Moving Forward

I am entering a season of experience more than reflection.  This means I don’t necessarily know the meaning of it, nor can I neatly categorize everything, instead, I am called to simply experience.  In this, I rely exclusively on the grace of God.  There is no flesh, no lofty thoughts fronting a facade of having everything figured out.  Just Him.  I can’t even say that “God caused (insert whatever here) to happen, so that I would experience this and learn that”, instead, I would say that a lot of things happened that weren’t ideal, and the thinking is not, “the weakness caused by the disorder of the past causes me to lean on Christ”; instead, I am believing that He is enough, and that hope, that faith, is what powers my worship.  It is not distress, but hope that motivates me to lean exclusively on His grace.  This is no small point because sometimes I get this vibe from some Christians that affliction is needed in order for people to lean on God.  I’d like to think that God doesn’t need evil, sin, and disorder in the world.  It’s easy to describe a testimony in terms of “the sin God saved me from”, but what comes after?  If you didn’t have sin to talk about, what would your faith be?  Seriously, there’s got to be vision beyond yesterday and beyond self.  I say “yesterday” because there is no way to experience “today” without God giving the repentance (a new mind) to experience it.  With the un-repentant mind, you don’t experience today, you experience yesterday over and over again.

I feel like this all has to do with the mystery of worshiping God rather than self.

Man looks back and tries to find the source, the thing to blame for the problem, but I believe that God looks forward.  I would dare even to say that when Jesus and the disciples encountered the man born blind, the men wondered who sinned and Jesus responded, “…it was neither this man who sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him”, He wasn’t commenting on the source of the blindness, but instead, the healing that was about to take place.  The disciples were seeking the wrong knowledge, or maybe more precisely ‘insufficient’ knowledge; that is to say a knowledge that is not sufficient or effective to bring life and repentance.  It was insufficient for repentance, which is to say that it would be powerless to change anything.