Before I Wake

They talked in the shorthand of old friends and shared memories.

I think I'm honored. Or speechless. Maybe something in between there.

Lord, You made us and gave us breath. May we do justice, love and mercy, and walk honorably before you this day. By the precious name of Jesus, I ask for your help to do this. Amen.

God is passionate about good happening in this world, not evil. I’m convinced of that. God hates what happened here, Rae, the same way He hates divorce, and He hates injustice. But He won’t destroy people to proactively prevent them from doing evil things, nor will He destroy them today after they have done evil things. Not until His great patience has extended to them every chance and opportunity there is to change and become good again.

God is good, Rae. Men have free will and often do evil. God has freewill and constantly chooses to do good. That’s the difference between us. God is good. Men have a bent toward evil that won’t change unless we appeal to God to take us in hand and make us good again. And since only a small fraction of men ever think it worth laying down their will to ask for God’s goodness instead, we end up with days like this.

Sometimes life is just awful, and that’s the way it is. It doesn’t have to reflect so much on God, as just be noted as this is what man is willing to do to his fellow man. It doesn’t mean God is like this too.

Do you think it was part of some plan, that you got shot so you would end up in that church and discover religion?' Bruce shook his head. 'I got shot because someone was willing to exchange the name of an undercover cop for a lot of cash. Ending up in church--God was just kind enough to make something come out of the disaster that hit my life.

Can I do anything for you? Bake you cookies? Walk your dogs? Throw snowballs? Just generally be a distraction?

Jesus pointed at the Father and said that’s life, to know that God who is absolutely perfect and good and loving; and it’s an abundant life to trust and obey Him. Jesus knew the Father was the one person we could have a relationship with who wouldn’t let us down. And that is the key thing necessary for having a good life: a relationship with Jesus and with God the Father.

can hold that relationship with God only because He’s reaching over and holding us up to His level, not because we can ever reach to His level.

I think trusting that God is good is one of the hardest steps there is to take. We get conditioned to expect to be let down. We get conditioned to not trust, because we trusted and we get burned. We get conditioned to be reserved and not take things at face value because we’ve learned nothing is ever at face value in life.

The Bible says God is good. It’s His personality, His nature. It’s impossible for Him to do bad; it’s outside His very character. And yet when we start to think about religion, about God, we spend most of our time trying to gather up the courage to trust and believe that God is actually going to be good to us and be willing to help us.

Curiosity was a bad character trait for a private investigator to have. It created work.