wonderous mysteries

God is awesomely mysterious ... and mysteriously awesome.

The things I thought as going forwards really were going nowhere, and the things I thought of as going backwards really are going forwards.

I'm realizing that being safe in my faith is actually a very dangerous place to be.

Its been a long while since I've desired to be challenged in the way I think, to have my world shaken up a little bit.

Normally I really enjoy hearing a sermon that fits my ideas and doctrines, it makes me feel good ... well I can't be that far off the mark if other people think the same way I do. Its been nice to read books where I feel like "they're right on the money". Mysteriously being comfortable has lost its appeal again. Just knodding my head and "Amen'ing" everything a pastor says without having my boat rocked doesn't get me anywhere except maybe build my pride.

What good will it be if I keep reading books that are "safe and easy"
I had forgotten what it felt like to be hungry for understanding, but I'm getting a glimpse of that again. Its strange but I actually desire to find out that some things I accepted as correct are in fact not. Its better to find out than to be ignorant and wrong all my life.

I long for more mysterious, so I can wrestle with them and be stretched as I attempt to grasp the ungraspable. Its like for a while I've been trying to flex my faith muscles and then I see just a fingerprint of the Almighty One and I'm put back in my place. But its the scare I needed to realize there is an infinity amount of mysteries that I'm yet to grasp about God, about his greatness, about his love.

Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell is the book that God has used to bump me out of my rut a little, and to give me a passion to wrestle again, even to lose in order that I might win.
God's mysteries are worth the chasing even if my uderstandings of Him get battered and bruised.

The rabbis even say a specific blessing when they don't understand a portion of the text. When it eludes them, when it makes no sense, they say a word of thanks to God because of the blessing that will be theirs someday. "Thank you, God that at some point in the future, the lights are going to come on for me"

The rabbis have a metaphor for this wrestling with the test: The story of Jacob wrestling the angel in Genesis 32. He struggles, and it is exhausting and tiring, and in the end his hip is injured. It hurts. And he walks away limping.

Because when you wrestle with the text, you walk away limping.

And some people have no limp, because they haven't wrestled. But the ones limping have an experience with the living God.

pp. 68-69 Velvet Elvis