I know that I won’t begin to feel remotely better until I post this blog entry.  I email my mother pretty consistently at work and we often discuss our individual walk with the Lord. She is on a quest to live a more dedicated, yielded life to the Lord. Her desire is infectious. As noted in earlier entries, I’ve started moving in a direction that is closer to where God would have me to be.  What I’ve found instead is a sense of confusion. 

I realize that I’ve relied on the words, thoughts, and opinions of others in regards to all things “God”…so much so that I’m not quite sure what is truth and what is not. I realize that a lot of what I’ve been taught is pure tradition, not scriptural. Why are deaconesses supposed to where white on Communion Sunday?...are we all less holy if they don’t?  Why is it required that you come to church dressed up?...I wasn’t aware that God was the Chair of the Fashion Police.  Why is the church service so scripted?…think about it.  We are told that we are there to “praise God” and “worship Him” yet we follow a schedule to be in and out by a certain time regardless to the general idea that we are actually there to “worship God.”  We go, we sit, we follow instructions (stand, sit, pass the offering plate) and leave feeling as if we fulfilled our weekly “requirement” to go to church. Yet if you ask most people within an hour of leaving church what the sermon was about, they draw a blank and can’t recite one of the scriptures used.  But we (I’m speaking about myself) go week after week as if this weekly ritual is of any real benefit.

The flip side of this is that I desire to be closer to God but I’m not 100% sure how to go about it. When I say “closer” I mean to have a walk with Him like the people we read about in the Bible. I want to be blessed by God like Job and used like David, Moses, Abraham, Isaac….the list goes on. I want to know God, not just be aware of Him. What is it to know God as a friend? What is it to sit and talk with Him? What is it to worship Him in your spirit? And as great as my desire is to find all these answers, I am equally dismayed by my human limitations and gravitation toward sin. It’s depressing. To know that you’ll never be without fault and feel constant failure at your attempts to live a more perfect life. In a sentence, I feel not quite good enough to think about approaching God to ask to be closer to Him. I am so very human, and He is so not.