Into the Fire

It saddens me when love for God somehow gets reduced to the trite and true. Of course how could it not? After all these centuries hasn’t it been expressed ad nauseum? How many times have you heard or said: God is good. Well, duh. Few of us even believe it as an absolute anymore. Really. Consider when trauma or tragedy strikes? We pretend not to wonder why, but doggone it, most of the time we can’t help ourselves. “The big picture” seems way too insignificant compared to the right-now picture.

I want to worship my Lord. I don’t want it to be insignificant, trite, familiar to the point of boredom. I want to worship in spirit and in truth. To experience the awe of His presence. Yet to express the wonder and magnificence somehow gets cluttered with worn out phraseology and words too small for His bigness.

Forgive me for this, but I’m not a “devotional” person. Maybe it’s from growing up outside the church. Maybe it’s from reading one too many that came out trite and well-worn. Maybe it’s because I wake up with Thank you, Lord, on my lips and in my heart. Maybe it’s because I just don’t care for the medium of expression—too formulaic, too ritualistic, too practiced, too legalistic. Not saying that all devotionals are like that. I guess sometimes it just seems that way to me.

Please don’t get me wrong. I have a friend who writes wonderful little devotionals. They’re poignant, real, effective. And I’m not questioning the hearts of those who create them. They’re just not my . . . style.

God is too big for me. I’ve told Him so. My mind too finite. I’ve always known He was so much greater than this humanity He created. I’ve so loved that about Him, and I’m grateful He allowed me to sense that about Him at a very young age.

Making our expression of Him and to Him trite saddens me. With all of our being and passion we need to worship the One we can’t limit, define, imagine, or explain in terms of human acceptance. He’s too far beyond our vocabularies, our imaginations, our limitations. It’s inside us to know Him, but that knowledge is bound up in the flesh, escaped in the spirit, but stuck in humanity. Someday . . . we’ll see Him as He is. And the experience will be anything but trite.

God, I need you . . . plainly. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.