The God Who Sits Alongside
I belong to a God Who moves mountains. I love a God Who’s bent low. I trust a God Who has moved towards me. Not away.
Towards me, even when I was weeping and raging at Him, pain pouring out in waves of lava and hate. For I hated the God I thought that He was.
What I found was not only a God Who Moves Toward, but a God Who Sits Alongside. In the darkest days and months of my life, He simply sat there, right by my side. With me. Not castigating. Not chiding. Never scolding or shaming. And it was this “sitting with” that finally, at long last, convinced me that He was the God I could trust.
It pains me more than I can express that so many of His kids say they know Him, but they don’t actually trust Him. Almost every day, links come through my news feed about church attendance, about spiritual disciplines, about the do’s and the don’ts and the shoulds and the shouldn’ts. It matters so little to me, and here’s why. Trying to keep and adhere to it all wore me out. And frankly, it worked as a vaccine. Yes, religion driven by doing and don’ting inoculated me to the bottom line.
And that was knowing–really KNOWing–God. Who He was and what He thought of me.
The mountains that this God has moved for me are many, not the least of which is the tortuous mountain range of Wrong Perceptions About God. Jesus Christ, faithful Shepherd of the sheep, Bishop and Overseer of my soul, is the One Who led me safely over the range and into those pastures of green.
You will not become mighty in faith if you never wrestle with God. Not really. For a blind acquiescence is not a sign of great faith. It simply leaves you weak and anemic, stuck in the foothills on the fringe.
If you wrestle with God, choosing to follow the Shepherd over your own mountain range, you may always have a limp. But you will enter a new, promised land where milk and honey surely flow and where lions lie down with the lambs.
I belong to a God Who moves mountains. I love a God Who’s bent low. I trust a God Who’s moved towards me. I’m so happy to be His child.