God is an Awesome God!

“Our God is an awesome God, there is nothing that he cannot do…” This is a song that my grandchildren learned in Vacation Bible School a few years back. It’s true, our God is an awesome God, but not just in the muscle-flexing ways of the children’s song. God is awesomely mysterious and yet knowable; capable of great and complex design of life that is totally self-supporting in the universe. He is as remote as another universe and as intimate in our lives as we want him to be. God is: “I Am Who I Am.”

That is the name he gave to Moses when he appeared in all his awesomeness in a burning bush that was not consumed [Exodus 3:14]; he wrestled with Jacob as an angel[Genesis 32:22-31] he appeared to the writer of Isaiah[Isaiah 6:1]. He answers our prayers. He spoke through the prophets. He commands us. He comforts us. He sent his son. He appeared as Jesus to Paul and totally turned his life around[Acts 9]. He, as the Holy Spirit, entered the disciples on Pentecost and forever changed them. These are just a few of the thousands of ways that God has been present to men and women in the Bible and in the time since.

How has he been present to you? Has he blessed your life? Is his grace to you apparent? Did he gift you with talents and interests that delight you and bring you joy? Has he spoken to you in your dreams? Or in your heart? Or do his thoughts drop into your mind? Has he healed you of shame and guilt? Have you invited him into the private, very private spaces of your memory? How have you experienced God?

Has he come as Christ to you? or Jesus? The Spirit? Or Father or Mother? Have you felt his comfort, his leading, his blessings, his presence? Has he showed you your purpose? Have you felt his call for your life, for today, for this moment? Has he put someone in your path that you needed to hear from or to help?

Has he awed you in the beauty of a sunset, or in a perfect rose or in holding a newborn baby? Has he spoken through the trees to you or through one of your pets, your cat or your dog? Has a horse breathed the very air of the Spirit that you breathe? How has God appeared to you? Are you open to seeing God in the events and people in your life? Will you welcome him into the dark places of your self? Will you welcome his healing or are you too identified with what is wrong with you rather than with the potential he created within you?

Do you look for his traces in the people you meet, the suggestions you hear, the events that occur? Do you recognize his voice within you? Do you know how he calls you? What has he told you that you are now to do? Has he taught you how you should pray to him, what you should ask for? Have you let God teach you who God is?

Have your views and beliefs softened over the years, become more open and embracing of others’ points of views, too? Have you been able to step back from your life and see it more from God’s perspective than from your own? Does God speak to you in every verse of the Bible? Are you aware of what he is trying to say to you today in this or that passage, rather than what you already know it means?

Are you open this day to God? Are you present to his presence? Are you letting him take your hand and lead you to your own true self, just as you were created to be?

It is not anyone else’s job to design how our lives should proceed. It’s not even our job. We are destined to have a co-creative relationship with God/Christ/Spirit, one in which we walk hand in hand with God. God wants to be our partner, our Source, our companion along the way until we are so firmly in God’s arms that we no longer see the difference between us. And then we are part of our awesome God’s kingdom where everyone is loved, supported, led, challenged and finally at home.

Questions to ponder over the week: How do I experience God? In how many different ways? Am I letting God show me who he is and who he wants me to be? Am I open to more experience of God? Or can I only see him/hear him in certain circumstances, certain ways?

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Check out this month’s posting on youtube: “We Aren’t Terrible People”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPe-EMPdAxo

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