God is in the things that we can prove don't need him to be there...

I love to stand in my garden.

I don't do it very often but when i do - on my own - generally at night and when everyone is out or in bed I'm always inspired.  Something will always grab me - often the moon, more recently even the plants - the rose plants - the fir trees.  Inevitably my thoughts drift Godward.  The moon reflects the light of the sun and does so with absurd beauty and such profoud importance... and yet has no light of its own.  I hear God wisper... "Reflect me.  Be significant... but remember your own dusty deadness has no significance unless I shine on you." 

God is in the things that we can prove don't need him to be there...

Why is it that I more often than not connect with God by walking in the hills or letting my mind wander as I observe creation?  I thank God for my house, my garden, my kids - but the questions race through my mind; 'is it a gift from God or just a gift from earthly beneficiaries, the bank (mortgage) and my careeer? 

I said to myself: If I believe my kids are truly a gift from God, then by definition I must believe in God.  So God gave me my children as a present?  Not just a wonderful expression of marital unity and the circular continuum of life?  I cannot deny science - I know where things come from - I understand something of how the world revolves - how the moon reflects the sun.  I cannot remain ignorant.  God is not Zeus.  If God gives me a gift - and I know something of HOW he does it then God cannot remain a Man in the sky.  He must be a wind blowing through the fabric of existence - he must be the inspiration that keeps the trees breathing into the carbon cycle, he must be intricately involved in the whole shebang - the entireity of this mental old merry-go-round.

God is in the things that we can prove don't need him to be there...

Singing worship songs seems a chore but I see its value... but I can't help thinking I'm boxing God in by my projection of the image I have of Him.  Don't forget the sun shines on the righteous and the wicked - God can be involved in the lives of people who don't know him. 

And it also rains on us all too...

God is in the things that we can prove don't need him to be there...

God enables the 'free will' of tectonic plates - as one of my young people put it.  They rise and create new farmland - they fall and kill thousands.  But they do what they do... as do we...

When Jesus arrived in the Middle East their understanding of God seemed unprepared.  Was it the 400 years of silence, or 4000 years of just not getting it?  Either way - they were expecting something else.  Their perception of who God was and what he was about was skewed.  It was painful for those few who chose to become more aligned to the truth of the character of God in those days; and many just couldnt do it. 

God is in the things that we can prove don't need him to be there...

I wonder if now, as we have unravelled increasingly more of the amzing mysteries of the universe and our revolving marketplace, whether our imagination of God needs to alter as perhaps it did back then... that we grow a new maturity of understanding of our God that will scare those of us who fear liberalism!  I [think I] am a charismatic evangelical whatever that means but I wonder if my mind can expand towards ST Colleridge's suggestion of a single - divine - idea - a wind that connects every form of life that can can influence and achieve connectedness with us and the world outside of our picture of a 'very big powerful man' - a very big spirit even, who watches over and waits for prayers.  Can God be less visible, less imaginable, less vocal - but yet still more alive and active and approachable?  Can I stop looking upwards when I pray?  Can I stop imagining a man when I sing?  Can I find new vocabulary? 

Church must always mean what it means, but in a world where I physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually CANNOT walk slow enough through life to find his wavelength - his frequency - I'm going to have to snap out of the attitude that the most powerful experiences of his presence and his voice should be found in a church sanctuary - or even in a small group of people speaking and singing, however passionately... (which I enjoy). 

God blows through everything; and I only seem to see it when I step outside to look at the moon laughing at me (through the clouds of water that have recycled for centuries; with light that has expired millions of years ago).  When I stand outside a house that has been provided through a subtle manipulation of modern circumstances in a godless society - through PEOPLE - through coincidence and through ways that are beyond my imagination.

The haunting of all this is the ways God can blow through all things to bring a medical cure, a miracle, a Bible or a prayed for iPod - but so can we blow through it to wreak injustice - and societies that are stupidly susceptible to natural disasters. 

And maybe an even worse thought that even though "God" can reach through all these things maybe he is not 'able' to do so to save in these situations, like Haiti, BECAUSE of our idea that he works only outside of the 'understood' things of this world.  The point is that  "He" makes himself inextricable with "us" and we don't facilitate Him through our actions and/or our "prayers."  Are prayers meant to be interchangeable with action?  The same thing?  One defunct without the other? 

I am my prayers as much as He is my possessions, breath and skills...?

He is life, my life and His life - all at the same time as He is both medicine, the 'national grid' of the natural world - and the cause of my boy and girl and the fact I have a house to live in... and a garden to stand in; in the quiet of the night.

God is in the things that we can prove don't need him to be there...