I think I assume the same things of girls as I do of God.
I tend to assume my future wife will be pulled from the mold I built in my head.
In the same way, I assume that God is exactly how I think he should be, and does what I expect him to do. But can you blame me? Church has taught us that God is Love, Justice and Mercy, that he’s omniscient and plenty of other idealistic words that fit so perfectly in our heads.
But I think instead of being just a list of personified attributes, he is as real as rocks that were thrown at you on the playground. He moves dry wind over iron and quartz in Albuquerque. He mouths specific words to people with OCD and rosacea. He waits for the Mad Men episode to end, or for us to put down MarioKart so he can tell you to text your sister. He works around our gritty, resistant wills to see out his own pure one.
Do you remember when an angel tells Daniel he was late because another spirit resisted him for 21 days? (Daniel 10:13) It looks like our omnipotent God has to work around real wills of a certain shape and sharpness that oppose him, because he gave us that freedom.
I think God is selecting a very real girl of a certain height and history for me. He will use her to pleasantly break the brittle mold in my head. He will do it through sore hearts, pensive nights, a profound type of love and an ancient breed of beauty.
In the same way I need to let God break the mold in which I’ve captured him. He’s just oceans bigger than my skull can hold. And He’s way older, and more real than even the words Love, Justice, Omnicsience and Mercy. He made them. They are merely colors to help us paint a likeness of him on our 6 pound brains. Every story in his history reflects them, but not just them, and never is he captured by the biggest box we can form with them, or with any other thing our massive human race has made.
Because he made us.
Raw Spoon
