God is light.
God is good.
God is righteous.
Can we really assign any adjective we want to to God?
How can God be good if God created goodness in the first place?
How can God be righteous if God is the very concept of righteousness?
Isn’t this like writing, This tree is treeness?
Well, yes it is, as a matter of fact. But trees are treeness.
But do we really need to say so?
Ever?
What is our need to heap adjectives on God, the meanings for all of which were created by God, all about?
When I was a little girl, I used to sit in God’s lap, figuratively speaking. And the biggest focus of my lessons from God at that time was how everything is God.
Now as a typical child with a not-so-typical parent teaching me things, and being me, even from the start apparently, I questioned how could this be. Day after day after day.
You say this is you. How can this be you?
Or this?
Or that?
And what about….?
This was my childhood.
It never grew dull because there was so much in the world to learn to see as God.
Roses are easy.
Thorns not so much.
When I flipped into young adulthood the lessons were much the same. Except they came with depth.
It was no longer, a rose is God.
Now it was, The Lesson of the Rose.
(It takes time to be able to open up fully to God’s light.)
And so it went on until I felt so full of God I became a hot-air balloon being lifted out of reality on such a constant basis that I had to struggle to keep track of my real life.
The lessons came and came and came.
And with them the beginning of understanding.
John writes:
This then is the message which we have heard of him and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)
It was a practical statement made by a practical man trying his best to exhort those around him to get on board with Jesus. Stop messing around with heretical thoughts. I was there. I know what I’m talking about. I’m your teacher. Listen to me.
He wants to say, The way I believe is good; the way you believe is bad.
But he doesn’t.
He says, well, good is light and bad is dark. God is only good. He is only light.
God is not dark.
God is not.
This is God.
This is not God.
And so it is about then that my mind stops and asks, What?
What is not God?
A not-god.
Now there’s a concept.
And what is all this nonsense about the dark being the symbol of bad? What are we, in a John Wayne movie? (Want to understand the characters? Look at the hats they are wearing.)
Life as simple.
A god whose characteristics we can pick and choose. Like a rummage sale. Nah, don’t like that. Now this I LOVE!
I’ve lived long enough to have changed completely from All Cannot Be God to If I Don’t Think This Is God, That’s My Problem.
I am more tolerant.
Instead of rejecting the bad and holding the good close, I see it more as the difference between mountains and valleys.
The extremes somehow always come together and make a brand-new sense of things.
And there is always the reality of how everything has a seen side and an unseen side.
Discovering what is on the backside of something has been absolutely fascinating.
We experience it all the time. People we think are all-giving turn out to have the feature of grubbing.
And we’re shocked when we discover it.
Some people spend their lives trying to keep hidden aspects of themselves from the eyes of others.
But the question becomes: Can you teach anyone about God if you break him into pieces and give the person only the shiny parts? And keep the rusty parts hidden?
What is the point of doing that?
Sooner or later, it’s going to come out.
Sooner or later, that person is going to read the Book of Job and ask, God is sitting around with Satan making bets? What’s that all about?
And if the God you present to others is essentially a combination of Santa Clause and a fairy princess, when the person you are trying to “teach” wants to know why God chose Saul to become Paul, what are you going to say?
There is only light.
There is no dark.
Everyone goes to sleep at night.
Everyone wakes up again in the morning.
We see the dark.
We see the light.
We see God saving people.
And we see God destroying people.
Life.
Death.
Both with their own beauty.
Their own colors.
Their own validity.