What a huge question to conquer in one little blog. The question of who God is has been spinning around in the brains of millions of people for millions of years. It's a question that we try to answer from the little ones at Sunday-school age, to adults with more complex inquiries that form identity and life philosophy.
But I'm not here to answer that question today. I'm here to ask it.
"Who is God?" is the question of my life right now. I remember very distinctly being told exactly who God is by my Sunday-school teachers. Being a very agreeable child, I never questioned it. And to be quite honest, I still do not. I have experienced a lot of who God is in my life. A lot more than many, and He has been so generous with revealing himself to me. What I was taught when I was a little girl is not by any means wrong. God is mighty, he is strong, he is loving, he is full of grace, he will pay any cost to protect the ones he loves against the one who wars against his children. All of those things are true characteristics of God. But the question I have goes beyond that. I know that all those characteristics are who God is, but who is he to me? This struggle of late is difficult to place into words.
Consider this metaphor. I know who Barack Obama is. I know what he stands for, I know his face, I know his voice, and I've studied up and am well versed on where his morals stand on many issues. I have seen how he deals with political situations and crises. But do I know him like his daughter knows him? Do I know what he wants for Christmas, or where he keeps his suits, or the way he kisses his wife? Do I know the feeling of his warm hug, or what it feels like to be comforted by him when I'm heart broken? Do I know what he desires in a husband for me, or what he desires for my future? Do I know what it is to be loved by him as a daughter? This is the way that I am asking "Who is God?".
There is a phrase that is going around the Christian culture that goes something like this: We are no longer to live in slavery, but to act as children of the King. When the president is busy at work, and his daughter is dealing with a struggle, she does not have to go through security to talk to her father. She does not have to get clearance to meet the president. She does not have to dress up nice or refer to him as "Mr. President". She lives in his house. She walks on his floors. She calls him Daddy. And when she is in need of comfort, she can walk straight into his office in the middle of the day in her pajamas and cry on his lap.
I've lived much of my spiritual life with God in a relationship not far off of my current relationship to the President. I know his voice. I know what he stands for. I know his character. I keep a running tab of the things that he has done to improve the life of those he governs. But I am only recently learning to embrace him like a father.
I have always thought that I knew God. I feel blessed that I have always been able to hear his voice, and even over the last five or six years, I've grown to have a relationship with him similar to that of a close friend. I don't feel like I need to dress up to be in his presence, and I do hear his voice quite directly in my life. I have grown a lot as a young adult in that aspect of my relationship with the Lord. But it is not until recently that I even realized that the Lord intends to bring our relationship even deeper still. It's not until recently that I even realized that there was more to know about God, and this is how I came to that realization.
Lately, the Lord has been asking me to stay home from church. Some people find it hard to be motivated to go. I am not one of those people. It's not that I'm self righteous about it. I won't judge if that is something that is difficult for you. In fact, my own husband has a hard time with Church because of his extremely introverted nature. I have always thrived in church. I love the music. I love taking notes. I love being around people. I love experiencing God in a group environment. And at the same time, there is an element of fear that plays into it, which I was totally unaware of until God pulled me out of weekly services. I have struggled for my whole life, and not even been aware of the struggle. I am afraid of how people will see me. I'm afraid of people thinking that I'm not following the Lord. I'm afraid of loosing friends. I'm afraid of missing out on something big. The ironic piece of it all is that, by attending church with those fears in my heart, I missed out on something even bigger than the music, the notes, the friends... I missed out on God. Or at least, the part of God that he has always intended for me to see.
This is why the Lord asked me to stay home. There is a depth to the relationship between a father and his daughter that goes beyond any other relationship, and that depth comes from a profound sense of trust. I have been pondering the reason why going to church was a bad thing for me. It's not that regular attendance is bad. In fact, I went through a period of time where the Lord was calling me to be obedient in attending every single week. I believe that a big part of the problem is that I've grown to believe that God only shows himself within the walls of the church. Not that he doesn't speak into our lives outside of weekly services, but that God only shows himself in the best way on Sundays. Maybe that is why I bought into the lie that I would miss something big if I didn't go. I didn't trust God to do anything big with just plain ol' me by myself, because I didn't see myself as his daughter. And if I am just an acquaintance to God, how else would I experience something big except when I'm invited to a social gathering? What I've come to realize recently is that it makes God's heart ache with longing. He asked me to stay home so that I could spend some one on one time with him. He was tired of seeing his daughter at social gatherings, and missing that important deeper father/daughter relational bond.
And the craziest part of it all is that it started with an act of trust. Sometimes, we are living in a state of fear that we are not even aware of, and He calls us out of a place that we don't even know we are in. And that fear doesn't seem all that bad until the Lord asks us to be obedient in something that doesn't make sense to us. The fear begins to swell up in our throat and it feels like this suffocating fear comes out of nowhere. "Why am I afraid to stay home from church when I know it's God who asking me to do so?" I had no idea that those fears were in my heart, and it was not until I stepped into obedience that I realized what he has for me, and what I am lacking without it. I've recently come to realize how much I don't know God. Not like I thought I did. I was missing out on the depth of relationship that he has for me because of my choice to be obedient with my actions, but not with my heart. A choice that I wasn't even aware that I was making.
All of my life, I have been really good at being obedient with my actions, because I can see why God is asking me to do something. But when it comes to my heart, I have no eyes to see what the Lord is doing. I've come to learn over the last year or so that the Lord doesn't care for an obedient pair of legs with a disobedient heart. And most often, my heart is disobedient because of my fear of what I can't see in front of me. I'm realizing that my legs have a tendency to follow my heart. I may be able to steer them in one direction, but if my fearful heart is somewhere else, they will always come back to the direction of my heart. My legs were trudging to service weekly in obedience to what *I thought* the Lord was calling me to, while my heart was ignoring the calling of the Lord to be a daughter instead of a citizen.
So who is God? I feel as though I am an orphan child who has grown up in foster care my whole life. I've always had an idea of who God is as a father, but always let the fear in my heart get in the way of letting him go there. I thought I knew God, because I knew his character and his voice. But what I knew was not even a page from a single book of the library that is who God is. I don't have any expectation that I will ever fully know who God is. But I will wrestle with this question at this stage in my spiritual life as I learn how to trust God the King as my Daddy.
