My Ramblings

What is it with today's business world? My wife and I were commenting today on a situation we faced. She and I had a conference call scheduled for today with a company we are hiring to revamp our church's website. Now, four hours after the time for the call, we still can not reach the company or the rep that we were to speak with. Granted, there may be a good reason for the missed meeting and I have been praying for the rep, in case something is wrong. On the other hand, this has become normal protocol for several of the businesses I have tried to work with here in Maryland. We have gone so far as to get referrals and check references only to sign a contract with a company and have them fail to follow through on their work. This has happened on several occasions. My wife is also a teacher and recounted for me the message she gives to students regarding the importance of punctuality. "When you get in the work world, being late will not be tolerated." Ap...

I recently received a solicitation to view an online parenting book. The book was titled, "A Father's Guide To Raising Daughters". However, it was the subtitle that intrigued me, "A Father's Guide To Raising Daughters: Because I Need One!!!" I felt better knowing that I was not the only one who failed to receive the instruction manual for my kids when they were born. For a while I thought I had figured out a lot of things about raising boys, that is until our second son was born. Even though both of our children are boys, they are nothing alike. They are 7 and 4 years old now, but my wife and I could tell they were two completely different individuals within the first year. They each have their own personality, they express love differently, and they respond to discipline differently just to name a few. So, what we do is take the things that we know and learn/figure out how to adapt them to work with each of our sons. Parenting is certainly an advent...

The more I thought about the peek-a-boo analogy, the more appropriate I think it is. I already mentioned the idea of playing hide-and-seek. There is another aspect to my relationship with God that wasn't mentioned. There are rather frequent moments when God just shows up. For example, I will be driving home after work and all of a sudden, wow! God's abiding presence fills me and the space around me. There is no question, God is there. He is always there, but not always like this. On many such occasions, my physical reaction to His presence is just to cry; not a cry of fear or shame, but more along the lines of the way my wife cries at all the Hallmark commercials. At other times I just laugh. Sometimes the laugh is because at the moment, it strikes me as funny. At other times, the laugh is a laugh of relief because God has reminded me that He is there. How silly I was to think that God did not know or care about what I was facing or going through. The ...

As a new Christian, I recognized that God had sought me out, found me, and saved me. As our relationship grows, it takes on another dimension of this game of hide-and-seek. Somewhere along the road I began to realize that at moments, the roles of the game would reverse; God would hide and I would become the seeker. For my theological friends, I am not saying that God would go away; David declares in the Psalms that there is nowhere we can go to be away from God and God promises to never leave us nor forsake us. Maybe a better analogy would be God playing peek-a-boo with me. It is a humbling albeit humorous thought. Anyway, to this day, there are moments when I am trying to connect with God and I don't feel His presence with me.

As my relationship with God grows I am learning that He enjoys playing hide-and-seek. Early on in our relationship, He was the seeker. I am convinced God's nature includes the character trait of intentional pursuit. In the Old Testament, God reveals Himself as pursuing and calling specific individuals. Jesus, God in the flesh, continues this pattern in the New Testament and adds to it parables like the lost coin, lost sheep, and lost son just to name a few, to help to expose God's seeking nature. God loves people and he pursues relationship with them. God pursues both those who don't realize they are hiding and those who are intentionally running away from Him. I know this because God has been chasing/seeking me for years. I don't know why. I couldn't imagine that perishable, imperfect, finite, people could love me, much less a perfect, holy, all-knowing God. But He does! He loves me enough to pursue me, even when I reject Him. He purs...