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And before you conclude I’m just dumping one more “ought” on you (which I most certainly am not), hear me out.

First off, what you describe is exactly how I viewed the Father for the first several decades of my life. So we have that in common.

Second, indulge me and use your imagination for a minute. IF it were true (and for the sake of argument, let’s not try to prove right at this point whether or not it is true); but IF it was true, and you KNEW it was true, and you had no doubt whatsoever it was true – indeed, if it was something you saw with your eyes and heard with your ears and experienced with all 5, 6, or 7 of your senses every single moment of every single day because He came to you and reinforced it in every way conceivable – that God’s best friend in all the universe, the person He thinks most highly of and takes absolute most delight in, all the time, is YOU, Jason-the-historical-brain-Taylor – AND if you likewise found Him the most stimulating, the most interesting, the most delightful and fun Person to be around ---

IF
IF
IF

IF all this were demonstrably true – how would it make you feel? What difference would it make to you?

Old chap this is NOT a rhetorical question, and I don’t want an off-the-cuff quick answer. This an essay question. I take that back; this is THE essay question. This is THE question that everyman’s heart longs to have the answer to. And the answer (as you have heard me say before on other occasions) is “hidden in the obvious” – in the cross.

And my friend, I don’t care how presumptuous anyone might think me (have I not by this time convinced you that I am a fool for Christ?); I shall say it: “I know whereof I speak”; “I know whom I have believed” (2 Tim 1:12) and I love to tell the Story, this Story; the whole unvarnished truth about Jesus and His love, the whole, accurately-portrayed depiction of what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are really like; these incredible Friends in whom there is “no darkness – nothing undesirable – at all”. And I honestly don’t believe anyone on earth can prove me wrong; (but I gladly make myself vulnerable to them to try; because every objection that has ever been brought has only made the truth shine all the more clearly and brilliantly).

My whole point in the above flight of shameless, disgusting “boasting” is this: I know what God is really like, and I know what He thinks of Jason Taylor. And, oh my friend, it is glorious, too glorious for words; but words are all I’ve got to work with; and I am your ‘umble servant to attempt, in the short or the long term, to help you (to help anyone) see “what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.” (Eph 3:18-19)

Forgive me for my effusiveness, but I live intoxicated on true wine (with a nod to Kevin Peet who also loves this poem):


Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.

Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love in that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

-- “The Agonie” (George Herbert, 1633)

TBC...

I wish I could think like that Rolley. Frankly MY experience has been thinking of Him as a "Grumpy Old Autocrat". Maybe I'm just more instinctively jealous of my independence then I really should be and sometimes it feels like I am exhausting myself only to be told how awful I am. It doesn't help that the people at my Church seem ignorant and phariseeical at the same time sometimes, too. But be that as it may I really don't know how to feel like that.

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This, in particular: “The person who abandons himself totally in God’s hands does not become God’s puppet, a boring ‘yes man.’ Only the person who entrusts himself totally to God finds true freedom, the great creative immensity of the freedom of good. The person who turns to God does not become smaller, but greater, for through God and with God he becomes great, he becomes divine, he becomes truly himself.”

That has surely been my experience. And faith knows I have but scratched the surface. It makes me quack maniacally.

Thank you, Gina.

When we say we need evil to be fully us don't we really mean we need it as a symbol for a lack of something good? Just as a society needs hypocrisy not because hypocrisy is good but because it is a placebo to take away shamelessness.