A quick bit of something or other that may stimulate or lead to (at least) one of us being locked away in a soft-walled enclosure for some time:
Have you ever stopped to think about just how hampered we are by time? After all, without it life is just a breeze for not only are you never late but as all places in time are yours all the time and so history and future are effectively now!
Does this mean that when we ask God for something our response (which is in our future) is actually the thing that shapes God's answering of it? For instance if we were to receive and respond in ways that caused us to deal with God's response in the wrong way would God not give us what we asked for because it would cause us to be in the wrong place?
If God is outside of time can we pray retrospectively? After all the person we are asking to act can act on what was yesterday's issues for us in our tomorrow and yet they'd be in the same place, temporally speaking, yesterday - today - tomorrow.
How do we pray when we know that God sees the end of our earthly timeline and that our future is as if it were history to Him because He knows our beginning and end (Psalm 139 - all the days numbered were in the book and known before day one began)?
God as someone who exists outside of time yet engages with His creation inside time.
Started lots of thinking about Boethius and with this comes lots of free will and foreknowledge issues.
Not sure I can cope with the temporal - inside, outside - stuff.
Think I'll go with omnipresent and place that on the rock of omnipotence - now where's that cup of te, my head hurts.
Where do you see God:
i. existing?
ii. working?
And how does this influence the way you pray and the responses you see (or expect) to those prayers?
3 comments:
I know that my Redeemer liveth. (There, I answered both questions).
Excellent questions that we should consider each day as the world tries to crowd out the idea of an existing and working Lord.
I know that before I came to faith, I couldn't see God in anything. I was agnostic, hedging my bets, just in case, as I didn't really know enough about faith or atheism to make a decision in its favour.
I had a Damascus Road event, while dealing with a fatality from Afghan, where, at the end of my tether, I'm certain that I heard Jesus say to me, "I'm here - let me in". I responded and everything else followed.
Once I had regained perspective, I could see how the family of the deceased took comfort from their Christianity, I looked outside the temporal and found the omnipresent. Their God was the same as mine. He was loving and merciful and always waiting for that opportunity to be the light, to help us to become his light.
Sometimes, I go through those bad patches, where it all seems empty and bleak, where prayer is barren and the soul is black and desolate. I pray through them, because no matter what as The Underground Pewster says "I know my Redeemer liveth".
Words like faith, belief, mystery, mystique, never knowing, ever being are all bound up together. But Jesus' words say it for me "Blessed are those who don't see - yet believe".
I am grateful for the notion that one can pray "as and when", knowing that the Potentate of Time (is that from a hymn somewhere?) can slot my efforts into the right place along the timeline. Unlike our one-directonal experience of time, when we are all to often too late to say what needed to be said, or do what needed to be done.
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