The main reason I love the meditation I'm currently reading is that it makes me go deep. Rather than give answers, it asks questions. And it's very brave.
Jan Richardson quotes a writer who has suggested that God, in what he's expecting of us, is acting like a maniac. Richardson responds in her own journal:
A maniac, indeed. I am searching for the mercy of a maniac who seems to delight in outrageous possibilities and maddening timing and in opening the ground beneath our feet, carving a fissure, breaking open a gap from which we will not exit the same way that we entered. Mercy, mercy, mercy.
Looking back, I've said the same kinds of things in my prayer journal. I actually wrote the following once:
What? You want me to do what? Are you crazy?
It must be much harder for those folks who think God purposely causes everything that happens to us, i. e., the recent tornados that have taken hundreds of lives and thousands of homes and then threatens those same people with a flood. I don't believe God does these things. I believe that in some cases they happen because we're not listening.
I also believe, as I look back on my life, that God expected unusually tough stuff from me. Somehow he managed to give me the strength to get through. Because I'm still here.
Richardson closes this section with a blessing:
May the mercy
of the maddening,
outrageous, outlandish God,
meet you and feed you
in every need.
***
Jan Richardson quotes a writer who has suggested that God, in what he's expecting of us, is acting like a maniac. Richardson responds in her own journal:
A maniac, indeed. I am searching for the mercy of a maniac who seems to delight in outrageous possibilities and maddening timing and in opening the ground beneath our feet, carving a fissure, breaking open a gap from which we will not exit the same way that we entered. Mercy, mercy, mercy.
Looking back, I've said the same kinds of things in my prayer journal. I actually wrote the following once:
What? You want me to do what? Are you crazy?
It must be much harder for those folks who think God purposely causes everything that happens to us, i. e., the recent tornados that have taken hundreds of lives and thousands of homes and then threatens those same people with a flood. I don't believe God does these things. I believe that in some cases they happen because we're not listening.
I also believe, as I look back on my life, that God expected unusually tough stuff from me. Somehow he managed to give me the strength to get through. Because I'm still here.
Richardson closes this section with a blessing:
May the mercy
of the maddening,
outrageous, outlandish God,
meet you and feed you
in every need.
***
