Elaborate.

"He'd have to go where no false god had ever gone before."

IT’S ALL A BIG MUD PIE within us, all these emotions and suppositions strung together with physiology and psychology. What should be black and white is now wrong-and-right, stripes on a hog’s hide. Neither one nor the other but both rearranged in a pattern we say fits. When the truth is, God gave us the example, handed us the finished product, and we treated Him like a cutout doll. Like those paper dolls we used to play with as young girls, and they had tabs which you’d fold over the sides to keep on the clothing. Love is not red. It’s magenta, because what’s wrong with magenta? And sin is brown, a thousand colors of people’s skin.

For God so loved the world that he gave his most valuable resource, and He planned it that way, for it to take the deepest part of Him, and He’d have to go to the deepest part of us. He’d have to lie down in the filth and pick up the shattered pieces, rinse them off, and glue them back together again. He’d have to go where no false god had ever gone before, those hollow edifices to warped craftsmanship. But His nature consumed Him, His character pushed Him forward, and that desire which had caused Him to breathe life into the soil in the first place.

Elaborate. From a few elements came a plethora of lives, placed in definite order down to the minutest detail. There is no knowledge that God does not have. He doesn’t ever need to learn anything. He doesn’t need to look ahead and see what’s going to happen. He already knows. He counted each person before e’er they came into existence. He knew our lives, knew when and where we’d exist, and loved so much that even what looks like chaos, disassembled pieces scattered on the floor, shards of truth and a whole lot of lies pressed tight, so many disparate seeds growing together, was redoable to Him. Undoable.

We give up easily and lose our peace, lose our emotions, throwing them out there, so much wind. That one we held close to becomes the backdrop for a crooked dartboard painted on with our errors in judgment. They’re less. We’re more. Only we’re not. And we diagnose it all, giving it hermeneutical names, Latinate spellings which neither correct the issue nor smooth things over. We need a fix, a shot in the veins to cleanse the blood and infiltrate the mind, a quick start over, and amidst our scrambling and fake news, there’s the old enemy swishing his tail.

He delights in our chaos, playing patty-cake with issues and commandments as if they are interchangeable, and we accept it in the name of hatred and revulsion, criticism and offense. We’re mad at government, angry with preachers, critical of the girl on the pew in front of us. Her hair is too short. We roll up the rules and stick them in a tube called doctrine then lob it at another because his church is called First Christ and ours is Second Temple. Maybe we should burn the doctrine, read the Word, and call it Christ’s Temple.

What do we really know of love? Take a hose to the mess, wash it all away, and get back to the foundation, One stone shines above all the others, the One placed there by the God who so loved and began all this in the beginning. What He meant for adornment, we’ve used for pride and arrogance. What was beauty to the Creator is shortcomings to us. When He planted to tree, not to see it suffer in the wind of confusion, but to pick its fruit. And the rules of fruit say it isn’t apples to oranges but a hundred different apples, a dozen or so oranges, and individual grapes which when squeezed make for delicious juice.

He wrote the rules of harvest, plotted the paths in the garden, and designed the leaves that heal the nations to decorate the buds which flower and attract the bees for pollination. That’s a good thing. Bees are beneficial not destroying, and fruit obtainable because His life flows into them. Into us. Carve the tree and build it into rooms. He knew this when He formed it. Mix the fruit and partake of something amazing, which the senses adore. We smashed the jars. He restored them and filled them with something better than before, something which no man can drain, His hands stained in the blood of our confusion, He repaired the breach in the furrows on His Son’s back. He refilled our veins by draining His own. He watered the soil with great drops of sweat, and our life sprung from it.

Our healing. Stained glass, straining the light through it to make a pattern on the floor, shaped like love big enough for that one we fought with before, deep enough for the sorrow which our bitterness formed within us, high enough to soar across the mountain ridges and this time, see the view. Where a cross once hung, now stands an emblem offered to all, the bread of life formed under pressure, lifted from us on the wings of an eagle caught up into the presence of God and a host of angels, where communion is continual, and the Essence of all things sits on a throne.

“How amazing and awesome is the love the Father has poured out on us, that we have been transformed to be children of God! And that is exactly what we are—his offspring, born of his love! The reason the world does not know who we are is that it does not know him.” (1 John 3:1)

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com