God’s mysticism

In Donald Miller’s “Blue Like Jazz,” he speaks about the mysticism of God and how impossible it is for humans to understand their creator because their creator’s immense being would have to be beyond our own reality in order for it to be reasonable for him to have created us. I’ll find the paragraphs from the book and quote them in here later.

Miller uses a pancake he cooked for breakfast as a metaphor, and I came up with a more practical one – dogs.

When a dog is a puppy, he is scared to death at first of everything once you become his owner. Of you picking him up, all of that. But he eventually learns to enjoy the ride up.

He learns to understand your tones and the pitches of your voice, but he will never understand exactly what you say – only what you might mean or feel. That is similar to humans with God. God’s voice is far beyond the immature Christian’s understanding. This is why I have not yet heard his audible vocals.

Another comparison is this – a son and his father.

I am 20 years old as I write this and if it’s ever published, I’ll be older by then. But when a kid is born, he doesn’t fully understand anything about his parents. As he grows older, he learns bits and pieces. At first he embraces them, then as often is the pattern, begins to struggle against them in some facet of life. We call this teenagerhood.

Sound familiar? In life and in Christianity?

Many Christians get stuck in Christian teenagerhood. I don’t know if I’m even fully into Christian puberty yet, but I’ve had my share of struggles with my heavenly dad.

But the older I have gotten as a son, the more I have come to understand the dad God born me to. There are two dominant positive flaws to being a Sneed – we love too much and we care too much, about whatever we are involved in. Sports, girls, jobs, you get the idea.

Then there are two dominant negative flaws – our tempers and our nerves. We can get incredibly ticked off about something to the point of punching holes in doors (only to come back and apologize later due to Flaw 1 and 2), while at the same time, we get so nervous about things that we function more like drugged lab rats than stable human beings. My dad can’t speak in front of people without having prepared for hours on end the week before. I couldn’t throw a ball back to the pitcher in college, as a catcher, for two years. No lie.

The point of all that is to say this – the older I became, the less I got aggravated with my dad and the more I understood him, because I began to understand myself more, and I began to realize how much like him I actually was.

As people relating to God, the more we grow in him, the more we grow as people because we discover parts of him that are also in us.

Why do you think so much of Hollywood loves dynamic lines about people finding strength in themselves or something like that?

Because God has put traits of himself in us as human beings. And yes, we don’t always need him to discover those traits. But … BUT! … the more we get to know him, the more it releases – or even unleashes – those traits in our lives, taking them and making them more than they could ever be if we did it alone.