Spacious Living in an Expansive God - Part III

Dear, dear Corinthians, I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!

~ II Corithians 6:11-13(The Message Version)

Welcome to part three of my series. (Click for Part I and II) Today I’d like to focus on the expansive nature of God. True confessions time. I’m a bit of a science geek. I actually have a favorite physicist. How many blonde, ballerina, romance authors do you know who have a favorite physicist? He’s a Jewish man named Dr. Gerald Schroeder, and his theories on the creation of the world blow my mind.

Here are just a few amazing statistics about our universe. It is thought to be approximately 93 billion light years (light years, not miles) in diameter. And a light year is roughly 6 trillion miles. Written out that looks like 6,000,000,000,000. That’s an awful lot of zeroes. Now multiply that times the 93 billion. Whew!

Our universe is believed to contain about 100 billion galaxies. And to put that into perspective, our own Milky Way galaxy is thought to contain 200 – 400 billion stars. Should I write that out with zeroes as well? Now consider that it would take over four light years (again, that’s light years, not earth years) to travel to the nearest star beyond our solar system. Are you beginning to get a picture of how staggering our universe is? And beyond all of that, our universe is in a constant state of expansion.

Yes, that blows my mind. And God blows my mind. That God would build countless galaxies to create the perfect world just for us. For me. For you. It reminds me of the expansive nature of God. That he is just sooooo big! That while he is the same yesterday, today, and forever, our awareness and understanding of him can grow everyday.

This mind-boggling God, how can he be both alpha and omega? Both beginning and end? How can he embody both justice and mercy, righteousness and grace, order and freedom. Yet in his paradoxical expansiveness, he does.

Sometimes we can’t quite handle the bigness of our God. The seeming contradictions contained within him. So what do we do? We make him smaller. We put him into little boxes of denominations, traditions, and doctrines that we can wrap our finite minds around. And in doing so, we create our own graven images. Our own little “g” gods made after our own preferences and limitations.

But God cannot be contained in a little box. In him the entire universe, galaxy after galaxy, all the laws of nature, down to the smallest particle of an atom, exist and function.  No wonder he desires for us to live spacious, wide-open lives in the expansive world he designed for us. Rather than try to put God in a box, how about we gaze at him in awe and wonder, hoping each new day we’ll grasp him just a tiny bit more. How about we just say, “Wow!”

Amazing, unfathomable, God. Father. Daddy. Help us not to put you in a little box. Help us not to create our own graven images. Rather help us to grow in relationship and intimacy with you so that we might become more accurate reflections of your splendor to those around us here on the earth. 

Spacious Living in an Expansive God Part II

Dear, dear Corinthians, I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!  II Corinthians 6:11-13 (The Message)

Now . . . I don’t want to say God is tricky. Rather, I will say that He is infinitely wise and able to get His message across — even when we don’t want to hear it.

Last month I started this series about II Corinthians 6:11-13. I was so excited. The idea of big, wide open spaces. Freedom like I’ve never known before.  I shared how I’ve felt trapped in my life, in my church and even in my marriage. About how, often, I’d been bound by religiosity, legalism and a list of expectations that God never placed upon me. That sometimes I was even trapped by wrong thinking. I think we all want to be set free from those sorts of prisons.

But as I considered the word spacious further, God began to take me to places that I hadn’t expected. This word is most often used in The Message version of the Bible, which I love. It never fails to breathe new life into the scriptures for me. However, because it’s paraphrased, I find it’s important to use other translations as well. Here’s what I discovered as I pushed my study of the meaning of spacious deeper.

Romans 5:5-8 uses the word spacious. However, it’s also calling us to give up our desires; To live by the spirit. It involves a lot of dying to self. Second Corinthians 5:5-8 includes the word spacious as well. But it seems to be talking about eternity more than earth. There is an inference that the cramped feeling on earth is not so unusual. The way to escape it is by dwelling in the spiritual kingdom and living by faith not by sight.

Hmm . . . this is harder than I anticipated. There’s a lot of work involved. Oh, but it gets more challenging still.

As I delved into the scripture above in Second Corinthians 5:5-8, I discovered that Paul was actually talking about not withholding love and affection, about pouring ourselves out for others. To me this means not putting walls around our hearts. And why do we put up walls? Usually it’s because of past wounds. The walls might involve bitterness and unforgiveness. But they might just be walls created by pain and lack of trust. Not so evil, right? An unwillingness to try again because of the risk of the hurt being repeated. There is a proper time and place for boundaries. However, that unwillingness to trust might be caused by fear. If so, it’s not so innocent after all.

It seems the smallness I’ve been feeling does indeed come from within me. I’ve built walls to protect my heart, and in doing so, I’ve built a prison around myself. I’m scared. I don’t want to risk being wounded again.

No one ever said this Christian walk was easy. I guess right now, God is asking me to tear down walls and take some risks. I don’t know how it’s going to work out. My job is simply to follow His leading and trust Him to see me through, some way, somehow, to good end.

God, give us courage to tear down the walls we’ve built around our hearts. In the end, they only keep us bound. Help us to trust You to be our defender and deliverer rather than seeking our own self-preservation. Guard our hearts, Lord. We place them in Your capable, almighty hands.

Spacious Living in an Expansive God - Part I

(as first seen on iflourishonline.com)

Dear, dear Corinthians, I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!  ~ 2 Corinthians 6:11-13 (The Message Version).

 For the last three years, I’ve been grappling with the same few Bible verses from Matthew 11:28-30. I’ve been determined to learn how to live freely and lightly in the flow of the Holy Spirit. I’ve been discovering the unforced rhythms of grace. I’ve made this the theme of my writing and my life.

Then a few weeks ago while I was attending the American Christian Fiction Writers Conference in Dallas, Texas, I took a class called Live Free. Write Free. Honestly, I figured it would just be a relaxing class that would reinforce my own thoughts and beliefs on freedom. A friend of mine was one of the instructors, and I always enjoy hearing him speak. But the class pushed me to a new level of freedom, even after years of meditating on the subject.

At the end of the class the instructors offered a challenge. If we were willing, they would hand each of us a journal that they had prayed over and written anywhere from a few words to a paragraph in, as God directed them. Our assignment was to fervently seek the Lord in prayer about these words, and spend at least a few hours journaling about them. Again, I figured no big deal. I’m well acquainted with journaling. God often speaks to me in that way.

But as I struggled through the words written in my journal and focused on the images they created, they began to take me to new places. To confirm things God had been speaking to me, yet pushing me beyond them at the same time. And by the end of my journaling time, I had a new mission statement for the next three years.

SPACIOUS LIVING IN AN EXPANSIVE GOD.

I immediately started a study on the words spacious and expansive. The scripture passage above uses them both, and it touched me on a deep level. I’ve actually written an entire spiritual memoir about how I’ve felt trapped in my life, in my marriage and in my church—about  how I’ve begun taking steps toward freedom by discovering intimacy with Christ.

But look at this: a wide-open, spacious life! This is a whole new level of freedom. God didn’t fence me in. The smallness I felt came from within me. I’ve been living my life in a small way. It’s time to open up. Open up and live expansively. What exactly does that mean? I’m not sure yet. Will you join me as I explore spacious living in an expansive God? Let’s take time to ponder that. Close your eyes and try to picture what it might look like. Next time we’re together, we’ll take a closer look at the word spacious.

God, please help us to let go of our own graven image versions of you. Help us to see your bigness, to truly understand your vastness. Don’t let us keep you in a safe little box. Show us what it looks like to live wide-open and spacious lives in the midst of an expansive God.