Getting to Know You

I can pray this because his divine power has bestowed on us everything necessary for life and godliness through the rich knowledge of the one who called us by his own glory and excellence.  2 Peter 1: 3

This seems strangely personal, but it’s what is on my heart so I’m going to go with it. Our relationship with God and the relationship of the Church to Christ has been likened to marriage in so very many places in the Bible. Hit me up if you need help finding them, but I’m way too wiped out to look them up and put them here right now. What keeps coming up for me this morning is how different my life and our marriage is now that I deeply and personally know my husband as compared to earlier in our relationship.

In the early years, let’s face it even in the middle years of marriage we tended to bicker over little things. I took everything personally when most things weren’t even about me. Sometimes he was just hungry! I foolishly felt the need to “control” or “manage” him, as I did with just about everything in my life. The truth is I wasn’t even managing myself well and so that caused so many more problems than it could have possibly helped.

These days we come at everything from a place of love and grace. We are just so grateful to have each other and that’s the starting point. Who cares if the laundry doesn’t make it into the basket or I left my shoes in the living room again. We don’t sweat the small stuff anymore. If anything, those little things are just sweet reminders that the other person is still around. When one of us is grumpy, instead of the other person taking it personally, we usually pause to see what is going on. Is the other person tired, in pain, hungry? Have we had too much going on? Do they just need a hug? The big stuff we work on together, as a team. We’re not against each other, we have the same end goals and we’re working together to get there. I love our marriage today.

I see my relationship with God in much the same way. In the early years it was a struggle of communication. Honestly, I was probably trying to control and manage my relationship with God in much the same way I was my relationship with my husband, it’s just the way my brain and my survival mechanisms worked at the time. Guess how well it works when you try to control God… I had a plan and a picture of how everything was supposed to be going and most of the time things just didn’t fall into place the way I thought they should be. The reality is God had a much better plan and things were falling into place exactly as they were supposed to. It just took me getting to know Him better so I could trust Him more before I could see that. Just as getting to know my husband better allowed me to trust in his love for me, getting to know God better let me trust that He truly was capable of handling all the things that seemed chaotic and impossible to me. The more I’ve seen God show up for us, the more I can trust Him to show up in the future. The more I’ve learned about Him, the more I can understand His deep and abiding love for me, and for all those that I hold dear.

Here's the Thing: I used to think that this verse meant that I just needed to study the Bible more to learn all the rules about living a godly life. Now I know that it means I need to know God more so that I desire and become more and more like Him. Yes, part of that is studying His word, but not so that I can assemble a list of rules. It is for the purpose of knowing God.

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