Pineridge Blog

One of the biggest challenges in trusting God is that God does not feel obligated to fulfill our expectations.  Maybe the biggest problem in believing is getting past the miracle that God did not perform for us.  The heartfelt prayer that was not answered. The healing which did not occur. The injustice which continues. 

But the hardest lesson of faith is that only by God entering our suffering do we truly experience God.  We want God to fix something in the world, but God calls us to face full on the brokenness not only in the world but also in ourselves. Especially when we hurt, we would rather that God be a Genie in a lamp that we rub with a prayer in order to grant our wishes. But God will not be put in a lamp or in a box. God will always be God. We might want to dress God up in a Santa Claus suit and check off our list, but God comes to us as a Crucified messiah, which is enough to ruin your Christmas dinner if you really think about it.

Maybe only in letting go of what we want God to do to save us, can the Messiah really be the Messiah and truly save us. The Messiah is a healer, who asks us to look deeply into ourselves to find the broken places and the dis-ease with the world and with who we are, because God is always strongest in the areas where we are weakest. So in order to truly understand Jesus as the Messiah we first have to be willing to let go of all or our expectations of who the Messiah should be. 

The Messiah comes as a Savior. Maybe the first act of the Savior is to save us from our expectations of who God should be in order to fully experience God as God is--the Living God who is infinite mystery and eternal love even in the midst of suffering. Jesus, who prayed for his executioners as they led him to an untimely, unjust death, “Father forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing.” “The one who,” Paul says, “was truly God.  But he did not try to remain equal with God. He gave up everything and became a slave, when he became like one of us…” because this is who Jesus was and is, “God gave Jesus the highest place and honors his name above all others.”