Quick Word: Learning Love

You can catch my quick word every Tuesday morning, just after six, on New Zealand's Rhema

I’m usually quite happy to do a little baking, for this and that, so it wasn’t really surprising when my mum asked me to bring a chocolate cake to a family lunch a few weeks ago.  I said yes readily enough, but by that particular weekend I couldn’t see myself making anything but takeaways for dinner, let alone baking a cake.  I started making some mutterings to my husband about buying a cake instead when he surprised me by saying he would make one.

Now, it’s not surprising for A to offer to help me, but in nine years of marriage I had never seen him bake and I’d just assumed he couldn’t.  In fact I probably assumed he would rather do anything but baking because, though he cooks, I’ve never seen him particularly enjoy it.  But no.  He’d done plenty of baking as a kid he informed me and he threw himself into it with enthusiasm making a really silky, beautiful cake.

It was all I could talk about for the next few days.  Of course I talked about how good the cake was but also how – even after a while of being together – he can still surprise me.  There can still be things that I don’t know about him, mostly because they have never come up or because I’ve never bothered to ask.

How true is this in our relationship with God?  I personally don’t think, even after a lifetime of relationship with God, that we could get even close to fully knowing him – which means we should always be learning, always discovering and even from time to time being really surprised.  Afterall, the disciples lived with God here on earth in the person of Jesus, and still constantly were astonished by him and what he did.

“Who is this man?” they ask in Mark 4 v 41 when Jesus controls the elements in a storm.  Later, just after watching him feed five thousand people in Mark 7 they are still totally amazed to see him walking on water.

My challenge however is to want to be surprised by God – to want to know him more then I do now.  Sometimes it seems easier to live with God in the box we have made him then to live with the dynamic creator and giver of all that he truly is.   It is awesome to have strong theology and to know what you believe, but we need to make sure that even then we are searching to know God the creator and not being content to live with a God we have created.