Hideaway

Greetings!  It has been a while.  I hope you are well, prospering from the overflow of your soul.
I am attempting to create a new area wherein we can think together.  I'd like to open with a reflection from a recent opportunity I had to spend learning about God, and how he sees us.  What I learned during those days, I thought I had already known.  Now, though, I have the experience to deepen my knowledge, and a resultant conviction to share this with you.  I hope that from this, you will be encouraged, and strengthened to approach God, who has always been waiting for you, and wanting you closer to himself.

This is part of a lengthy essay, which I'll shorten for the sake of the post.  It may be helpful to break it up into several shorter posts.  The first segment is here.  I will include some of the references from which I have learned.

From Monday, January 20 through Friday, January 24, 2014, I had the privilege of going to The Hideaway, a retreat center in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  A combination of lectures, book and article readings, spiritual practices, small group times, and individual interactions were at my disposal for acquiring much knowledge about Soul Care.  More than this, though, God taught me about Himself.  He shifted some of my previous understandings about His character, and gave me a newer, deeper experience of His disposition toward me.

Since the earliest days of my own mindfulness in the Christian faith, I tended to believe that the way God views me is just like I believed my earthly father views me.  Therefore I have always respected and loved God, and we were mutually amiable, sure, but there existed between us a hierarchy in which he was more of my Master and I was his servant.  I was his child, too, but mostly a servant.  I had no problems with this frame of reference, as I also believed that our relationship was supposed to exist in this way.  God is the Creator of all that is, and I am one of his creatures after all; working for him like a son/employee was quite natural to me.  I served faithfully, and of course God remained faithful.  I took care of God’s business, and he took care of mine.  We were, I thought, excellent business partners.

I did not consider us to be friends who shared the same spirit.  I had previously assumed that our relationship worked based on four premises:  God is powerful.  I am weak.  God empowers me.  I work for him.  The logic seemed foolproof.  I enjoyed spiritual growth, and was confident that life would continue on unhindered by upsets or setbacks so long as I ‘stuck to the script.’  How wrong I was!  High school friends and then college relationships challenged the ways in which I viewed the character and nature of God.  From this class/retreat, I have had a chance to begin reflecting on the words of Dallas Willard, from his book entitled Hearing God.  “Scripture is a communication that establishes communion and opens the way to union, all in a way that is perfectly understandable once we begin to have experience of it.”[1]

So I recognize now that I had not yet appropriated union with God, because I did not yet grasp the significance of communion with him.  In fact, I was aiming to thrive solely from the communication of God through the Scriptures.  To me, the highest aim was unflinching belief in what God has revealed to us in the Scriptures (never mind that he tells us he wants both communion and union with us!).  From that pinnacle, all of life would flow on without much trouble at all, and any problems I encountered could be easily remedied with a reaffirmation of belief in God through his written Word.  Little did I realize that there was more to life than intellectual assent.  God wanted to engage my mind as well as my heart.

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[1] Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God, updated and expanded / by jan johnson. ed. (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Books, 2012), 210.