My husband said today, “You should blog more often”. I agree.
I asked, “What should I blog about?”. He said, “Life.”
It’s easy enough to blog about the everyday things happening in my life (although it seems awfully boring to me at times). Life seems to be about going to work during the week, resting on the weekend and getting back at it on Monday morning. I’m still enjoying my job although this week was particularly hard. Tuesday was the first day I had the thought, “I wish I wasn’t the ‘manager’ today.”
There are some shining lights – my wonderful husband, who never ceases to communicate his love for me; my daughter, who is so much fun with her quirky personality at almost 15 months; our house church, which always offers a richness in discerning the word of God together.
My friendships, which I had more time for while on maternity leave, are requiring a more conscious effort on my part since going back to work. And I haven’t been very ‘conscious’ a lot of the time. It seems too long between visits, but the visits and chats are cherished all the same. I wish I had days where I could go hang out for the afternoon.
I think the most significant thing that has been happening to me over the past few months is a re-examining of my view of God. This is a more difficult thing to talk about. I don’t have everything figured out. In deconstructing some of my beliefs, the alternative to those misconceptions about God almost seem heretical to me. I find myself questioning commonly assumed beliefs wondering if those beliefs are truly consistent with the word of God. Does God ‘send’ people to hell? Or is it that people ‘choose’ darkness instead of light and in so doing THEY are the ones that separate themselves from God, not the other way around.
John 3:17-20 says, “17 “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. 18 “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 “This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. 20 “For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.”
Doesn’t this sound more like people hiding themselves from the Light rather than the Light hiding itself from them? I’ve fought this concept for a while but I find it appealing to me. It demostrates God’s great love for the whole world. The Bible also talks about the ‘day of Judgement’. But what does that really mean? Do we assume to know how God is going to judge even though His ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts higher than our thoughts? What is the overriding message of Jesus’ ministry, His death, and resurrection? Is it not the passionate love of God? Is that the theme of God’s message to His people: LOVE? Paul said that three would remain: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13).
I realize I have put more weight on God’s judgement of sin than on His love. As a result I find it very difficult to accept His grace because I don’t deserve it. I deserve judgement and that is how I treat myself most of the time. What if there are subtle lies in my thinking that at first seem biblical, but when God digs deeper I realize go against who God really is? I suspect there is much more freedom in Christ available to me if I understood more of the nature of who He is and who God the Father is.
Like I said, I don’t have this all figured out. But I find it liberating to be examining my beliefs and testing to see if they truly represent the heart of God or if the concepts are just assumed to be found in the Bible because I’ve heard them so many times before.