Marriage and my Greatest Sin to Date

I find You, my Love, very strange. Using a carelessly broad generalization, some lines of thinking would lead me to believe that You are a woman. You seem to show up in various forms, with little to no explanation as to why, you tend to express your desire for me to do specific things; but you don't always, if ever, tell me why I am or should do what you ask. It seems that I am only able to see why you asked me to do these things after I have or have not done as you asked. I guess you and I, our relationship, is a lot like a marriage in that regard. However, I have yet to really being to learn how and why you tick the way You do. Time with someone, seeing their likes and dislikes, desires, and interactions with others, it reveals how they work and why they work the way they do. You are my Husband, I am Your bride; but our situation is much more enigmatic than a marriage here on earth -we never dated. We were suddenly married -your Father arranged it.
Now I ust learn who you are, how and why you work the way you work. That will lead me to a place of not needing to ask "why." I will know You so well that my knowledge of You and experience with You will tell me "why."
This sheds an odd light on studying Your word, my King. For I would study your word inside and out to learn how to act and how not to sin; but that is not what you would have me do. I want to follow You, and I want to act how You would have me act; but following You is hard to do while so cripplingly blinded by a lack of explanation from You. But you have no desire for me to live my life here "blindly," do you? You have no desire for me to follow what some call your "instruction manual" -I hate that peppy seeker sensitive name for your sacred Word.
If it is that we are married, if it is that I am to learn more about You and how you tick then I need experience with You my Love; but I cannot simply sit and talk with You every night and expect to learn your ins and outs through simple conversation. I must experience life with You, I must live out real life situations with You. That comes with every moment of everyday, being observant of You and Your voice -in myself and in others as well. This then affects Your scripture and how I read it. Perhaps, well obviously, there are commands and rules for living in Your word; but more than that it is full of You, and experiences with You. It is a record, a testimony of how you have interacted with humanity in the past. It seemst hat it may serve as a sort of journal of key instances, key situations that allowt he reader to observe You, the King, and from this careful observation a person can learn how and why you work, think, act, feel, and desire as You do. And if a person, if I know why You are who then I can understand what motivates your will and desire. I can know why it is that You ask me to do what you ask me to do.
Something that breaks my heart as I ponder who You are is that You truly are my lover, the one truest Love that my heart will be committed to. You are a husband who takes joy in spontaneously giving to Your bride. You love to bless those You love. I, however, and saddened in light of this because I know these statements to be true in my mind, but I doubt them in my heart. I am selfishly ignorant to Your desire to bless me my Lord, and to give me gifts. This time wtih You alone, the feeling I have in Your presence is even a gift I do not count. I am so sorry that I do not acknowledge Your gifts as gifts at all or as being from You. Instead I expect these things and am angry when I do not receive them.

Forgive me Father, for I have discovered a far greater sin than lust, murder, envy, or even hate...I am so guilty of not acknowledging that You love me. The pain of giving love to someone only to have them fail to recognize that you love them and that your gifts are out of love is a pain humanity, nor the God that created it should ever have had to feel.

