Check Your Vision

We see God not as God is, but as we are!
We see God through our eyes, our experiences, be they good, bad or otherwise. This is why, I believe, it is very difficult for a person who has lived a hard life or a life filled with insurmountable struggles both inwardly and outwardly, to hear and accept the words, "God loves you." Such a person cannot fathom a loving God in the midst of the painful circumstances of their life, especially if all they've known has been turmoil and pain.
Such a person may not even know what true love looks like or feels like. This is why I believe Jesus was about action and not just words. Maybe that's why he didn't write down anything he said-because he knew that people would fixate on the written words moreso than the doing of those words. We love to quote scripture but are we living what they say? Are our lives living expressions of the scriptures? It's easy to say to someone, "God loves you," but what about demonstration of that love. What do those words really mean and how does one manifest them? It's like a husband telling his wife,"I love you," while he continuously ignores her needs or fails to take time to show her that she matters to him.
Jesus was a man of action and words. The parables he shared, the stories he told were coupled with his feeding of the 5,000 along with his healing of the lepers, the blind, and the crippled. He spoke about God as his Father but he also demonstrated God. He came to show who God was.
When he spoke to the woman at the well, he pierced her heart simply by talking about regular drinking water from a well versus living water that he alone could supply. He went deeply into her personal life about the many men she'd had in her life. By the time Jesus was done talking with her, something inside her had been forever changed. She, from that moment on, knew God in a completely new way.
Someone once said that God created us in His image and we've returned the favor by making God in our image, meaning we oftentimes bring God down to our level.
Check out your life.
Check out your thoughts.
What are your beliefs about God?
Do you equate God's ways with the ways of people?
Do you believe God is just like man?
God says that His ways are not our ways, neither are His thoughts our thoughts. As a matter of fact, His ways and thoughts are higher than ours, as the heavens are higher than the earth.
Perhaps this is why there are so many strains of Christianity, so many varying views and beliefs about God. We all tend to see God as we are.
When will we make room for God to show up in our lives as God truly is and not the God we want Him to be? Let God in, you might be surprised!
Peace


God is much different than we thought and also much better than we feared.
- Richard Rohr,
Things Hidden, Scripture as Spirituality