Unpredictable Outcome

Freedom in Faith “"Donot be bound by rules"” My sincere desire to be close to God led me to this journey to seek God outside of organized religion's trappings. I came to the understanding that organized religion was the construct of man to control God and His outcome. I had come to comprehend that organized religion was a form of controlling our behavior, our thoughts, and our hearts. There was so much required of us to see, hear, feel God that we missed His sweet presence each time! I was devastated by that understanding. How much of this had formulated my faith? How much did I truly believe in who God was in my life? I needed to be taken back to the place where God wanted to meet me, not where “man” had set up for me. I had seen and understood God's healing in my life. I had felt His sweet presence outside of the walls of a church building. I was beginning to see God in my walks. I was starting to hear God in my conversations with my “secular” friends. I was starting to hear God speak to me through my “non-Christian” friends. How was this all possible? Was I turning into a heretic? How was I going to explain this newfound (understanding) to my family? It all sounded quite ridiculous until it wasn’t. I met Rita the second day I arrived in Los Angeles, she was my husband's co-worker and she wanted to treat me to lunch. She wanted to hear all about my past and how did I meet my soon to be husband. I shared with her all the hurt and pain, but more importantly, my love for God. She looked up at me and said, “Your faithfulness to God bought you to Robert." I just stared at her. No one had ever said that to me. It was a beautiful God moment. Entirely out of the box. And HE did it again... I was sitting at breakfast with a dear friend, Heidi. I shared the exhausting relationship I was having with my oldest son and how things were so strained in our family dynamic. It all was so hurtful and broken. We were approaching the holidays, and it had been a few months since I had spoken or seen my son.. It was a tragic and emotionally and physically life-altering experience. There I was sharing my heart and hoping to receive sympathy for my broken heart, and then she said, “did you invite him over for Thanksgiving?” What! Are you kidding me? Did you not just hear a word I just shared with you? Were you not listening? This young man is broken, and he almost broke me! I stared at her in disbelief and said, what? Ummm…no. I don’t think I can do it. And as quickly as I finished my sentence, she looked at me and said, “how will he know what unconditional love looks like?” Yup! Read that again…I was slain. Right there in the diner, I was slain. Not by some “radical Christian, Pastor, Theologian, blah, blah” but by a friend who just knew what LOVE was supposed to look like. Period. Full stop! My sweet dear friend looked at me and made me promise the moment I got in the car, I would text my son and invite him to Thanksgiving dinner. I did. And he came. He used strangers in a department store, random texts, unexpected phone calls, cards in the mail and simple conversations that would spark his presence. This was one of many God moments with folks that would not fit into the construct of "organized religion"; who didn't practice, believe or live like I was taught one should live in order to speak on behalf of God. It was apparent to me that we have limited God to make Him controllable. We want the right person, with the right credentials to speak to us so that we can identify that it was truly God speaking to us. We place Him in this confined space to not see how genuinely ENORMOUS He is in our world. I realized that if we genuinely sat and listened to the teaching of Jesus and sincerely walk in his commands, we would be broken. To read and accept the principles of Christ as they are written will require us to look at ourselves in the mirror and face the realities of our counterfeit life. We would be required to expose our lives' truth and the lies that we hide from the observer. We would have to confess that we have manipulated Christ's teachings to fit our ideals that are doable and acceptable. We have formulated the science and belief that the God we serve in our religious organizations is just enough to get us by. But to stand up to those lies, we have to expose the mess of our lives' and clean up after it, and that requires work. We suffer from what I call "GBS" aka Genie in the Bottle Syndrome. We only reach out to God to ask for something that “we think” he may be capable of doing. So we pull out our bottle, make three wishes, and hope for the best. In actuality, the wishes are all requests that we can manage if we lived a disciplined life. We are all living in the pettiness of faith. You get comfortable. You keep yourself safe and keep your faith convenient until you cannot control what is happening, and we pull out the “Genie in the Bottle." This realization crushed me. I collapsed; figuratively and spiritually; I collapsed. I cried. No, I wept. The understanding that we have taken the teachings of Christ and have subjected them to our intellectual construct to benefit our needs in a deceiving way seemed all the more blasphemous than anything I had heard to be so. How had God not done away with the generation? Because of love! Unconditional Love!