your own personal Jesus

Lewis talks about the god that most people worship today in A Year with C.S. Lewis.

He says that everyone thinks "What other God would we worship, but the true one?" And yet, he says, most people worship other gods.

In a sense, there's no way around it. None of us can know exactly who God is. It is, in fact, impossible. He is not completely knowable. He will always be beyond our ability to understand Him. As Lewis puts it so eloquently in the Narnian Chronicles, He's not a tame lion.

So we can't know Him the way that we know that 2+2=4. We can't understand Him. But we can know Him the way we know our friend. The way we know our brother or our father. Using Spanish to clarify, we can conocer Him, but we can't saber Him.

What does this mean practically? Well, one thing it means is that God will continually surprise us. If you think you've got God in a box, and you completely know what He'll do next... that's not God. That's your idea of God. God delights in surprising His children. He did it all through the Bible. He did it in the lives of the saints. He did it in the event that we will be celebrating in 4 days. God is an amazingly creative person who loves to give us gifts that we could not possibly have imagined.

So let's open our hearts and minds to what God really DOES have for us, rather than limiting ourselves to our preconceived notions of what He might do. His surprises are amazing.

God, thank You for not being a tame lion.