Is a Relationship With God Even Possible?Paraugs

Accepting and Appreciating Mystery

In our drive to gain understanding (and certainty and control), we as a species have lost some of our willingness to accept and appreciate mystery. Mystery offends our pride a bit because it runs counter to our faith in ourselves. 

So, instead of accepting and appreciating (and reveling in) the sacred mysteries of God, many of us choose a different approach: we try to reduce God to something we can cram into Hawking’s machine. 

The naturalists and humanists among us, those who demand to be able to understand a thing—empirically, intellectually, fully— before they’ll consider it real, simply dismiss him (or try to). They cannot comprehend God’s presence in our physical world, so they try to reduce him to nothing. 

We Christians don’t take things quite that far. We believe there’s a spiritual realm. But we too hold a strong bias toward the physical world. Because we cannot see or hear or touch him with our physical senses, we struggle to grasp that God really is here, in every situation, in every moment, in our very beings; that he really is supremely interested in each of us; and that he really is outrageously loving. 

And because of that struggle, many of us try to reduce God by relegating him to the spiritual realm. We try to reduce him by turning him into a theoretical god. A million-miles-away god. An only-in-heaven god.

We accept that he exists, that he is somehow essential to our lives (or to life in general), but we just don’t believe that a personal relationship with him is possible—certainly not one that’s deep, real, heartfelt, and conversational.