There is only one God.

[I wrote this in 2014 and stumbled across it today. As A.A. Milne once said, "One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries."]

I have a rather bleak default-theology -- you know, the spiritual mindset to which you revert when life screams louder than truth. Old habits die hard. With a vengeance. But I digress.

My default-theology could be described as "You made your bed -- now lie in it"-ism. Its teachings hint darkly at one's salvation being part of a package deal: I was the 13th in the baker's dozen, maybe even a squished one that the baker snuck into the box, an afterthought among the powdered sugar, frosting, and sprinkles.

And at the center of my default-theology is a God impatiently waiting, arms folded and foot tapping and brow furrowed, for me to clean up the messes in my life. He is a God long on recrimination and short on help -- the One who "helps those who help themselves," and not a minute sooner. He bears no resemblance to the God I encountered long ago when I accepted Him and felt like I was soaring high above the earth in peace and freedom; rather, He is curiously reminiscent of other gods, human-gods, who apparently live on in your head long after they have ceased to be a physical presence in your life.

I was thinking today about mistakes -- specifically, about specific mistakes and how trapped I feel in them and how if I knew then what I know now I would never make the same mistakes but the fact is that I did and sometimes there is nothing you can do to fix them and you are sentenced to fix your eyes upon your blunders in perpetuity.

[This sentence is over-long by design -- in case you were wondering. It's intended as a device to illustrate the way that in the mind, regretful thought begets regretful thought begets regretful thought, etc.]

A blunder, by the way, is not necessarily the same thing as a sin; a sin is always a blunder, but a blunder can be just plain old garden-variety stupidity. And while we can and should confess our sins, what do you do with a blunder? 1 John 1:9 would hardly seem to cover that.

Well, I know what I do with my blunders. The ones I can fix, I do. The ones I can't, I hold up to eye level in front of a mirror, to remind myself (in case I'm ever tempted to forget) of the error of my ways. And God is always present at these times, arms folded and foot tapping and brow furrowed, letting me know beyond doubt that if I think He's going to intervene, I'd best think again. I made my bed, and now I can bloody well lie in it -- then we can talk. Of course, unfixable blunders being, well, unfixable, I end up lying in the proverbial bed forever.

But today it occurred to me that on the day I accepted Christ, He could very easily have folded His arms, tapped His feet, furrowed His brow, and said, "You made your bed -- now lie in it."

And yet He didn't.

He delivered me, delivered all of us, from the ultimate unfixable blunder -- the sinful state that separates us from God -- without recrimination. If He can do that, is He not also able to help us in the midst of our more temporal plights? More to the point, if He is willing to do the first, is He not willing to do the second? Why save us for eternity because He loves us, only to let us make fools of ourselves on earth because, well, we deserve it?

Obligatory caveat: I am not suggesting that God exists to keep us from making fools of ourselves. Free will gives us the right to be as stupid as we choose. Nor am I suggesting that God is duty-bound to "fix" all of our blunders, unfixable or otherwise.

But perhaps when I consider the God of my temporal plights, I should remember the God of my salvation. They should not be diametrically opposed to one another. The hope I found in the latter is the same hope I should find in the former. Probably pretty elementary stuff to most Christians. But for me, it is serious food for thought. And I do love to eat.

[It occurs to me, reading this over ten years later, that I might appear to be endorsing the Marcionite heresy of two Gods: the malevolent Old Testament God and the benevolent New Testament God. But I'm not. To my mind, God is all Old Testament, all New Testament, all the time. I don't entirely understand how to reconcile that, except to say that I need to be mindful of both, which in turn means avoiding a default-theology that leans too heavily one way or the other.]

#God #Jesus #mercy #grace