more from Isaiah

I am very slowly working my way through the book of Isaiah. I love the promises that I find there. I don't love so much the opposing sides of the picture of God that are displayed. Yes, I admit I struggle to resolve the image of a God who is loving and compassionate vs. a God who destroys people and cities because they do not listen to Him. It is difficult to wrap my feeble few "grey cells" (to borrow from Agathe Christie) around the idea that He is able to be both. He is love. He is justice. They cannot be separated from Him. He simply IS both of them.

And yet, I find myself intrigued by the idea. God is the perfect Balance. Everything is combined in and through Him. As fallen human beings, we don't like balance. We want ANSWERS! We want CUT AND DRIED! We want to be able to KNOW that we are RIGHT, and that we are the ONLY ones who are right! We want to win the debate!

I get it that there are absolutes. There is right and wrong. However, within the side of right, we as Christians get all muddled up. We live like we are on a teeter-totter, frantically running from side to side in an attempt to balance it out all by ourselves. But each time we run to the other side, the result is a resounding thud as we hit the ground.

Allow me to use an illustration:

As a young Christian, I was convinced that the way to be a good Christian (is there such a thing?) was to read my Bible and pray every day. This was what I heard preached and taught. If you want to follow Christ, you must read your Bible. You must pray. So, I attempted to read my Bible. I knelt every morning by my bed to spend time in prayer, only to find myself falling asleep. (not because prayer was boring, but the lack of sleep) I questioned, "Does this mean I'm not a good Christian? No matter how hard I try, it's not working." No matter how much I read my Bible, I found myself having the same issues day in and day out.

Somewhere along the line I threw it away. Well, in my defense, I tried to read my Bible every now and then. I did spend time praying to Jesus as I walked through my day. But this whole idea of reading my Bible for a half hour in the wee hours of the morning began to seem ludicrous. How could that possibly save me, or even make me a good Christian? I decided that it is about my relationship with Jesus. It is about speaking to Him and listening to Him. It's about calling Him my best friend! It's not about what I am doing! It's about who I am being.

Slowly, but surely, I feel God calling me to a balance in this issue. Because I was angry that the one end of the teeter-totter simply thudded to the ground, I ran completely to the other end. It was a jolt then to realize that I thudded just as hard on the other end. I was reacting, and living in reaction to something rarely brings about the desired response. And so, I now am attempting to come to a place where I see the Truth in both sides. I am attempting to stand with one leg on either side, striving to keep the board in the air instead of crashing down. The tilting becomes not so great, and the frantic rushing does not happen quite so often.

This is only one example. I propose that the majority of our lives needs to be spent finding a balance...living in the so-called tension between two sides of an issue. Because we are not perfect, we are going to rush frantically at times. We are going to react only to face the jolting thud of our teeter-totter hitting the ground once again. But we need to allow ourselves to be called toward the middle and embracing Truth for what, and, more importantly, WHO It is. We need find our confidence not in our answers, but in a God who really does know all the answers.

One day, it will all make sense. Until then, "I press toward the mark..."