Philip Yancey is one of my favorite authors - books like What's So Amazing About Grace?, The Jesus I Never Knew, Where Is God When It Hurts, and others have been faithful companions to me over the years, and I find myself returning to Yancey again and again.
At the beginning of his book Reaching For The Invisible God, Yancey talks about an exercise that a discussion group he was a part of did. They decided that they would each write an open letter to God and read them to each other the next time they met. The following is Yancey's letter:
Dear God,
"You sure don't act as if God is alive" - that's the accusation one of Pattie's friends made to her, and it has haunted me ever since, as a question: Do I act as if you are alive?
Sometimes I treat you as a substance, a narcotic like alcohol or Valium, when I need a fix, to smooth over the harshness of reality, or to take it away. I can sometimes ease off from this world into an awareness of an invisible world; and most of the time I truly believe it exists, as real as this world of oxygen and grass and water. But how do I do the reverse, to let the reality of your world - of you - enter in and transform the numbing sameness of my daily life, and my daily self?
I see progress, I admit. I see you now as someone I respect, even reverence, rather than fear. Now your mercy and grace impress me more than your holiness and awe. Jesus has done that for me, I suppose. He has tamed you, at least enough so that we can live together in the same cage without me cowering in the corner all the time. He has made you appealing, love-able. And I tell myself he has made me appealing and love-able to you as well. That's not something I could ever come up with on my own; I have to take your word for it. Much of the time, I hardly believe it.
So how do I act as if you're alive? How do the cells of my body, the same ones that sweat and urinate and get depressed and toss and turn in bed at night - how do these cells carry around the splender of the God of the universe in a way that leaks out for others to notice? How do I love even one person with the love you came to bring?
Occasionally I get caught up in your world, and love you, and I've learned to cope OK in this world, but how do I bring the two together? That's my prayer, I guess: to believe in the possibility of change. Living inside myself, change is hard to observe. So often it seems like learned behavior, like adaptations to an environment, as the scientists say. How do I let you change me in my essence, in my nature, to make me more like you? Or is that even possible?
Funny, I find it easier to believe in the impossible - to believe in the parting of the Red Sea, to believe in Easter - than to believe in what should seem more possible: the slow steady dawning of your life in people like me and Janet and Dave and Mary and Bruce and Kerry and Janice and Paul. Help me to believe in the possible, God.
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Once again, Yancey puts into better words than I could ever come up with, exactly what I'm thinking about right now.
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