I quite often end up writing many of my prayers down, as the written media holds a certain dearness in my heart. This prayer I wrote today in between classes & it contains some interesting thoughts that I thought may be worth sharing to others. Enter into the realm of my prayer life with God—a little snippet & by no means difinitive nor paradigmatic.
Enjoy.....
Lord God, I do not really know what to write about at this point in time, but—that being said—I still feel like writing for some reason. It is 12:09 in the afternoon of September 14, 2004 and I am contemplating life, I guess. Today's class was pretty good so far. Thanks that you’ve given me the opportunity to attend a good educational institution, Lord. I actually am very grateful for that.
Okay, since you're God, I know that I don't really have to "work into" the deeper topics & that I can pretty much just jump in & go wild, as it were. So, I will.
Relationships are a funny thing God. They are really quite unfathomable. If you were to ask me even as little as 6 weeks ago if I would ever have held the perspective about my current relationships with people that I do right now, I probably would have laughed at you. All these relationships are turning out to be quite weird. I wonder if it's just a girl thing, God... My male friends seem to act the way I would expect friendships to progress. My female ones always seem to throw me a curve ball—consistently at that!
It is interesting to think about, relationships. They are the key to community & society, yet it seems like I have very little control over how they progress. Something about the dynamism of interacting with another sentient & conscious, "free-willed" being must contribute, I would imagine. It seems that I typically talk to you about relationships & how they are progressing in my life, even about my relationship with you . Makes me wonder why this is so? How come I don't talk to you about science or art or literature? Why do I not talk to you about politics or the weather? I guess it just goes to show what I find important in my life, eh? Does anyone talk to you about the weather, or about the workings of our physical environment? Do you ever reveal the secrets of the rules that underlie creation? Did Newton discover gravity after asking you how (why) things fall to the ground? Did Einstein pray to you & consult the Lord of Creation about the mysteries of space/time? It makes me really wonder.... Perhaps I should start talking to you about these other things as well.... Maybe it will result in a scientific or technological breakthrough, contributed to the knowledge of the human race by the Author himself. Interesting concept. I wonder if anyone would buy it...
So, how are you doing my God? I don't think I've heard from you in a while. Maybe that's because I don't listen to you as much as I would like (or even should). But I really do have an interest in your self. Do you ever have really shitty days, God? I've always wondered that: can the King of Love ever just have a rough, dismal day? I am torn in my desire for an answer. On one hand, I would like to think that you indeed to have crappy days & depressing states, but on the other hand if you did, I know that it would really wrench my heart—even the mere thought of you suffering emotional distress of that kind makes me want to give you a super huge hug. You probably did experience such things while in your incarnated state, and you probably still experience duress & distress at our inability to follow after you in a true and fervent manner, but just a "bad day"? I dunno... I would hope not. I would hope that the progression of the events throughout time would cause celebration in your heart & in your presence to the extent that it would outweigh the harrowing events of our sinfulness. Or is that why you chose to redeem us? Because the mere thought of the quantity of our sins before you was too depressing to bear that you were compelled to do something about it in order to feel happy/better? This is something I have never thought about before, but it seems to make some type of sense... Though the contradiction of this thought becomes a bit apparent after some time: If your selflessness was motivated by your selfishness, then why would selfishness be considered a sin? Then again, you also are the only one who can be righteously jealous. I guess you could be righteously selfish, seeing as when we are selfish, that puts our focus on ourselves & removes the focus from you. When you are selfish, the focus does not change, and because you are the lord or all creation, king & creator of everything, everything is subordinate to you & therefore everything was made for your purposes. It would only naturally follow that your selfishness would not be considered a sin, since it aligns itself with the purpose of creation: to be aligned to your will. Yes, this makes sense. It also causes a bit of a new perspective within me about sin & its nature. The Greek word is "mistake"—hamartano. Since you are god & since everything that is done has been done to serve your purposes, it follows that you cannot sin & therefore you cannot make a mistake & therefore you are perfect. :) perfection is easy if you are the one making the rules, isn't it? You decide what's right & what isn't; you decide what is correct & what is a mistake, and since you have the capacity to define this—being the absolute authority & all—you are fundamentally, by your very nature, perfect. The only only way that you could ever be considered not perfect would require something—anything, maybe—that was not created by you—except for yourself, of course. This alternate creation could possibly have a structure in such a manner that would require something that is contrary to your character. This can be evidenced in human philosophical constructs, whose realms were not created by you & whose fundamental laws you neither completely conform to nor abide by. But since they exist purely within the context of your creation, you still remain perfect. Even if there were other things that were not created by you, you would remain perfect within the context of your creation, which we as humans will forever be, seeing that you are the one who created us. Therefore, anything outside of creation besides you is irrelevant to anything in your creation.
