So I have been reading a lot about how God created us to have the desire to belong and to have something outside of ourselves validate us and of course that something is Him. None of this is really new to me but seeing how I am a slow learner when it comes to God I still need to hear it. I realized that all my attempts to belong, to fit in, to be cool (I mean really who determines cool...Besides Miles Davis) et al. were not wrong in and of themselves it is just what I was desiring wasn't quite right, my aim was off. It is like C.S. Lewis writes, "we are half hearted creatures fooling about with sex and drink...our desires are not to great they are too small"(I don't know if that was word for word but you get it). The smaller catechism of Westminster abbey says "what is the chief end of man? To glorify God and to enjoy him forever." This seems to me to be the cry of everyone that has ever lived.

Unfortunately not everyone knows what their souls are weeping for, so they attempt to fill it with relationships of all sorts, books, movies music, endless drivel about the lives of celebrities(celebrity..such a strange phenomenon). I would like to tell you that once you have discovered a God who always has his arms open and pursues you like a person crazed with love and has infinite grace and kindness for you that all of those other things would pass away in importance. I would like to tell you that when God has revealed himself as a being who is intimately aware of every detail of your existence and yet is still gentle and non-manipulative in His attempts to build a friendship with you that things like coolness and celebrity would not matter as much. I would like to tell you that but it isn't all true.
Christians create their own celebrities and hierarchy of coolness and I am talking about myself here. Christians battle with each other and with those not like us because it adds to our status in our particular group, often in ways that go unnoticed by the ones doing it. And the reason I believe this is, is because We have failed to really let the truth of what God has done and who he is permeate to our hearts. We have failed to work on our friendship with God. We have failed to see God as a being with emotions and feelings and as a lover.

Now not all of this is a bad thing. In the book I was reading the writer pointed out that even though God and Adam were on a first name basis with each other and were tight, Adam was still lonely. This is really cool because it tells me that even in a state of perfection and a face to face relationship with God that it wasn't complete, there had to be more. We needed companionship (I believe this means Platonic and romantic) we were created for it. God himself shows it by his own essence (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). And that makes me feel less stupid in how much stock I put in friendship, I value it highly and it is a sacred thing to me. I also as I said earlier realized that the most important relationship is mine with God and that if my relationship with Him is disfunctional then my relationships with anyone else will be too. After Adam and Eve screwed it up the world turned to crap and relations between people became mired in it. Mankind had a disfuntional relationship. This is important to realize when you work in the field I do. My friend Mike and I were saying that we have heard things, because of our line of work, about the darkness of mankind that will forever scar our psyche and it is all because we are disfunctional in our Relationship. I attended a conference regarding children who are behaviorally challenged and we went through some theories and all of them were attempts to understand how to reconcile man to each other and all of them boiled down to healthy relationships. One presenter had a study that showed that if a child doesn't receive love and nurturing in a consistent fashion within the first six months of their lives they will have a lifetime of struggling to maintain any relationship and that this is often a precursor to Anti-social Personality Disorder (formerly known as Pschopathy). And it hit me like a ton of bricks, this importance of relationship and I began to understand why we are called to become Ministers of reconciliation. We need to reconcile man to God and then mans relationship with himself and others will make more sense.

The other reason this isn't such a bad thing, the whole failing to get it thing, is because this whole thing is a journey. I went hitch hiking many a year ago and I had the chance to see and experience some of the incredible nature of God but I was focused on getting to my destination and would often lose sight of the fact that I was walking down the highway through the mountains, seeing little brooks and streams, or through the prairies and seeing the wind move the grasses like a velvet sheet and that I could hear the breeze throughout the trees; all these things could not be experienced from a car and if God had given me non-stop rides then I would not have been forced to stop and experience and enjoy. Failing allows us to do just that it allows us to stop, experience God's love and grace and mercy and enjoy it. Failing allows us to see who we truly are and the beauty of others. Failing allows us to see the beauty in harsh circumstances and say "I count it all joy..." I love the title of a CD by Joy Electric called Five Stars for Failure. When I begin to understand this I begin to understand the paradoxical nature of Jesus and things he said. I begin to realize that I am most useful to God when I am myself failings and all.