God meets us...

"This prodigality of God's love scandalizes the hell out of us. And thank God it does."

 Axiom #4 in Matt Tebbe and Ben Sternke's book 'Having the Mind of Christ: Eight Axioms for Cultivating A Robust Faith' is "God Meets Us in Our Messy Reality." This was another powerful chapter for me, and one I likely need to re-read.

I'm getting lazy, or perhaps lost in thought, so I'm just going to drop some random highlights I made from the chapter:

• This Blaise Pascal quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." (p.74)
  
• "We have collectively mastered the thing that will keep us feeling distant from God: the habitual practice of not being right here, right now, open to reality." (p.74)
• "We separate ourselves from what's actually happening by giving ourselves pep talks ("Too blessed to be stressed!"), gaslighting ourselves ("It didn't hurt that much"), or minimizing whatever bad or wrong thing we are experiencing ("It's not really that bad; at least I still have my health"). Instead of meeting God in our messy reality, we use God to bypass our reality." (p.75)
• "Another symptom of spiritual bypassing is that we tend to confuse conviction with condemnation." (p.76 - great little piece here)
• Attune... Admit... Accept (pp. 77-78)
• "Like a good doctor, God does not detest the patient with cancer. Rather, God detests the cancer in the patient." (p.79)
• "I lived as though God loved an idealized me, a future me, a less wretched and more faithful me... but not the actual me. Not coincidentally, I didn't love the actual me either. I lived as a Christian with a toxic conscience. Shame becomes toxic when it becomes an identity and condemnation sets itself up at the core of who we are." (p.80)
• "Many of us have difficulty being present in our anger." (entirety of p.82)
• "Rather, we learn that prayer is consenting to God's presence, a surrender of our messy reality to God, a pathway to entrusting all we are and all we want and all we think to God." (powerful section on p.83)
• "The starting line for lasting transformation in our lives is when we decide to get real with God." (p.83)
• The 'Experiment Of Trust: Centering prayer using "God is now here"' on pp.84-85.

This was a rough chapter for me. I was confronted and convicted by much of it, because I feel like my internal life has become so messy. I've tried to avoid being present with God. I'm not sure why. Maybe self-preservation, shame, guilt... who knows. For someone who seems to blurt all my dirty laundry everywhere... I feel like such a fraud sometimes. Sometimes I wonder if I even know myself!

While rough, this was a good chapter for me. Like I said, I need to re-read it, and practice the experiment of trust...

***

Mark 2:15-17

While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”