All God
God is not a concept, idea, law, ideology or deity in the clouds, distant from us. God is beyond what you can think, has human qualities but is not human, is always happening, always now, is always with us — nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is love personified, and yet God cannot be explained. God is. (Yes, that’s a full sentence.) God IS. But the problem is that we can’t wrap our heads around that.
Creation wasn’t a one time event. It is always happening, because God is always happening. This is hard for us to grasp too, because we live in a culture of deadlines, goals and finishing. Who of us doesn’t imagine ourselves ‘arriving’ somewhere in the future … the perfect job, car, partner, house, vacation, the ‘perfect life?’ We’re wired to constantly work toward an end, and when we get there, we move the stick further down the line. Why do we do this and what do we think we’ll gain at the imagined finish line? There’s never an ‘okayness’ within us, only a projected perfect future, which creates even more craving within us … a perpetual longing without satisfaction. To me, that sounds a little bit like hell. And yet, we do it. To ourselves. Ah, we humans are certainly a fickle, striving, interesting bunch. But guess what?
God doesn’t care … about any of that. And God doesn’t care what you look like, how you act, what you believe, what you do, how you are or who you are. God loves you to your very core, both because of and in spite of yourself. Then, now and always … it’s all the same. God knows you through and through and loves you, just because … because that is the nature of God. And that nature is completely unfathomable to our minuscule human intellect.
Throughout history … we’ve put God in a box, limited God to one gender, envisioned God as a man on a throne, made God into our image instead of the other way around, allowed politics and culture to dictate who God is and how we behave based on that belief, on and on. We’ve fought wars over God, damned people who don’t believe what we believe, tortured, maimed and killed in the name of God. We’ve reduced God to belief and faith … ‘if you believe the story, you’re saved.’ Doesn’t that sound more like human behavior than the reality of a Divine, powerful, omnipotent force capable of orchestrating the all of all? There are galaxies upon galaxies in our known universe, more than we can fathom, and we reduce our own reality to a set of beliefs.
All God wants is you … naked, vulnerable, broken, sad, elated, terrible, wonderful you. God is living your life in and as you. God wants you to do good in the world and that good doesn’t have to be grand. It can be a smile at a stranger, a random act of kindness, a biting of the lip when your first tendency is to lash out, a helping hand to someone in need.
God wants your time … reflecting, contemplating, just being … in prayer or conscious thought about the nature of life, asking the big questions and waiting for a response to arrive. God wants you to laugh and have fun and be in relationship with others. God wants you to love all of creation. God wants you to spend time in your body, fully present, grateful for all that is. God wants YOU, all of you, as you are.
God is more real than all that we see with our eyes, think with our minds, feel with our hands, experience in our hearts … though the last one gets at more truth than the others. God is a knowing deep in your being. God is in you and everyone else in the world. God is relationship, union, connection, with and to all that is. God knows you better than you know yourself. God is in the trees and the oceans and the creatures big and small. If God should cease to love us at the count of three, at the count of three everything would disappear. God is the glue that holds us all together. We are all connected, truly, in God.
God doesn’t make bad things happen, but God doesn’t stop them either. And God is with us when tragedy befalls us. God meets us wherever we are. God ‘protects us from nothing yet sustains us in all things.’ (Thank you James Finley, for that little gem.)
God isn’t a story or a belief — or set of beliefs — or religion or creed or tradition or only for a specific set of people. Only we, in our flawed human ways, see things that way. There is more to life than what we see, feel, think or do. There is more wonder here than we see, experience or believe because our brains are wired toward pessimism and negativity over optimism and positivity. It’s up to us to live into the grand reality that is before us.
Can you ponder that? All of it? How do you feel knowing God loves you through and through, no matter what, requiring nothing of you except your full participation in life and feeling grateful for whatever life is handing you, not in a passive, weak way, but in a ‘yes this sucks but I trust it will all work out for my good’ sorta way? Is there anything in you that fights against that? Is it easier to complain and distrust than to be grateful and accept? It’s simply a stance or posturing, and one that is foreign to many of us.
Don’t get me wrong. Life is hard. Bad things do happen. We endure terrible things in this life. We go through hard times. We cry, scream, fight, rail against all of the bad because we simply don’t wish it for ourselves or others. But God is the great sustainer. How many times have you made it through heartache or tragedy when you didn’t think you could? All God. How has it come to pass that you are the person you are today? How much of it did you plan and how much ‘just happened?’ All God. What will it take for us to live into the reality of life — naked, unmediated, raw reality — in a trusting, loving way? I certainly don’t have the answers but these are questions I wrestle with daily.
God simply is, just as you simply are. Our notions of ourselves do not equal our real selves. The things we think aren’t reality, only projections of it. We can imagine the lives we want, work toward them, perhaps even ‘achieve’ most of our dreams, but along the way, things we don’t expect (or want) will happen, and in the end we’re all going to die. So see yourself there for a moment — about to take your last breath — what did your life stand for? What are you most proud of? What brings you peace when you think that thought?
“Is the life I am living the same as the life that God wants to live in me?”
Parker Palmer
Yes, God is living your life in and as you. Are you positively contributing to the effort?
1 John 4:16 says, ‘God is love.’ But what does that really mean?
How well do you love? What stops you from being loving? What is love, really? Is it a feeling? Is it within you? Beyond you? God living in you? If you really think about it, the idea of love and the idea of God are both ungraspable to the human mind. Thankfully we are more than our minds (though culture and society would have us believe otherwise). We are ourselves, our bodies, our essences — the all of us — with all of our flaws and foibles. Perhaps our hearts are more us than we realize, our gorgeous human hearts that beat and sustain and love … without our conscious effort or consent. All God.
Photo by Yana Gorbunova on Unsplash
