Alright... so my last post may have been a bit reactionary and whiny. It was morning and I"m not a morning person. So I don't want to diminish some of the ideas, but maybe looking back I wish I was a little bit less whimpery.

Still the idea is one that I can't get away from. Looking back over the past few months, it's been there... God is not defined by my definitions. God is. Steven Curtis Chapman said God is God and I am not. There's a lot of truth in that little statment. But it's a lifetime of learning it.

I guess now that I'm several hours removed from the frustration, I see that the discovery of God is in the wrestling of Jacob, and it's in the facing of the scary man outside of Jericho. Without facing that guy, we never get to see God.

It's the different facets of God (if that's a good word for this). We meditate on the 23 Psalm and love to get the pastoral image of Father, making me to lie down in green pastures. The God who ordered Saul to slay every one of the Amalekites including animals, women, and children is not a God that I constantly seek out in my quiet times.

But it's the same God. I can't choose which God I follow. I have to take Him or leave Him. It's the taking that's tough. Because the comfort that comes in the nestling arms of my very big Father finds fulfillment and ultimate realization in the fiery eyed God who seeks out and destroys those things that try to kill me. As God loves me and holds me, He is violently opposed to what would steal, kill, and destroy me.

"The wages of sin is death."

Yeppers. Those things that kill me are in me, and they are me. That's why sometimes I feel like an object of wrath. That's why I'm so uncomfortable with the blazen eyes of the Lord of Hosts. Because those eyes are fixed at the things in me that are killing me and rotting me from the inside.

Honestly, I hate sin. I hate what it does to me, I hate the inherent distance that it brings my relationship with Father, and I hate that it's all over me and so many times I feel powerless to change the things I hate most. It's an ugly thing.

It's easy for me to focus on topics of conversation and teaching like advancing the Kingdom. It's difficult to realize that the Kingdom is within me. What areas of my life is the Kingdom advancing in me? It's easy for me to focus on a mission of salvation, of bringing light into dark places. It's difficult to face the dark places in me. What areas of my life are increasingly being changed by the light?

I see the effects of sin in my life all the time. I see it in the way I relate to my wife, my coworkers, my favorite people in the world. I smell the stench of death in people at my church whose marriages are being ripped apart by abuse - physical, emotional, and substance. But the hesitancy to face up to that in my own life translates neatly into my hesitancy to face up to that in those who have allowed me to have some small role of influence in their lives. I fear legalism. I fear the label of hypocrite. I fear that they'll turn in anger and ask me what right I have to look into their lives when my own life bears the scars.

But more than anything, I think, I fear dying spiritually because I was scared to face those things in me. I fear seeing people live lives of meaningless fritter because I never held their hand as they walked away from death. I fear living a life where no one points out the marks of decay in my own life, and helps carry me away from the grave yard.

Jacob wrestled with an angel, earned a limp, and became the father of a people. Joshua met a warrior who he feared, and led a triumphant band of warriors into the promised land. There's power in the battle. Fight on.