God Dependency

Core Value, God, Love, Relationships 0

God dependency corrects all other faulty dependencies. God keeps us right-size and allows us to go through the ebb and flow of our work day without overreacting. We are able to see our co-workers as separate and equal. We treat them with dignity, and we behave with dignity ourselves. God is our source. We remember that, and it draws everything to scale. We are able to see our true employer as God and our boss as a stand-in. We perform our work well because that is doing God’s will for us. We do the best we can and let the chips fall where they may.

God allows us, too, detachment in our love relationships so that every shift of our partner’s mood is not an indictment of our lovability. As our relationship comes to include God, the ebb and flow of personalities becomes far less personal. We lead our life each day in relationship first to God and then to our partner. We treat our partner with loving courtesy, but those attributes are grounded in our relationship to God. Secure in God, we turn less to our human companions to supply something they are not able to supply. God is the source of our emotional security. That established, we are able to love others with a less-demanding neediness. This is attractive to people. We have an inner compass, a personal gravitational field that circles us back, always, to God. Our partners may love us, but they cannot supplant God for us. We may love our partners, but we cannot supplant God for them. When this is clearly understood, when God is the primary relationship and all others, however cherished, are secondary, then we begin to have right dependency. “Thy will be done” we pray, and we include our relationships within the range of the prayer.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 129-130

Going Somewhere

God, Gratitude, Growth, Joy, Life, Peace 0

In the Genesis poem that begins the Bible, life is a pulsing, progressing, evolving, dynamic reality in which tomorrow will not be a repeat of today, because things are, at the most fundamental level of existence, going somewhere.

When Jesus tells the man that there are rewards for him, he’s promising the man that receiving the peace of God now, finding gratitude for what he does have, and sharing it with those who need it will create in him all the more capacity for joy in the world to come.

How we think about heaven, then, directly affects how we understand what we do with our days and energies now, in this age. Jesus teaches us how to live now in such a way that what we create, who we give our efforts to, and how we spend our time will all endure in the new world.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 44-45

The Terrible Thing

God, Love, Universalism 3

“But you must allow that God hates and punishes sin — and that is a terrible thing.”

“It would be ten times more terrible if he did not hate and punish it. Do you think Jesus came to deliver us from the punishment of our sins? He should not have moved a step for that. The terrible thing is to be sinful, and all punishment is to help deliver us from it, nor will it cease until we have given up being sinful. God will have us good; and Jesus works out the will of his Father.”

I myself do not believe that mere punishment exists anywhere in the economy of the highest. I think mere punishment is a human idea, not a divine one. But the consuming fire is more terrible to the evildoer than any idea of punishment invented by the most riotous of human imaginations. Punishment it is, though not mere punishment, which is a thing not of creation but of destruction: it is a power of God and for his creature. As love is God’s being and a creative energy in one, so the pains of God are to the recreating of the things his love has made, and sin has unmade.

— George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God, p. 148

New Hearts

God, Life, Love 0

Jesus and the prophets lived with an awareness that God has been looking for partners since the beginning, people who will take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways. They centered their hopes in the God who simply does not give up on creation and the people who inhabit it. The God who is the source of all life, who works from within creation to make something new. The God who can do what humans cannot. The God who gives new spirits and new hearts and new futures.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 36

God’s Story

Creativity, God, Life, Story 0

But this is no fairy tale. Naturally, given that the story involves real people, it’s messy. Also, since it involves God, you get the sense that the story is not so much about how to simply clean up the mess, but how creative you can get with the mess you have. This is what God seems to be up to — creating good, mysterious things out of messes.

— Curt Thompson, M.D., Anatomy of the Soul, p. 141

Secrets

God, Growth, Guidance, Letting Go, Life 0

But how many of us are ready to abandon ourselves “utterly.” It takes courage to make such a surrender, and without the courage born of desperation, many of us balk. What will become of us we wonder if we give our lives utterly to God. We often have images of what a godly life means, and very often it means giving up things that we hold dear. We may have many ideas about God that say “God does not do business,” and so there goes our career. Or we may believe “God does not do sex,” and therefore there goes our love life. Very often our idea of God is otherworldly. We think of God as a monkish sort, disapproving of our involvement in the world. In short, we forget that God made the world and that nothing in it is really foreign to God. We forget that God is worldly.

God does do finances. In fact, turning our finances over to God’s care has often been a route not to poverty but to prosperity. God is an expert at husbanding resources. God is an expert at increasing the worth of what we hold. To involve God with our finances is to ask the source of all abundance to have a hand in our affairs. This is not folly. This is wisdom. But how seldom do we see it that way. For many of us money is somehow “dirty” and not something we think God can attend to. We think that ambition is something to be ashamed of, a secret that we can keep from God. We forget that there is no secret that we can successfully keep from God. God knows our worldly dreams and desires. Is it possible that God can help us to have them? That seems too good to be true. Instead, we act as if any success that we may have achieved has somehow been achieved behind God’s back and that the last thing we want to do is draw God’s attention to our finances. Our finances are nearly as secret as our sexuality. Most people have a hard time talking about God and money or God and sex. There is God, and then there is the rest of it. But where did the rest of it come from, if not also from God?

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 123-124

Which Jesus?

Faith, God, Truth 0

Some Jesuses should be rejected.

Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don’t believe in, we quickly discover that I don’t believe in that god either.

So when we hear that a certain person has “rejected Christ,” we should first ask, “Which Christ?”

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 9

Unfolding Through Time

Faith, God, Growth, Life 0

“This is going to take a while” is one of the earmarks of growing faith. Faith unfolds through time. We need faith over and over again, not just once in a great while. Faith must be our constant companion. God must be a partner for us, not merely a spiritual pinch hitter to be called in at the bottom of the ninth. By saying “This is going to take a while,” we begin to acknowledge that life is a process and that we are given what we need to undergo that process. “Not I but the Father doeth the works” begins to become our lived experience. We feel the hand of God acting not only on us but also through us. We begin to have confidence that God’s power will flow where it is needed, that we can ask to be tapped into that power and expect that our request for power will be honored.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 116

What’s the Message?

Faith, God, Life, Truth 0

Some Christians believe and often repeat that all that matters is whether or not a person is going to heaven. Is that the message? Is that what life is about? Going somewhere else? If that’s the gospel, the good news — if what Jesus does is get people somewhere else — then the central message of the Christian faith has very little to do with this life other than getting you what you need for the next one. Which of course raises the question: Is that the best God can do?

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 6

The Jesus Story

Faith, Forgiveness, God, Joy, Life, Love, Truth, Universalism 0

This love compels us to question some of the dominant stories that are being told as the Jesus story. A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance of anything better. It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. viii