The Question

“It’s the question that drives us.” stated Trinity in the movie The Matrix.  This was the case with me a few weeks ago.  I was reading the book Divine Nobodies by Jim Palmer in which he tells the story of a truly difficult season he lived through.  As he was trying to sort it all out he was asked by a man, “How would you describe God?”  As a seminary graduate and former pastor Jim dove right into answering that question.  “I know this one!” he thought.  He explained that God is omnificent, omnipresent, omnipotent, and on and on according to everything he had read in the Bible and been taught through his years of ministry training.  The man surprisingly seemed unimpressed.  Then he responded, “I didn’t ask you what the Bible says about God, I asked you how YOU would describe God, based on your personal experience?”  BAM!!!  There’s the billion dollar question.  I immediately had to put the book down.  If I didn’t read another sentence, that question alone made the price of the book worthwhile.  That question pierced my heart and left me pondering and wrestling with God for days.

We believers talk all the time about having a relationship with God.  Yet, many of the circles I participated in pooh-poohed personal experience.  “It’s all centered on the Bible, not your personal experience.”  But there’s a problem with that line of thinking.  Relationships are entirely experiential.  My wife has written me notes but my relationship with her is not based on her notes, it’s all about my life with her – a person.  I’ve grown to know her through the experiences we’ve had together walking through heaven and hell together.  If you were to ask me to describe my wife to you I wouldn’t turn to anything she wrote, I’d immediately tell you about her from my very real experiences of living life with her.  Why is it when it comes to God we regurgitate Biblical theology and sermons like students trying to pass an oral exam?  There is no life in that.  It’s not real.

When I pondered how I would describe God I felt like I had been stripped bare.  My heart was totally exposed before me.  Honestly, how would I describe God?  He’s wishy-washy.  Sometimes He’ll come through for you and sometimes He won’t.  Why would I describe Him that way?  Well, I had seen Him come through for me in amazing and miraculous ways.  God miraculously paved the way for Lilly and I to get married over 21 years ago and we saw Him move mountains to move us to Sacramento and then to Dallas just recently.  But we also didn’t see Him come through for us in the midst of tremendous financial devastation and loss.  I lived with humiliation as my constant companion and for a while each time I thought things couldn’t get worse, they did.  And then there are the complexities surrounding my wife’s pregnancy years ago.  She was pregnant with twins and both were born premature.  My son died but my daughter miraculously lived.  So, God is wishy-washy.  Sometimes He comes through for you and sometimes He doesn’t.  I never realized that view of Him resided in me until I sought to answer that question honestly.  I have a double minded view of God due to past hurts.  I think I see why we’d rather regurgitate Biblical theology.

So why do I keep following God if He’s so prone to impulsive behavior and letting me down?  Well, there is something deeper in my heart that causes me to continue to press toward Him in spite of all the crap and disappoint in this life.  Somehow, in spite of it all I know He loves me.  It really doesn’t make sense.  I could never defend my view of God to an atheist and I certainly couldn’t win any arguments because, quite frankly, it doesn’t make sense.  How do you win a “battle of the minds” with a reality in your heart? There is something like a flame that resides in the core of my being that is fueled by nothing but love.  And nothing has ever been able to smother it, even when it has at times appeared to be nothing but a smoldering wick.  That love just won’t leave me.  Even when I have felt so far gone I feared (and was almost certain) the flame will surely die.  It never did.  And somehow I know it never will.  Somehow I know this love is God’s affection for me.  This is not some pie-in-the-sky fantasy, but something that is so real in me it is almost tangible.  It is this affection that compels me to press forward.  It is this knowledge in the core of my being that I am loved that causes me to know that God is worth knowing and pursuing in spite of my perceptions of Him based on the bad experiences in this life.  There is a love deeper than anything I’ve known.  It’s not the kind of love seen in romance movies but a love stronger than that of an old couple that has been devoted to each other for a century.  That’s why I can’t describe it.  The One who loves me this way speaks my language and really gets me.  For that reason I’m not ashamed to admit I see God as wishy-washy because I have even greater confidence in His love for me.  And that same love that gives me the liberty to be real will also one day swallow up the lie I’ve believed in my heart.  Just as light removes darkness, so love will cause the truth to swallow up the lies.  Not everything will go great for me.  But the truth is that there is One who will never leave me nor forsake me.

So how would I describe God based on my personal experience?  God is love.