Result number one

I recently read Crazy Love, by Francis Chan. It was sent to me by a friend, along with a highlighter, because "you might need it." I did use the highlighter. I found the book challenging and oddly encouraging. Not that it said much that I hadn't read before, but it said a lot of things that we can all stand to be reminded of, and made me consider if I've been actively pursuing life in light of Christ's love, or just sort of drifting along on whatever I learned the last time that I read a book like this. This is the first in several (I'm not sure how many) posts about things I learned or remembered reading this book.

I had an epiphany the other day. I had an epiphany, and I had an encounter with God, both of which were unexpected at that moment (was washing my hands in the bathroom - not generally a time and place when it is considered "the thing" to have epiphanies and encounters). My brain had been poking and prodding at a vague disquiet that I had been experiencing for several days. The disquiet was brought on by a chapter in Crazy Love listing several of God's attributes. They were all very orthodox and biblical - holiness, omniscience, etc., so I wondered why they bothered me. Maybe I just didn't like thinking about them. Maybe I wasn't comfortable with that God and preferred a more manageable God. Maybe maybe any of a long list of heresies. So I poked, prodded, and turned the feeling as I went on with my life, until the epiphany burst upon me at the sink.

God has a personality. More like, God is a personality. It's odd how this surprised me, but it did. It's another one of the things that I've always known but never realized. I was honestly so startled by this that I found myself sputtering to the towel in my hand: "God has a p...per... personality." And as though the words had made it real, I felt it. I felt God as a completely separate Person pressing against my consciousness. A person who loves and hates, laughs and cries, feels joy and sorrow, greed and generosity, and the whole host of emotions like me. But not just like me, because I feel those things finitely and in part. He feels and is those things infinitely and completely.

It's odd how much of a difference it makes to think of interacting with a person, instead of a list of attributes. Quite a startling sort of thing. Mr. Beaver's description of Aslan takes on a whole new significance: he's not safe, but he's good.