I am being judgemental of people, their actions and behaviour. God is the only one that can judge, not me. All I see is the physical outer body and what it is doing. I cannot see into their inner heart, mind and soul to understand why.
I am sitting in my car waiting for my wife to come out of an appointment she doesn’t enjoy attending. Furthermore, I try and support her, but it’s her issue to overcome if she wants. While waiting, I am watching the morning movement of people. It is 08:30 and so the off to work and school people are passing around me. And I ponder….how many of them have given a moment to a spiritual thought? How many are striving to seek the truth and wisdom in their lives? How many are in the treadmill of pain with no idea of how to exit it or that there even is an exit!?
Not many.
But here ‘I’ am again – it’s not about them. It’s about me. The considerations and questions above in themselves are judgemental. I must return to the ‘now’; to this moment; the only thing I possess. ‘Wash the bowl’. A term to enable me to return to not only the moment but to the simplicity of life; the little things.
Now much later at home….
When earlier in the day writing in my car the words ‘how many of them have given a moment to a spiritual thought? How many are striving to seek the truth and wisdom in their lives?’ I searched my mind for a quote I had once noted and now home I have found it. It’s by A. W. Tozer:-
“The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions.”
I don’t think people see there will be a judgement. It comes down to the question I used a while ago, ‘Either God is or God isn’t; what is our choice to be’. If you answer ‘yes’ everything else flows from that. Genesis must be true (albeit that I think the words are understood and looked at in human time not in God’s time of which there isn’t any. He exists outside time and space and so ‘a day’ could be a billion years). King David, David the Great (If I forget thee, O Jerusalem let my right hand forget its cunning) is truth. Jesus existed by coming into the world (not from it). And so on. My experience points me to I can’t have one without the other. And I think there is too much ‘complicated faith’ with deep theological writings and hot air and not enough ‘simple faith’ that the Bible is a fact – now – today – been played out with God’s engineering and permitting. Taking us to Revelations.
Sorry, I know I once wrote this is about my experience and not the work and words of others however some words of others have struck me so much with the truth and this is another by A. W. Tozer:-
“Millions call themselves by His name, it is true, and pay some token homage to Him, but a simple test will show how little He is really honoured among them.
Let the average man be put to the proof on the question of who or what is ABOVE, and his true position will be exposed.
Let him be forced into making a choice between God and money, between God and men, between God and personal ambition, God and self, God and human love, and God will take second place every time.
Those other things will be exalted above.
However the man may protest, the proof is in the choice he makes day after day throughout his life.”
I put myself to this test and FAIL. So let’s take the chip off all our shoulders. Simple faith, without complication, is lacking, is lacking in me.
I throw something else in here that I think is linked. It is putting God and Religion into the same box; the same container; like they are mutually exclusive (or is it inclusive – who knows who cares, I hope you get what I mean). My experience has shown the following words of Anthony De Mello to be true:-
“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology, you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”
I have found as soon as I consider from inside my formative ‘religion’ of the Protestant ‘Church of England’ I am fenced in, ‘us and them’ starts to rear its head and I get distracted from the goal of God.
Let me KISS – keep it simple, stupid.
Let me take the next step in grace, even if I don’t have any vision. Let me see God and be with God in actions as simple as washing up the dishes; having eyesight and hearing; being able to move of my own accord. Also, to see deeper into nature. Oh, I can take that for granted!
As simple as my Lord washing His disciple’s feet in John, Chapter 13. It contains love and service; humility and leadership, and sooo much more.
And all this from sitting in our car waiting….
Blessings
Mountains of my Mind 