I have a hard time trusting God. How can I draw nearer to God?
The way we conceive of our God; as hostile or loving, “on our team” or “the giant task master in the sky”, judge or defender, etc. effects our whole life. In a substantial way, our image of God will determine our sense of purpose, our capacity for joy and happiness, and our ability to love and connect with others.
In the terrific little book called Good Goats, the authors (Linns) state that in a very real and concrete way, we become the God we adore. “If we adore a warrior God, we become war-like. If we know a stern, judgmental God, we become judgmental. If our God is petty and over-scrupulous, so we too become petty and over-scrupulous.” It reminds me of that old joke “God made us in His own image and likeness and we have been trying to repay the favor ever since!” We definitely tend to project our “smallness” onto God, no?
Fr. John Powell in his old gem of a book The Christian Vision tells the story of a man who comes home drunk one night only to observe a thirty-five foot snake on his lawn. He becomes so afraid that he gets a hoe from the garage and frantically chops it up. The next morning he discovers, to his immense humiliation, that he has chopped his garden hose into pieces. This story highlights how much of our behavior is based on our perception. If you see a hose as a snake, then – to you – it is a snake.
God is always offering us love and acceptance, like the sun offers light and heat (not because we have earned it but because God IS love…love is God’s essence), and we are either open or closed to this free gift based on our perception of God. We are either basking in it or unwittingly hiding from this love, and our ability to love and accept others is largely dependent on our openness to receive love and acceptance from God.
Some of us inherited a skewed image of God that we have lived with our whole life and possibly never questioned - or even felt qualified to question. If you have been taught to see God has a judgmental, fickle, threatening presence - whether or not this is something based on truth or not - it IS the truth for you…and your behavior will reflect this perception.
Fr. Ron Rolheiser says “The God that Jesus reveals to us is a God of infinite abundance. Inside God there is no scarcity, no stinginess, no sparing of mercy… God’s love and mercy are limitlessness.” Our job, as Paul Tillich puts it, is to muster the “courage to accept acceptance.” And sometimes, given the image of God we inherited, this is no small bit of work on our part…a real leap of faith.
Certainly part of our deepening our trust in God can be to simply ask for it in prayer. Henry Nouwen likens prayer as going from clenched fists to open hands. Our clenched fists represent everything we are clinging to, or angry about, or scared of…our security in the things we can see, all our ideologies, the places where we need to grow in trust that God has our best interests in mind.
Prayer works to open our clenched fists, to let go of those things that are not of God, to open our hands to receive all that God wishes to give us. Maybe that is our work this Lent - to invite God to gently pull back one finger at a time until we are able to come to God with open hands.
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