Three easy steps...

"Don't look for shortcuts to God. The market is flooded with surefire, easygoing formulas for a successful life that can be practiced in your spare time. Don't fall for that stuff, even though crowds of people do. The way to life--to God--is vigorous and requires total attention."

i hate marketed plans for a God relationship. i despise three easy steps or seven key principles or ten guaranteed practices. maybe it's because i'm young and rebellious. maybe it's because i'm cynical and skeptical. maybe it's because none of them have ever worked for me. it's not that i haven't tried them or looked for them. actually, despite my despising, i think i still look desperately. because i'm lazy and i want easy answers. but i know my search is futile. and hopefully, by God's grace, i am wasting less time looking and spending more time living. what a beautiful reminder to me today that i need God in my all-the-time. that my relationship with him is "vigorous and requires total attention". brilliant.

because if we break God into three easy steps (which i am obviously contending is in actuality impossible), then i think we will have severe problems ourselves. two chapters later, blind men approach Christ and beg for healing. Christ asks them simply, "do you believe this can happen?" and they clamor that they do. and he replies simply, beautifully, "become what you believe". become what you believe. i am a rather firm believer in the idea that your perception is your reality (at least in many circumstances). that we do truly become what we believe. and so if we simplify God then we nullify the grandeur, wonder and mystery that is God. if we take our faith from a seven course feast and instead package it as a happy meal, to go, then we surely can't fool ourselves into thinking that we're not missing out on something. much more than something. and so i will relinquish my right to know all the answers and find them fast. i will be ok with being hopelessly lost in the dark occasionally, if not often. because in my confusion i find hope that God truly is much larger than my intellectual capacity and more powerful than my understanding. and that a god who could be within my grasp would be a tiny god indeed.