a kingdom built of seeds

If (or when) we begin to diverge from what we were so stringently taught to believe, feelings of fear and guilt may follow. Our context, upbringing, circumstances, and environment are so powerful, and have so much control over our thinking and beliefs of what is good and bad, right and wrong, true and untrue. If we are to move forward, we must come out from under the shadow of our families, communities, and religious or spiritual structures of origin in order to find our way back to them again, in freedom. We must let our ideas and idols of God die in order to find him again, afresh and anew. As we begin to lose all of this, there is an emptiness and a sense of death. But isn’t this where we must go to be filled again with a better way than that which is merely passively given and blindly received? I believe in a God good enough to not want us to live the rest of our lives with such a controlled, protected, narrow image of himself. And yet, we will not avoid tainting his image for those of the next generation, who must all go through the same process. And thus God will continually refine his image from one generation to the next, never being seen perfectly, but, I pray, more fully and completely – a piece here, a piece there. We may “know” just as little, but find ourselves held even more tightly by a God who loves us more than we can imagine. Really, all growth originates in the awareness of being held by a loving God, losing our fear in that surrender. All growth occurs in letting go of the old to embrace the new (you can’t let go of the old or receive the new with clench fists, only with open hands). While God never changes (He Is who He Is), his image may never be fully perfected to or fully known by us; but, we can hope for it to be continually perfected in us. 

“I feel myself in the void, but the Void is totally saturated with love.”

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