My wife shared with me a quote of Chris Tomlin tonight. She said that at one of his concerts he prayed, "Lord, show us that you are not just a bigger us."
I think that's what we tend to do. We can't conceive of God very well and so we just make him a bigger version of us. We tweak his image a little bit and make him a little more petty or a little capricious. We ask questions like, "How could God love me if I...?" fill in the blank. Or conversely, we ask, "Why would God take my loved one away?" While I think it's true that God knows us intimately, knows each one of our hearts and catches every tear we cry, I don't think we have a complete sense of God's heart or that we hear his most intimate thoughts. Otherwise, we wouldn't be asking those questions, would we?
We trundle along in our daily lives and, like the self-centered children that we are, we can't conceive of his plans or intentions. We only see that first God does this and then he does that. We don't understand the reasons so we call him capricious. We don't understand why we stand ankle deep in blessings all around us and so we suspect that God will correct himself and rain down the iron shards of his wrath for our sins at any moment. We are children. The scripture calls us sheep! Both have no concept of purpose, timing or seasons. We suspect God because we suspect ourselves. And all the theology in the world can't correct that.
We need to sit back, watch and learn how He works. We don't do that by busying ourselves with objects of fascination or fretting about something that He seems to have forgotten. We sit back and we watch the Master at work in his garden. He plants a shrub here, removes another tree there. We stop to wonder why but He's already off to the next thing. We watch a Master at work and we sit still and try to hear His voice as He works. We watch with our eyes, we hear with our ears and we perceive not a bigger us, but rather a smaller part of Him. O, magnify the Lord!
Maybe then it will be easier to trust Him. Isn't that what this life is all about?
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