Behold, your God!

"Isn't your God of your own making?" - the question doesn't always come from pugnacious Skeptics; very often, it is a genuine question surging through the layers of our intuition and consciousness.

So I sit and imagine what God of my design would be like:

- God would not use a masculine pronoun but be more embracing.. {but wait, the name God revealed is a set of consonants that put together sound like a breath: YHWH which is really neutral..}.

- God would make black and white clear and intervene so we never have to agonize over 'religious wars' from Crusades to terrorist acts. {but wait, all skeptics would hate how this will reduce intelligent speculation and discourse}

- God would at once punish all the evil and put a stop to darkness {but wait, in all honesty, I may be soot if it goes this way}.

- God will be perfect, beyond question {but wait, will I be good enough then?}.

I am pretty sure my version of God will not lower to Human levels; or live so much like us as to feel emotion, and experience hunger, grief, loneliness.....and then die at the hands of humans!

I want a God who vindicates, usurps the powerful and is free to break all rules because He made them.... Not one who suffers alongside by living like us; fully exposed to the verities of the human condition: poverty, class differences, gender divide, injustice, suspicion, betrayal, loneliness, death.

Yet this is the God the Bible presents me with.

An amazingly 'humble' God who doesn't dazzle and scare me into submission but invites me to enter a genuine relationship of acceptance, celebration, reverence and awe. A God I can love because as in the Cross I can see love in action.

"very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man

someone might possible dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this:

while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" ~ Romans 5v7-8

Almost by instinct, the notion of God comes with the expectation of power, might, majesty, eternity. But we will never figure in humanity in the mix; for we know ourselves too well-- we are simply not God material. Even the Greeks had to admit limits to their God's, and all our superheroes are accidental or lab-produced.

A humanity validating, affirming and rescuing God I simply cannot conjure up myself.

But because of this God, I embrace Life and long to live it real and full, rich and free.