The purpose of creation was to suit your will. Therefore, by its very design, all of creation is intended to have its focus on you & to resonate with your will. If, by some chance, there were other constructs outside of creation that were parallel or even super-ordinate to this creation or even to you, their mandates would be irrelevant. Even if there was a god over you, who demanded that there should be no worship of anything besides itself, or even if you had contemporary, fellow gods how deserved just as much—if not more—veneration & devotion as you deserve, the act of worshiping these others would remain sinful within the context of creation even though they may be the requirements outside of your creation. Technically, our solitary worship of you could really be a huge, grave sin, but since we were created by you, for you, to resonate with your will & your will alone; since you created "this" all around us, you have made the rules & therefore to worship any other god or to adhere to a set of principles for perfection other than the one you created would necessitate a "mistake" on our part, and we would not be following the correct outline mandated within creation: we would be sinning. It is weird to think about these things, God, but it also refreshes my perspective—looking at the big picture & understanding everything by that. Therefore, a foundational & crucial assumption in my faith & in Christianity is that you indeed are the sole creator of my self & of these things around me. This does not, however, necessitate that everything in the world around me has been/was created by you, just that you created the architecture, the framework & the guidelines by which everything that resides in this creation must adhere to. Perhaps there are other gods that were not created by you. Perhaps there are other non-gods in this creation that are/were not created by you. Maybe their assertions to be worshipped above & beyond you are valid. They just cannot be so within this context of creation, especially if I myself am specifically created by you. The assertions made in John chapter one seem to imply that there is nothing outside of creation, but maybe all it is saying is that nothing outside of creation is relevant. It certainly does state that everything within creation must adhere to the foundational premises of this your construct—even those things that we ourselves create, whether their foundational premises align themselves to your will or not. This is why sin is sin & why the same Greek word is used for both "sin" and "mistake." This is also why you alone are the judge of human kind & of our deeds here on earth. This is why you can be both jealous & selfish without sinning. This is why you can be grieved with your creation, yet be faultless—as you were before you sent the Flood. This is why you are inherently perfect, because the very nature of your creation leaves no room for you to be otherwise. It is impossible for you to do anything wrong.
This is also why it was so very important for you to become fully man when you appeared as Christ on earth, isn't it? In order to redeem us, you had to become fully one of us. It is this apparent freedom of the human will in our limited, linear appreciation of time that needed to proceed in such a fashion as to never make a single mistake in order for you to be considered a blameless, spotless sacrifice, suitable for atonement. This, in combination with your fully-god nature, is exactly how you atoned & redeemed mankind, isn't it? You had to be both fully man & fully God in order to accomplish this: You had to be fully man to have the capacity to sin—to make a mistake & to deviate from resonating with your own will—in order to be able to take all of humankind's sins upon yourself. You had to be fully god simultaneously in order to completely eradicate those sins, for by the very foundational tenets of this creation, it is impossible for you to sin. By having the capacity to sin yet being in your very nature incapable of sinning, all sin was atoned for and negated on the cross. Phenomenal! Brilliant! Only you could have come up with something so elegant: redemption through destruction. You chose to destroy a part of yourself in order to realign creation to your will, yet since you were not created, you needed to "create" yourself in order to achieve this purpose. Furthermore, since the created part of yourself is still fundamentally you, it is also—paradoxically—a non-created artefact within creation, and therefore—since you were not created—you were not destroyed either, just the sin that was attached to you.
