God as an event

I snapped this in the beautiful Sierra Valley of California, where I live.

God is not a distant deity in the clouds.
God is not a concept, an idea, or a law (or a set of laws). 
God is not an ecstatic experience 
or a psychedelic episode.
God is not an ideology
or a political party.
(Though God can find us in all of these things.) 

God is the event of arrival
in a death experience.¹

God meets us personally
on the event horizon of death and nothingness.

It is here
that God meets us in history
at a specific time and place
under a specific sky
calls us by name
presses into our old, tattered story
and ministers us back to life.

And this is where things get interesting…

Because God, you see,
is not a soft-handed, passive-aggressive helicopter parent
(like I can be).
God doesn’t enter our most challenging moments
so that we’re free of carrying them.

God ministers to us with profound compassion and love.
But God is a pastor,
not a pacifier.

The compassion in God’s encounter with us
is always followed by a lovingly firm call
to minister to others in their death experiences.
Even people who’ve never been to church
experience this
for though our secular culture has tried locking the door to the Divine,
God is everywhere
seeking out every last one of us 
in our wilderness. 

And in that new dawn, your steps have vigor,
your lungs take on a wider capacity
and the wind shifts behind you.
A future has been delivered to you
leagues deeper
than the dark, extended night of nothingness
that proceeded it.

God has usurped your death experience
as the event of your divine identity.

God doesn’t skate around your death experience.
God moves through it
meeting the reality of your nothingness
with the promise of outward-turned possibility
spoken from the One voice
that creates galaxies
out of the void.

Grace + Godspeed,
Jonas

1. My inspiration for this post is a book titled The Pastor in a Secular Age by Dr. Andrew Root