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When God Leans Down

by James Barringer  
11/24/2009 / Christian Living

I'm not all that tall, just a shade under six feet, but I'm taller than my girlfriend Andrea, which makes hugging a very interesting experience for us. I basically have two choices: mash her face into my sternum, or bend my knees a little bit and make myself shorter so we mesh better. Unsurprisingly, I tend to opt for the latter, and in fact I did it for a very long time before Andrea even caught on that I was doing it.

Tonight, we were upstairs in her house, getting ready to go for a long walk together. I had my shoes on, and she wasn't quite to that point yet, so when she sidled up and tried to hug me, she was even lower than normal. "I have to stand on my tiptoes just to reach you," she observed, "and even then you still have to lean down for me."

I had a pretty vivid mental image, at that point, of me doing the same thing to God, standing on my tiptoes like a toddler who doesn't quite know what he wants, trying to make myself closer to God, who leans all the way down from heaven and brings himself near to me.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much ridiculous stuff God puts up with from us. I have friends from a lot of different theological backgrounds, different denominations, and the whole nine yards. We disagree about a lot of stuff, and in all honesty, we probably spend a sinful amount of time discussing our differences when we could be doing good as partners for the kingdom. But that's by the by. The point is that, on every single issue that we disagree on - baptism for infants or believers only, worship with new music or old hymns only, and so on down the line - at least one of us is completely wrong, and the odds are pretty good that all of us are at least a little bit wrong. Yet here we go, strutting around like we think we know things, declaring with our heads held high that we know exactly how God is. We've got his number. And I can only imagine God up there, laughing his head off at how silly and naive we are to think we could ever figure him all the way out.

It got underneath my skin at first when I started thinking about how off-kilter I was with regard to God. I mean, all the theological opinions I have are researched as best I can research them. I took seminary classes and read books so thick it takes a crane to lift them. And I'm still wrong. I keep forgetting that a finite human mind simply doesn't have the ability to conceive of an infinite God. I try, of course, because there's value in the trying, but I have a concept of God that only vaguely resembles God, the way a toddler's crayon drawing only kind of barely resembles the house he lives in. A.W. Tozer once wrote that he likes to start prayers by addressing "The God that truly is, not the God I think you are." The surprising thing should be that, as much as our opinion of him differs from how he really is, even sometimes differs from what he explicitly tells us in the Bible, he still shrugs and leans down to embrace us.

Scholar or fool, it doesn't matter at all to God, as long as we call on him as savior, because he doesn't want people who are scholars or people who are fools, only people who lean on him for salvation and forgiveness. Pentecostal, Baptist, Presbyterian, Disciple of Christ - the labels and the differences mean nothing to him. He accepts worship played with musical instruments and without, sung on-key and off, from songs written two hundred years ago and songs written yesterday. He accepts pre-written, elaborately eloquent prayers as well as fumbling half-sentences. He smiles on the soldier as well as the anti-war protester. He says to pray continually and we pray three times a day if we remember. He says to feed the hungry and clothe the sick, and we pat ourselves on the back if we do it once a month. We fall so far short of his standard that we don't even register on the holiness meter. He doesn't care. He just wants to be our savior.

We try to hug him, feeble arms extending a mere eight feet above this earth that chains us down, and he swoops down a million million miles to clutch us tightly to himself and speak words into our hearts about how we're loved and we mean something to him. He chooses to love us even though our best efforts would never be enough to make us love him. His love for us never falters, never wavers, never lessens.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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