The Blind man and the Wedding


I think the greatest sin we can commit is to not spend time with God. Sure, murder hurts Him, lust hurts Him, killing His Son hurt him too -I definitely think there is a special place in hell for unrepentant child molesters and those involved in genocide; but I'm still convinced that God is more hurt by us knowing Him and still choosing to ignore Him. I think that we think that desiring God over everything else is something that will come after in "eternity." That may be true, to some extent; but that being said, it seems that eternity began long before time was plopped in the midst of it, and that it will go on long after time is removed from the midst of it.
Sometimes I wish I had been born blind, but I think that makes me masochistic. Sometimes I feel that Christianity manifests itself in a mild form of masochism -there may be something to that thought, but that's irrelevant to what I'm stewing on at the moment. Sometimes I think we should have all been born blind until we turned twenty-three. Beyond it giving the twenty-third birthday a meaning besides it being the first birthday you have since you are sixteen that means absolutely nothing, it may would serve us in helping us to appreciate the world and it's colors better. In the same way, I envy the blind man in the story of Christ healing the blind man. An entire life spent in darkness, seeing no colors, hearing only sounds, being unable to put faces with voices or pictures with smells or even knowing what it meant to see a blue sky -how horribly unfair. Yet, something inside of me believes that his life was more blessed than nearly every other life to have been lived or to be lived. The first thing the man saw was the face of God. Save Adam, he may be the only person in history to have claim to such a blessing.
How different things would have been for the blind man, let's call him Pete. How different Pete's life must have been seeing the face of the Son of God, the face of God, first. The first thing Pete saw was the incarnation of Love and perfection. That had to have had profound effects upon Pete's view of the world and life. What if we were all like this? What if instead of war, death, famine, fear, hate, anger, divorce, disease, suffering, and sin we saw the face of God first?
This paints an incredible picture for me when I think about the dead rising up and awakening. After your eyes open the first thing you'll see is Christ, maybe...maybe not. At last those of us blessed with the burden of living out Christ's life without ever having seen His eyes will finally get to look in them...I bet they are beautiful eyes.
One of the most profoundly missed metaphors in scripture is not a metaphor at all I do not believe. Hosea, in my mind, shows this metaphor better than any other book in the Bible. God, reeling from being betrayed by His lovers -Israel- makes a statement that puts me into tears.

"Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor [trouble] a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. 'In that day,' declares the Lord 'you will call me "my husband"; you will no longer call me "my master...I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord. In that day I will respond," declares the lord - "I will respond to the skies and they will respond to the earth; and the earth will respond to the grain, and the new wine and oil, and they will respond to Jezreel. I will plant her for myself in the land; I will show my love to the one I called 'Not my loved one.' I will say to those called 'Not my people,' 'You are my people;' and they will say, 'You are my God.' "

I think this is literal. I am convinced it is not some shaky metaphor that will break down. I believe raising from the dead, entering heaven will be the marriage ceremony on a Divine level. It will be just as it is for a wife who has just had the sanctuary doors flung open. For me there will be family and friends who will be there in the great sanctuary. They will no longer be eaten alive and weakened by cancer, or crippled by handicaps that left them in wheel chairs. They won't be bodies mangled by car crashes, gun shots, suicides, or age -they, all of them, will be perfect. My grandmother will know my face, my cousin will no longer be an adult mind stuck in a crippled dysfunctional body, my grandfather will be able to see me clearly and would be able, if he wanted, to get up and pick me up in jubilation. But none of that matters, none of that will matter. I won't be walking down that isle for anyone of them. I didn't get all dressed up for them, I didn't clean myself up for them. I won't be walking down that isle for anyone in that sanctuary...save one. Imagine that moment, what it will be. Music, triumphant music, playing in the background. Joy would be so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife. And then our eyes will meet, both of us...especially me...will know this is the moment I've been waiting for all my life. The moment that my faith has lead me to. The moment I can touch Him, the moment I can hug Him, when I'll know beyond the shadow of a doubt that He exists because I have tangible physical evidence first hand that He exists...that moment has arrived. What else could possibly matter.
Suffice it to say, I seem to be looking forward to death more and more every time I talk to God. Something about that disturbs...something about that excites me -more proof that I might be mildly masochistic? However, what is the disconcerting is that this saddens me, this image. It makes the gap between Him and I more and more vivid. Paul voiced this very conundrum when he said, "For me...to die is to gain [everything,] but to live is Christ."

Preface to this Blog

I am continually amazed when God reveals something more about Himself. I once heard a rather ironic definition of the word "genius" once. The person defined it as the ability to scrutinize the obvious, and when I think of how God has spoken to me in the past month I can think of Him as nothing less than a genius. I've blogged quite a bit in the past, but I stopped because it became a source of arrogance and pride in my mind -not sure how but it did, figure that out and you can have a nickel. The past month and a half of my life have been absurdly intense, whether it be because I haven't slept or because God has spoken to me in ways that I could not have ever imagined and said things to me that I am confident are the most profound things He has ever said to me. So, on the advice from a friend I am going to record such an intense time down in a public setting so that perhaps it allows me to get them out of my head (helping me sleep) and maybe even helps someone else make sense of the insanely intense genius that God seems to be.