like-wise?

At the risk of offending both my neo-fundamentalist evangelical friends and touchy-feely charismatic-pentencostals (I have been both), who have both (unconsciously, inevitably) come to relate to God and his love as a [mechanised] system of Cause and Effect, logical steps, diagnosed Him as a solution/decision tree. On one hand painfully logical arguments, on the other hand kung-fu-ish force-field hand-waving; strangely the two ends of the spectrum seem so similar, the twain seem to have met and converged.

Have we made God in our image, and proceeded to make definitive pronouncements? In so many ways in our daily, limited dealings with Him, we seem to have worked out some paltry laws of linear FIFO, LIFO, GIGO, and thought we have had Him figured out. Have we endorsed rubbing the fat belly AND legal hyperbole?

In stark and painful contrast, instead, perhaps we ought to see God as wildly personal, immensely good, mysteriously grand, inscrutably awful, and yet at the same time be comfortable with Him as loving us to bits, crashing through time and space to our rescue. Not a tame lion... but wild, unpredictable, personal and above all, intensely Good.

Just as we relate with people, to know them, we long to be known. Perhaps similarly God wants to be known in a personal way, to be related to, not subscribed (gasp!), not even merely obeyed, not formularised, vulgarized.

Have we put Him in a bin of our own design, and boxed him in? We, of pallid linear temporal one-dimensional existence, vs an almighty, transformational, multidimensional, interdimensional, transdimensional eternal Creator!