When Moses asked God who He was on Mount Sinai, God answered, “I AM”.
Did you ever have to interact with anyone who was annoying? Or worse still – were you ever related to someone who you found to be annoying?
I have done and I am related to people like this. The interesting thing about people who we find annoying is that annoyance is a feeling – not a reality – and therefore because it is not absolute, our own personal prejudices play a very large part in how we perceive another person.
And I have been thinking about this today. Sometimes, the person who annoyed me yesterday will be quite pleasant to my sentiments today. Sometimes, when I am most irritated with someone and find them most annoying, they are in fact completely blameless and instead, it is my own weakness and bad mood that has coloured the entire interaction with that person.
And I have been thinking about that too because I have been considering how closely this resembles the relationship I have with God.
Sometimes, I feel so close to God that I feel I could almost be in Heaven with Him in that moment. The feeling such as this does usually not last more than a second or so, but there have certainly been times when I have felt God’s presence strongly enough to never doubt His existence. But then there are the more common times, when I doubt God very much. There are times when things go wrong, or I am afraid, and in those moments, I am unable to step out of my own feelings enough to know that God is not the problem – I am.
You see, when Moses asked God who He was on Mount Sinai, God answered, “I AM”. And that means – in essence – that God is unchanging. He was not one way before and developed into another way now. He is not like this today and like that tomorrow. I cannot expect that the God who I know now will be a different personality in the future. Instead, I can know for a fact that GOD is I AM.
And this means that when I feel like God is punishing me, testing me, being unfair to me, or just turning away from me for a moment and leaving me in my pain, that cannot possibly be the reality. And I know it cannot because God is God and He is who He is because He told us He is I AM.
And I have been thinking about this today as I have been thinking about my feelings of annoyance with other people. And it occurs to me that in all of those moments when I cried out to God in my pain, when I was afraid that He had turned away from me, it was me who was wrong all along…
And I have such a feeling of joy today in realising that – such a great feeling of joy…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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