11 pm randomness

I write tonight because I have to, because something bigger than myself is pushing me, pulling me, prompting me, and persuading me to write. I have thoughts that are continually spinning around in my head that I can’t seem to stop. Thoughts which I think must indeed be worked out on paper in some form or fashion.

I was talking with one of my profs today, Jon Isaak, over at the seminary about some scriptural passages in Genesis 9—where Noah builds the ark, and gets saved while the rest of humanity drowns and is destroyed. The text talks about God regretting the decision he has made, about how it grieves him deeply yet nonetheless he continues on with his decision. I wonder if part, the people were to blame. Jon and I talked about how we need to be careful where the blame is located and it can’t all be located on God, the people had some choice in the matter. They chose, to use Jon’s terms, autonomy, alienation, and isolation. They chose to reject the relationship that God offers. Yet also, as Jon pointed out, within relationship there has to be freedom to “shut the door” there has to be freedom to reject, to turn away. Is that why these people died? Because they chose to be away from God instead of near him?

As I was continuing to wrestle with these ideas and the larger suffering of humanity as a whole (I know small talk, right? Lol), I realized that maybe just maybe we are not always going to understand God but we can choose to trust him anyway in spite of our not understanding. I really want to read the Elusive Presence by Samuel Terrian (it was brought up in class today—might check it out for some extra reading). In it, he talks about how God’s presence is a elusive and does remain a mystery. Greg Camp and I were talking tonight about how we often try to put God in a box, we try to pin human terms on him when in reality we can’t—he does remain a mystery. Yet at the same time, sometimes I think we use human terms in order to understand better. Its like sometimes when we think about God we get so abstract that we can’t really grasp it at all and I think that is when we begin to use human terms in order to have something to cling to. One of the commentaries I read for my paper on Hosea last semester talked about how “God loves us with the type of love he wants us to have.” I think we really only are catching a glimpse of the love, of the relentless relationship, of the desire, of the faithfulness of God and we will never really understand it yet we trust in it anyways. Sometimes it is just hanging on for the ride.

Maybe it is just learning to live in this tension. When Jon and I had conversation earlier this afternoon he talked about this need to live within the tension—the tension of grappling with issues and then resolving them. Perhaps we can’t completely resolve that tension but we are called to live in the middle of it. We are called to live in the midst of the uncertainty of the world and within that uncertainty we begin to learn what it means to trust God. Within that I think we begin to see how relationships are formed and how we continue to create space for the other. This is a time where we are called not to have the answers, but rather called to live because of the questions and because of the journey. It’s the nitty-gritty of life. Perhaps that nitty-grittiness can’t always be figured out. Or maybe it isn’t supposed to be.