I Can’t Deal With You Today:
Am I the only one who often wants to go live in a cave with a porta-potty, refrigerator, mattress, and no human contact — EVER AGAIN?!
Let’s see — I would definitely need to pack bug spray…and snake repellant…and a water filter (gotta have that!). I wonder if Amazon would be able to make deliveries. Oh, never mind.
Those moments are usually fleeting and arise after encountering some dumbass, or worse, watching lots of them huddled together on the news.
The world seems to be growing more and more insane by the day if we only focus on the god-awful people that make the news in the first place. Don’t we have enough to deal with just surviving without being reminded ad nauseam of the ugliness that surrounds us?
Then recently, unexpectedly, my faith and hope were renewed. I attended a prayer service for “National Gun Violence Awareness Day”. I thought it was just a gathering of my church to recognize and pray for an end to gun violence. I had no idea it was a national movement that started in 2015.
On their site, they state, “In 2022, more than 1500 partner organizations, influencers, corporate brands, elected officials, and landmarks joined hundreds of thousands of Americans to unite around a call to end gun violence.” I was blown away. Those, my friends, are God numbers! Here’s the link if you want to read more. https://wearorange.org/about/
Burning bush moments
There are so many examples in scripture of God confusing people by showing up unannounced in unexpected places trying to find an opening in our hard heads.
My heart suddenly filled with a trust (which I should have always had) that God is working right in our midst, in all the turmoil, insanity, and seeming lostness of humanity — as always. We often aren’t aware of it because we’re not present to our own burning bush moments. And apparently, that’s not newsworthy — God’s not newsworthy. Humph!
Still waiting?
Now, does all this mean that we can just sit back and wait for God to show up and fix every mess we humans have created ourselves? It seems that we continually take our crap to him expecting a reset.
ME: Lord, I’m tired and confused, and drained of any desire to come out of my cave and try again. Please don’t give me that stink-eye, or worse, the silent treatment. It’s so irritating. Can you just fix it?
GOD: (defeating silence)
Hopefully, in that silence, we realize we have forgotten why we’re here in the first place. God does amazing work in and through us. The mind knows that, but the heart fears it will demand too much from us.
This is not complicated
God sent Jesus as a living, breathing template along with a one-word instruction manual. My A.D. D. brain always bulks at sitting and reading forty-page instruction manuals before starting a project. Then, inevitably, I end up with missing or extra parts and no idea what to do with them. But God’s manual has only one word: LOVE! (Mark 12:30–31)
Jesus has always managed to work with the messy humans assigned to him, but he surely rolls his eyes in response to our efforts because we add stipulations to loving others: I will think about loving you if ______________ (fill in the blank).
Jesus mastered his task to love unconditionally all the way to the cross as he handed his disciples, and now us, the baton, “Now, it’s up to you and the Spirit within you, to carry on God’s work in my name. Don’t screw this up. I’m depending on you, Gods depending on you.”
I’ll leave you with two of my favorite quotes:
“Nothing shows the presence of the spirit in human life as well as love does…. When love is expressed as compassion, the spirit enables us to come out of ourselves, put ourselves in the other’s place, bend over the person fallen by the wayside. ….by grace we participate in God’s very being. Here the human spirit is touching the hem of the Holy Spirit’s garment.” Leonardo Boff
“I worship Something Else that says that everyone is a beloved child of the divine, nothing more, nothing less, no matter what. We are not better than.” Tommy Airey. This is the article he wrote.
