Apparently, I Don’t Believe

And I’m not yet sure I want to…

Since I was a child, I’ve heard about that eighteen inches between the head and the heart. I was taught the danger of knowing something in your head and not believing it in your heart. Living like that was never okay – you couldn’t just know “about” God – you needed to “know God,” or you would, of course, be lost forever.

(Oddly enough, many of the people who taught me this lesson are the same people who also teach to “believe in your head and your heart will follow.” Let me leave the irony there for the moment, however.)

As I grew and learned to speak the truth in my heart, I felt that I managed to avoid the 18-inch gap that stretches for eternity without the Holy Spirit’s work in a heart, and in typical, human fashion, I rather checked the lesson off my list of things to pay attention to, pretty much figuring that if God had me, He had me, and He would take care of it.

This worked fine until this year, when God decided to do that thing He promises to do to people who draw near to Him – He drew near to me.

And let me tell you. Having God draw near is one of the most incredibly uncomfortable things that can happen to a girl who, for all intents and purposes, has been living a practical deism for the last ten years or so. It’s not that I have taken God for granted, and it’s not that I don’t believe that He can or would weigh in on things in the world. I don’t really think He created the world, set it spinning, and then stood back to watch all the things go down without Him once He set things in motion.

But apparently, I do believe that He only ever intended to get as close as Christ, and since everything begins and ends with Him and His life, death, resurrection, and return, I have no right to expect to see any blessing, interaction, intervention, or presence of God in my actual everyday life here on earth. However subtle it may have been, at some point in the last several years, I simply stopped believing that God’s goodness was at all specific.

Except there was that time… And there was that one too. And He *did* specifically tell me that these things were good gifts that He was giving to me

My jaw kind of dropped yesterday as I realized that for everything I believe in my head about God, I really don’t believe in my heart that He intends to be good to me. The reason I hate the word “blessing” is that it feels like a curse. I reject the idea that delighting myself in Him should have any effect whatsoever on my life outside of a fulfillment of my spiritual obligation, and the thought that He will “give you the desires of your heart” (if those desires are not specifically Him as my great reward) makes me throw up a little in my mouth.

I’m sorry. That’s probably heresy. And here I’ve been living it.

So that eighteen inches between my head and my heart is getting me into trouble, because even if a body is doctrinally “right” in the head about God, you can’t leave the heart behind, because it is with the heart that “man believeth unto righteousness.” You don’t get a to-do list to check off for spirituality when you’re walking humbly with your God. You get your heart and God holding it and holding you and being God enough to do so with Christ covering up the rest of the mess with His righteousness.

I don’t know what to do with God when He gets all Old Testamenty in my life and wants to interact in “all my ways” as I’m learning to acknowledge Him there. I think I do want blessing, and happy, and I want to say “oh LOOK what God did!” – but I’m scared to let Him in, really let Him in, and be that specific and that personal with me in my world.

Because I’m the better manager for this life that is not my own, don’t you see.

My practical deism has just been given a limited lifespan. I’m not sure I am ready to say with the Roman centurion – “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!” But I think I’m willing to wait a little longer with Him drawing near, and take one step at a time while I am learning how to humble myself in His sight. I’m already generally okay with His being God. I guess it’s time for me to learn some specifics, huh?