Twists, kinks, and holes...

I have realized that there is something flawed in the way I see God. Like my view of him still has some twists, kinks, and holes it in.

I am currently reading Donald Miller’s book, “Father Fiction,” in which Miller talks a lot about growing up without his dad and how much that has shaped him. But for those of us who grew up with a father, the book is still marvelous. A great deal of the material corresponds to God as our father.

So in reading this book, I have been thinking a lot about God as my dad. In Kenya, the Swahili word for father is “baba” and I have somehow grown to love that name. Often in my journal I begin writing by addressing God that way.

But it seems easy to call God baba, but harder to fully view him as that. Some days he seems as close to me as my best friend. And other days it feels like he is as far away as the stranger down the street. Yet I still find myself trying to balance and squeeze in all the identities that I know God to have into one person. My friend, my provider, my healer, my father, on and on.

I know I have yet to figure out his character though because of the way I sometimes find myself thinking. Like this week, I was thinking about something in the future and in my mind I was going through how I wanted the situation to turn out. So I uttered a short sentence of a prayer about what I wanted to see happen.

And do you know what my subsequent thought was? My next thought after my prayer was, “Well since I just said what I wanted, now I am not going to get it…”

That thought made me pause.

Because it means that some part of me has this idea that God does not delight in giving me what I want. Or it can even be implied that I think that God literally enjoys giving me the opposite of what I am asking for.

Now I think part of this thinking of mine is due to the fact that time has taught me that more often than not, I do not know what I really want or need. So now I sort of lean towards assuming that I am wrong about whatever thing I want to see happen. I am quite short sighted after all.

Still though, in the past I have even thought that if I pray about something, then it certainly will not happen simply because I prayed about it. So at times I have avoided praying about things because I just do not want the answer to be no or to receive an alternative solution.

With my own earthly father, my thinking is not so skewed. I know that if I was to tell him that I wanted to go to Crackle Barrel for lunch, he would not drive me to Red Lobster. I have never liked seafood. So my dad knows that I would hate eating at Red Lobster which means we would either eat at Crackle Barrel or perhaps think of an alternative solution that we would both enjoy. But he certainly would not disregard my wants.

This is all an age old analogy. I mean even Jesus talked of how our earthly fathers delight in giving us what we ask for and thus, our heavenly father must even more so delight in giving us the desires of our hearts.

I am just wondering when I began thinking that God will tell me no arbitrarily or that God will give me the opposite of what I want or that if I pray a desire, it will surely be canceled out.

Just last week, I wrote someone an e-mail about prayer. The person does not believe in Jesus and recently prayed but saw no intervention. So she was obviously frustrated. But I e-mailed her to simply encourage her about prayer. I said something about how sometimes we pray about something we want, but it is not what we really need. Thus, we receive no’s for Jesus, who has our best interest at heart.

But the truth is that I struggled to be convinced of that still and I have known Christ for quite some time.

And it is just funny how one day, one line of thinking, one light bulb moment can make you realize that there are twists, kinks, and holes in your thinking of God.

I found some in mine this week. There is a distortion in my soul as to how I view God as my father, my baba. And it seems like this is something that I need to work out.