God Connects with Us
I wanted to call this section God Answers Prayer but that doesn’t feel right. God does answer prayer. God tells us to call on him in the day of trouble ( Psalm 50:15 ). Jesus tells his disciples to ask, seek, knock, and it will will be answered, we will find, and it will be opened to us ( Matthew 7: 7-11 ). Jesus also tells us to ask anything in his name from the Father we will receive it ( John 14: 13 ). Answering Prayer , though, just sounds too transactional. The best God can give any of us is the same as the best any of us can give to anyone else. The best we can give, the best God can give, is our selves. In marriage and in our other friendships we seek to give our selves, sometimes our fill selves, to the other. This is complex. We learn to do this over a lifetime. We value our friends. Not what they do. Not how they make us feel. We value who they are, knowing them, being with them. The same with God. God connects with us. God is the greatest, the funniest, the most caring, the most loving, the smartest . . . . Our connection to God fills and enlivens and improves every aspect of every other connection we have with anyone else. (Caveat: if you have a terrible experience with someone who talks about God a lot, you may have just caught them on bad day or maybe they haven’t really made an honest connection with God that truly shapes them.) We are made for connections with others. We are not made to have connection only with God. In Genesis, when Adam lived in a perfect environment with direct access to God’s presence in the world, God said that situation was not good. With our divine relationship, we need human relationships. And, our relationship with God, our connection with God, is unique and beyond all others. God connects with us. All our human relationships are wonderful. Our connection with God goes beyond all these.
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