Avoiding God

I usually struggle to sit down and paint because it's very hard for me to truly create art without putting my whole self into the process.  Good art comes from a place of being fully open and immersed in making it, and sometimes I just don't want to be fully immersed in anything.  It's easy to live on the surface even of my own thoughts.

Speaking of living on the surface...

Some days I avoid God.

Which is crazy because he never leaves me so I'm pretty much holding hands with someone but refusing to make eye contact or have a conversation.  So ridiculous.

But I know that God knows me so completely and sometimes I just don't want to get really deep with someone who knows me that well.  Some days I want to do the, "Good morning.  Nice weather we're having." kind of dialogue.  Sometimes I just don't want him to point to the bandage on my heart and say, "I gotta clean that wound out."  Or for him to get a close look  at the sin and pride and selfishness and fear that is still in me and hear what he has to say about it.

Have you ever had the friend who skips the small talk and starts asking the really personal questions?  Or who knows you're about to cry and asks you about it?  Well, God is totally that friend.  Sometimes I just want to be left alone. 

But he wants to transform us. Sometimes I want to put off his work of transformation in me because sometimes it hurts and sometimes I am a puddle of tears and sometimes I don't want to see the ugly things I know are there.  Sometimes I've so carefully put myself together like a Jenga tower that I know one wrong move and I'll come undone.

He wants me to spend time with him.  He wants us to spend time with him.  To be still and know that he is God.  To listen in prayer as well as speak.  To rest in his presence.  When I anticipate a real conversation I'm not in the mood for, I have a tendency to fill the silence with nervous chatter.  Some days I fill the time with busy tasks.  And now that my life has slowed down, I've become so aware of how addicted to the noise of life I've become because I no longer "need" to be busy but I still choose it.

Even still, he waits for me.

Because love is patient.



"Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.  See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."
Psalm 139:23-24

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."

Matthew 11:28

"He says, 'Be still, and know that I am God;  I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.'"

Psalm 46:10