quote of the week (the first of probably many)

My favorite quote of the week:

“We serve the one true living God.” They sounded really excited about that.

Ok. I do too. But do I even know what that means? I’m not quite sure.

SERVE: We are the servants. We find our purpose through honest humility and recognition of our weaknesses and limitations before our loving Master. We don’t call the shots, but we trust and serve the one who does.

ONE: The single source of truth. His words are our guide, and nothing is exclusively true unless He says so.

TRUE: Trustworthy. Ultimate. Perfect. Beyond mortal comprehension.

LIVING: When something is dead, it is set in stone. Almost everything about it can be explained and understood. A living thing can be a mystery, an unknown, an exploration. It can bring life to other things. It is, by it’s very nature, vital and in motion. When something dies, it stops moving (on various levels). It remains, at best, exactly as it was the moment it died. God is alive; He is eternally the same, but He is not confined to the box He is occasionally presumed to be buried in.

GOD: I don’t think we’ve arrived, or ever will arrive, at a place in human knowledge where I can begin to write a sentence about the enormous reality behind what we can only label “God.” That’s the best word we’ve come up with, and when asked for a name He just replied “I am.” It doesn’t seem like He expects us to wrap our mortal minds around it anytime soon.

And so, I’m afraid I’ve turned that sentence too many times into something it was never intended to mean. We are so convinced of the “one true living God” as WE understand Him that we become arrogant and exclusive unless we find others who agree with our understanding, when we become twice as exclusive because our views are validated. There IS truth, and God is it. When He tells us something (or writes the book—which He did), we can trust it to be true. But lest I forget, God has never authorized me to corner the market on Him—I’m serving Him. If God wanted to just explain Himself so that there would be no further need for exploration into who He is, He would’ve done so. And yet, there are so many questions left, and so many ways in which we still must rely on God to even understand the God we’re relying on. He has this wonderful tendency to reveal Himself and His truth to those who are humbly seeking it, not in their own understanding. “Lean not on your own understanding, but in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your path.” We try so hard to understand, when our understanding is fallible and impermanent. We have only to truly want Him and He will take care of the directing of the paths.