This picture did not start out this way. At the beginning my God was much smaller and over time as my understanding of who He is grew my picture grew and the God in my picture grew and though I don’t claim to be any kind of expert, I think I’m closer to the truth now.
When we see the beauty that surrounds us everyday from sunrises, to mountain ranges, to rainbows, to people, we are reminded that there is a God and that He wants us to know Him. For much of my life I dismissed the possibility of this God, because the stories were simply too fantastic, too incredible, too unbelievable. There were so many different people saying “this is the truth” the others are wrong. So many different answers to my questions. They can’t all be right and how can I chose? So I didn’t.
I begrudgingly settled for the meaning that I knew. The meaning that I found in the friendships and family that I could experience. This I could hold on to – this was real. But there was always a whisper in my head saying that there is more, this isn’t all there is, there’s something bigger. So as I attempted to live life with the wisdom I had learned growing up, I found myself constantly faced with situations that I couldn’t explain and that didn’t make sense. A brain tumor in the center of my head causing pressure in my head as if an elephant was standing on my skull. A marriage strained past the breaking point. The loss of a job, due to funding that was supposed to be there and then wasn’t. I questioned everything, but mostly I cried out to a God I did not know. I called out from my perspective – life wasn’t working out the way I had imagined. Even though I had a lot of worldly success, these things that were happening seemed so far beyond what I could control.
I use to say for much of my life “I’m a pretty good person, certainly I have many more things on the good side of the scale than bad things on the bad side. Certainly if there is a heaven and if there is a God, then he’ll let me in. I was projecting my ideas of what this God would be like on a god in my head and soothing myself with these thoughts even though there wasn’t any substantiation or experience telling me that they were true.
The picture above is my feeble attempt as a human, to try and communicate what the God of the Bible I have come to know is like and He is so much more than we could ever imagine. How would you go about creating a star? How about the earth? How about the universe? where would you get the design, power, materials? Where would you start?
Below you will find some of the attributes of God as described in the Bible. These attributes are actually in my picture coming out from the center, though they are hard to see unless you zoom in or are looking at the full size image.
If I could leave you with just one idea to contemplate, it would be this. One of the things the Bible says about God is that He created us with a free will. He gave us the freedom to love Him or not. Though He certainly could have created us with a built in desire to love Him, He did not. He allows us to chose. After all, Is it love if you are forced to love? No. So we have a choice to love Him or not. I hope as you mull this idea around in your head that God would open up your heart and show you a glimpse of His Glory and that you would be motivated to search for the life that is found in knowing Him more and more deeply each day.
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