Monday, January 9, 2023

God and the Human Condition

Sometimes, we're afraid that our humanness gets in God's way. We look in the mirror, and we wonder how God could ever work in a life like ours. We wonder if we've made too many mistakes, taken too many wrong turns, burned too many bridges for God to do what He intended to do with our lives. We're afraid that we've ruined it. 

Whenever I'm tempted to think this way, I think about the creation of Eve in Genesis 2. 

God created Adam first, forming a man out of the dust of the ground and then breathing the spirit of life into him. Then, when no suitable helper was found for the man, God decided to create woman by taking the rib of the man and building off of it. Before God reached down to take Adam's rib, however, He put the man to sleep. 

He didn't have to. There are plenty of ways for God to divinely take your rib if He wants it. There are ways in which He can transcend the metaphysical realities of the universe that He just created and reach in with some kind of ghost arm and pull the rib out without Adam having felt a thing. 

But God isn't like that. God had just created this flesh, and He had just declared that this flesh was good. Very good. And from that moment on, when God decides to interact with human beings, He does so in full recognition of and respect for their humanness. He doesn't use His God-ness to pass through our flesh; He humbly stoops to our flesh and works with it. 

This reminds me that God understands my humanness. All of it. Even the parts that I haven't made sense of yet. And every time He wants to interact with me, every time He wants to use me, every time He wants to send me, He already knows that I'm human before He even starts to reach down for me. As a popular meme says, He's already accounted for it. 

So I'm not worried about messing up God's plans because I'm human. God has already shown that He works with the human condition.  

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