What is relationship with God?
Disclaimer:
I don’t presume to speak for God. This is my best analysis based on my reading of the bible.
God made us for relationship……to walk in the garden with him. But, why? Why does he want relationship with us…….with me? And, what does that relationship look like?
I believe that it is based on a parent/child model. In other words it is not a relationship of equals…..and it is certainly not a relationship where we get to pass judgement on God.
We can’t see it clearly from here.
We can’t understand it clearly from here.
And yet, we must actively seek it.
We must reach out.
We have to take the first step toward God.
Relationship is a gift from God…..not earned. …not deserved ….grace.
It completes us…..it fills a hole in us that we can sense……in our hearts, we know that something is missing.
It requires an act of faith. There is no other precondition.
It requires us to recognize our smallness, our weakness, and our dirtyness………..in a word, our failure. And if you don’t believe that we have failed………. just take a look around.
In the end it requires submission to a benevolent higher being…..and we hate this.
The main impediment to our relationship with God is our ego……our insistence that we are in charge in spite of overwhelming evidence that we have messed it all up.
Our contribution is small…….it mainly involves reaching out from our weakness and imperfection. We give up our position as the center of the universe. We humble ourselves. We touch the shadow of God’s enormous reservoir of love and realize the promise of knowing it more fully in paradise. We must accept on faith that God’s vision for us is better than our own and this goes against everything that our society tells us.
God’s contribution is hard for us to see. It is nonetheless always there and active…even when we lash out at him or ignore him. We cannot turn off God’s pursuit of relationship. We cannot turn off God…….no matter how hard we work at rejecting him.
I can only guess at God’s feeling…at his motivation. He is our ultimate and perfect parent. If he is like our earthly parents……..and I believe that he is. He wants us to be complete and happy. But on his terms…….not on ours. Because his plan is better for us than our own plans.
He knows that our vision and our goals are clouded and imperfect. At best our plan is short term………limited to 90 years, give or take……..in the tangible universe. His vision and plan extend far beyond the space and time that we can comprehend. He knows that his vision, his path for us, will lead us to a better place than the path we choose for ourselves. After all, how can we create and execute a plan when we know next to nothing about our destination? The best destination we can imagine is to either accept death as the ultimate end…….”the lights just go out” or to dream up a very nice version of our failed world. The first option is at least intellectually honest……..though it is depressingly bleak. The second option is appealing, though completely dishonest…..that is unless I actually am the creator of the universe….in that event it works out nicely. Unfortunately, my life experience, at least so far, clearly tells me that I am somewhere well below creator in the chain of command.
So……God loves us and lays out a plan for us……a plan to fulfill and satisfy us. He gives us free will. He then watches us reject his plan………and him. He sees us slip away from him and the paradise that he has built for us. He watches us slip away from the relationship that he knows will complete us. I can’t see into Gods heart. The best I can do is draw conclusions based on his actions and my experience as a parent. My experience tells me that this must break his heart. I think that God must be saddened to the point of tears at our rejection. I think that God probably spends more time shedding tears than hurling lightning bolts.
This is the God that I know.