I am who I am

A funny question among Christian's is "What did God do before he created the Universe?" I have often pondered that question and in my small thinking I think about God sitting in a big black space hanging out, looking like a disco ball in the center of a dark room shining small light around, but on an empty and black dance floor.

But today I had a revelation today reading St. Augustine's thoughts on what time is, he said Time is something humans created to understand how are lives move. I don't believe there was time before the universe, I believe that God doesn't see lives in a time frame, he sees it in stages. He sees his great painting by numbers picture start filling up before we get to 100 and we can see the two dogs playing with a tennis ball. God is bigger than time, he is bigger than what my brain can comprehend. God has been there before time and will be there after time. To God time is irrelevant, he has all the time in the world, and yet our time is extremely relevant to God. What we do each day matters, what we say, do, or even how we treat others matters to God. Time doesn't matter to God, yet our time here on Earth is precious, and it is a fleeting moment on the grand stage that God has created. Our time and what we do with it matters, how am I showing Jesus today? Am I helping or hurting the Way? How am I set apart? These are all questions that need to be wrestled each day, and beautifully most of the influential people of the Way have wrestled with these same thoughts.

In the first days of the Church Peter and Paul argued over the direction of the Way, whether it is to save only Jews or to also save gentiles. (Gal 2:11) Did gentiles need to follow Jewish law and be circumcised in order to be followers? Moses questioned God when he was told to speak to Pharaoh about freeing the Jewish Slaves (Ex 3:11). Jonah argues and abandons Gods path for his life and ends up in the belly of a great fish (Jnh 2), and then has the audacity to pout and be mad that God saves the people of Ninevah.

There are so many more examples, but the point is that sometimes we feel that we are the only ones dealing with the indescribable size of God and yet we have countless examples of men and women of the bible who have gone through the same thing, and come out the other side even stronger in there beliefs. As God states from a burning bush in the middle of a dessert, "I am who I am" (Ex 3:14). Perfect.

Guess what, I am who I am, and you will spend the rest of your human life trying to wrap your brain around those 5 words. Amen

American Landmarks

Where life meets us at our core is at a point when we have no options. When we are done, when we are down to our last quarter on the claw machine desperate for that stuffed bear. This is where God meets us, this is where the true human emotion of life with God rests. So many times we see our lives move fast in front of our eyes that we don't take a step back to realize where we might be. This is where God meets us, and we meet him. We give up and shake our heads and look towards the heaven and state "I can't do this, I can't live alone, I need your help, I can't do this anymore."

We miss God's beauty all around, when we stand at the Grand Canyon and want to go into the gift shop to buy a souvenir. When we sit on the shores of the ocean reading a book. God's expansive universe is in front us, and is too incredible for our minds to understand. In the old testament Moses asks God who he is, God replies "I AM". Rob Bell puts it best in saying that "this is as if God is saying you don't understand me and you cant understand me." "You cant even understand my name." This is the power of God that I want to believe in, this is the incredible power that his name is larger than anything. He has created a world that is larger than our understanding. The Grand Canyon, the ocean, the swamp land, the dessert sunsets, the Rockie mountains, all these things are in our own back yard and yet we miss them each day.

We have HD TVs and Planet Earth and we still miss the beauty of what is going on. This is a God that I believe in, a God that states you don't understand me, you cant even comprehend my name, yet I love you, I have loved you from the beginning, and I will always love you. A God who hears the cry of the weak, a God who weeps. An almighty God who can create and destroy in an instance, yet still chooses to love me unconditionally, even when I turn my back on him.

My brain cannot get around that last sentence, but the beauty is it doesn't have to for God to love me.
Amen

The First Post

Living in a world that each day seems to become more corrupt and distant than the day before, we see how far the human being has fallen from what we were created as in the beginning by God. At power positions in D.C. we have men and women who do not pay there taxes yet get to stay in power. As normal citizens we each would be punished severely for these non payments yet these men and women get cabinet positions.

We walk around society and the world with a moral compass that has a magnet taped to it. Is this what we were created for? To strive for big houses and big cars? To spend an outrageous amount of money on energy drinks so that we can keep up with our erratic pace of life. I do not believe this is what was intended for our lives, God did not create us to drink a couple of red bulls, work from 7 to 6, go by KFC pick up the family pack and then rush to our child's ballet recital. So many days we sit in our houses watch our 60" inch plasma and stare into a world were MLB baseball players turn down 25 million for a year. This is not what we were created for, this is why ad agencies were created, to read our thoughts and make us want the next big thing that we cant afford.

I believe that God had a different plan in mind when he created us, he created us to love one another, he created us and gave us opportunities so that we can take care of the less fortunate. Most places outside the US don't know what an ipod is, they don't know that you can have water coming in through your house without having a well. With the tough economic times ahead, this makes me step back and realize how truly blessed I am and how spoiled I have become. I throw away leftover food regularly and the majority of people who live in Cambodia work in the dump to find food and resources for there family. God has given us resources, in biblical days they also had resources and that is why Jesus preached to take care of the poor and widows, because this makes us realize and understand where we came from originally, Dirt in the Garden. It keeps us humble, it is a solemn lesson to understand how much God has truly blessed us.

To stare into a beggars eyes you see Jesus, for a beggar to stare into your eyes he also sees Jesus.
Amen