As I briefly mentioned in my last post, I’ve been having a sustained conversation with a friend about issues having to do with how God is in control and how we understand that and what it means.
It’s a new thing for me, and I think something I’m growing in- to be able to give more leeway and lenience for theologies that I don’t necessarily find personally compelling. Partially, I think it’s that I need to embrace things that are true about God that I don’t find compelling in my mind. But I think it’s also the only way that we ever can really survive as a church, to be able to be at peace while having divergent theologies.
In the end of the day, my friend and I can both affirm this idea, which should drive our spiritual lives: God is God and we are not.
In that light, my friend shared this verse, which has really sat with me and become a prayer for me.
Yet you know me, O LORD; you see me and test my thoughts about you. Drag them off like sheep to be butchered! Set them apart for the day of slaughter!
I find it interesting because it is in the middle of Jeremiah questioning whether or not God is really just. He sees the wicked doing well and asks how that is fair. But in the middle of it, his response is this verse.
Yet you know me, O LORD; you see me and test my thoughts about you. Drag them off like sheep to be butchered! Set them apart for the day of slaughter!
If you’ve read much of what I write, you know I can’t go very far without writing about doubt and questions and how I think they are a vital part of a faith that is real.
I think what I am learning in this phase is that there is a tension in which we need to be honest about our feelings, but also receptive of the fact that God always remains a mystery, never totally understood. and so Jeremiah’s prayer that his thoughts be slaughtered rings true, even while I affirm the need to be honest and wrestle through those thoughts.
Do you have thoughts that it might be time to let go, or to let be slaughtered by God?
Could it be if we let them die that there might be something better, more rewarding for us to be invited into?
“You are the God of all truth, the God of deep hiddenness.
God of all hiddenness who shows yourself
in your being hidden,
who hides yourself in your disclosures…”
-Prayers of Walter Brueggemann
I can’t quite wrap my brain around this one, but it resonates… and I think it’s appropriate!