Imagination, Richard J Foster, says it’s ok to utilize in our quest for God. I didn’t know it was ok, but it’s what I’d always done, though perhaps not aware that I was different from anyone else.
There are those who encourage the idea of seeking God “as you understand him” and that’s worth a moment to ponder.
But ones relationship with God is a very private thing. Profoundly private. That which I want to share herein is part of that private place that I keep shut away, but that constantly knocks at the door to be let out into the light of day.
But before I tell you of my experience, I have two other examples of this in two people I know very well. My wife, Cheryl, and my friend Art. We have a home group which both of them attend with me. The night Cheryl shared her experience with “God as she understood him”, Art identified with her experience in his own life.
Here’s what he had to say about that.
All I know is that both were raised in a home where reference to God was very limited. But both had an inner life. A daily communion.
My wife said it was a voice in her heart. She dared not share this with anyone else. She needed it, nonetheless. She would shut herself in her room, alone. She had 4 brothers, Daryl, Kevin, Rodney, and Brian, 2 sisters, Daphne and Sandy, a Mom, Rose, and a Dad, quite the full house.
Was she lonely? Not in the sense of being alone. But there was a deeper need. She pursued it in her private time. She would go to her room, close the door, and listen to her music. This, she told us, was when she would hear a voice. I don’t know the details. It’s just that years later as she got to know the Bible, and the testimony of other Christians, she made the connection. She had a particular incident happen where it all connected. It was after she responded to a sermon on the topic of the infilling of the Holy Spirit.
God’s Grace and gentleness is profound. He doesn’t muscle his way in, he woos each of us. And part of that gentle persuasion is the work he does through believers. Bonhoeffer talks about the aspect of what part others play in this in his book, Life Together.
But God has put this Word into the mouth of men in order that it may be communicated to other men.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Charles Spurgeon speaks of this need for gentleness in a sermon entitled, Gently, Gently
A fire which is almost expiring may be revived by a gentle breath, but it will be blown out if the bellows are plied at their full force.
C. H. Spurgeon
Our ability to listen, and come along side of God at work is completely dependent upon our ability both to listen and to hear to HIM, in our hearts.
When Cheryl and I met. I had just come out of a couple of difficult relationships. I needed to know what God would have me do. Cheryl told me something that helped me to pursue a relationship with her. It was her plain statement:
“I’ve always wanted to go to church, but have nobody to go with”
Cheryl
I was disillusioned at that time. My faith was as intact as it had always been, but the details were on trial. Something in what I’d been believing led to the greatest catastrophe of my entire life. The loss of my first marriage, alienation from my children, and alienation from the perfect little planet where I could be in the ministry. There’s this list. And being divorced isn’t on that list. I was an outcast at that point. This wasn’t something just in my head, I felt it’s reality as I endeavoured to establish myself in a church. People seem to always have this compulsive need to judge the validity of my divorce. It’s part of what is wrong with the human race. There are many Christians who think that the Bible is a book written to them about how others should behave.
The Bible is about my relationship with God and others. In the extreme if there are those who are behaving contrary to the word of God, yet claiming to be followers of Christ, we are to disassociate from them as being a brother or sister. The examples are extreme.
“But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one.”
1 Corinthians 5:11
The difference with me is I was a drowning man reaching for Hope. Asking for explanations from a drowning man is something like stepping on his fingers as he tries to lift himself out of the water, into the boat.
Imagine you’ve just shaken my hand, welcoming me to your church, and you want to know more about me. Am I married or single, or…?
Break away for that scene, and into the broken images I will now describe to you.
I remember when I told God that my marriage of 12 years was officially over, something had happened that there would be no remedy for. Who knows how many other things I bore. But the day I woke up in jail, because of lies she told to get me there, and to get herself into the system that would pay for her and my children to be taken far away from me. And I would not know for weeks later, where they’d gone.
There in that lonely place God met me, and kept me whole. I vividly remember considering all that was around me. I didn’t know just exactly what she’d said, to result in me laying on a bare mattress on the top bunk, in a cell with one other unfortunate individual. He was an addiction who asked me if I had any drugs on me. I ignored him. I was in absolute fear! I had no grace to church extend to that man. But regardless of that level of conscious understanding, there was a peace that under lay that fear, and all my other emotions in that moment. This is once again where I have to refer to a mental image. Think of a peaceful pool, with an absolutely calm surface. And a sheet of Glass is over it. No matter how much I try to pound on that glass to trouble those waters, I could not! It was beyond my ability to panic. I then finally understood a verse I’d sung about for most of my life.
“And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
Sometime later, Cheryl got on my bus. And slowly came to be in my life.
Cheryl came to church with me, but I also went to church with her. She had no baggage of the oughts and shoulds.
This I spoke about in my first post. It’s contained in the whole, but especially in the first line:
I’m overwhelmed by my failure to live up to whom I was suppose to be by now.
It’s Over
I’m sealed up, in my coffin, waiting for the lowering and the scoops of dirt.
I can’t hear any tears, nor any handfuls of dirt being lightly sprinkled by loved ones left behind.
Just a cold, dark waiting… here at the end of my days.
I lift my eyes up to heaven, and tell God how he’s let me down.
I’m being let down, into a 6 foot pit dug by anonymous grave diggers.
Just then, God, busy with some intricate matter, has one eye adorned with one of those high powered magnifying lenses you see jewellers use, just above that there’s a visor, above these, a low hanging bright light illuminates his work space.
He sighs, as my words arrive at his ear, it’s a patient, loving sigh.
“Who is it that has disappointed expectations of you?”
he asks, turning towards me, after having lifted his visor and letting the lense pop out into his lightly outstretched hand,
“I, myself, am very pleased with you, and the life you are living. Why don’t you come out from under those covers and make us both a coffee”
Running Down Vimy 