Embrace God
Have you ever viewed God as a Being who delights in you? Have you communed with God and heard Him speak good things over you? Has your experience been with a God who desires to commune with you and be seen by you?
Or is your image of God harsh, dictatorial, and condemning? Have you experienced a God who awaits your next wrongdoing so He can once again pronounce how disappointed He is in you? Are His demands on you driving you to exhaustion and burnout? Does He to seek to discover what is flawed in you rather than what is beautiful in you, His beloved creation?
We all, in some way or fashion, project an image of God into the way we view Him. In a sense, we have chosen a specific characteristic of God to focus upon based on our own life experiences, relationships, and culture. This is a natural tendency. But what happens when the picture we’ve draw of God isn’t accurate, nor biblical and it has the reverse effect --- detaching us from our Creator and Savior? This view could easily result in negating a relationship with Him. We build walls to protect ourselves from this distant and apathetic Being. Or we attempt to earn more favor or appease His anger by doing more, never fully satisfying Him.
Here are a couple simple challenges for two very broad approaches to embracing God…
For those of us raised in the church and caught in the trap of doing more and better to prove our worth to the Lord, may we cease the doing and just be in His presence. Allow ourselves to be fully seen by God and experience His pouring out of delight right where we are. Enjoy being and all that entails --- gratitude, reflection, contentment in the present. May we stop huffing and puffing to make a difference and just embrace Him.
For those of us who have put distance between ourselves and God because of the judgement, misconception, or anger associated with a divine, sovereign being, may we do the counterintuitive and draw close. And as my daughter often says, “Be curious”. It can be so easy to miss what is right in front of us because we are utilizing a lens of another human beings’ behaviors or judgements. Or a lens that sees only our own reality reel. We’ve understandably, yet incorrectly projected those on to God.
Believe it or not, God wants to hear from all of us --- the good, bad, and ugly. We, after all, are His creation. His desire is to connect and relate with each of us individually as His beloveds. He urges us to cease from striving and be with Him. He implores us to draw near and be curious! Embracing God is quite simply to relate!