What does God believe in me?

What does God believe in me?

Now there is a question I had never asked myself. We spend so much time debating the “believability” of God. Do you really believe that? Which has come to mean: Is it true? factual? evidence-based? proven?

A host of questions come to mind:

• Do you believe in God?
• Do you believe God?
• Does whether you believe or not have anything to do with the existence of God?
• Does God really care if you believe Him or believe in Him?

But this question, posed to me yesterday, turned the tables. Does God believe in me?

Well, since God is truth, He need not debate with himself whether or not I am believable. He knows for sure. It’s me who wonders.

If I am imaginary, then I have been imagined by God. Again, a moot point for God’s consideration.

But God “believe in” me? When would He have placed His belief in me? That takes me back to the moment of my creation, my conception and before. The moment I was considered by the mind of God.

If, when God speaks a word, it is. (It exists) When God believes a being, it does. (It acts)

So, when God spoke my name, I was. Could it be that when God believed me, I did? Whatever He believed in me, activated?

This sent me researching the word, “belief.” Maybe there was something lost in the translation over the years. What was the root word? Maybe it was really “be” and “lief.” Be, I knew, but lief?

Well, dictionaries tell me that Chaucer, Shakespeare and Tennyson used it, as an adjective and adverb and, with ‘to be’ as a verb.

lief

adj : (`lief’ is archaic) very willing;
“was lief to go”; “glad to help” [syn: glad, lief]

adv : in a willing manner;
“this was gladly agreed to”; “I would fain do it” [syn: gladly, fain]

1. Dear; beloved.
“My liefe mother.” –Chaucer.
“My liefest liege.” –Shak.
As thou art lief and dear. –Tennyson.

2. Note: (Used with a form of the verb to be)
Pleasing; agreeable; acceptable; preferable.

So, if ‘be lief’ meant beloved and in a willing manner, then perhaps God’s belief in us, activates His will in us, His beloved.

God believes, therefore I do.

Two sides of the same…notebook

Call me cheap or thrifty or just plain utilitarian, but I use both sides of a sheet of paper. I’m not proud about that, probably got it from my mom who called it “being Scotch.” If anyone knows what that means, please let me know.

But this goes beyond your typical utilitarian paper-use. This morning I pulled out my steno pad – the one I had started from the front with ideas for some upcoming writing. On the first page are things like, “What if it’s not just a game?” and “What if spring never came?” I have always been a big what-iffer. Sometimes it can work for me.

But, true to form, I haven’t filled too many of the pages behind the starting ideas.  Okay, I haven’t filled any. But today I am starting a new season training a team I have worked with for some time. I always sketch out a “game plan” even for a training session, and I need a notebook to do this in. A steno pad would be perfect. And there I have a perfectly good steno pad, hardly written in. I’m cheap so I don’t wanna start a new notebook. I’m prideful so I believe my ideas, however meager, are worth keeping. So, I turn the notebook over to the back cover. And begin again, from the back.

In the back cover I tape the team game schedule and the days of my sessions. Then I start scribbling in the theme for the day and the ideas I have. This is followed by terrible stick figure drawings, arrows, lists, dots and dashed, shapes and numbers. In short, it is my handiwork. It would mean nothing to anyone but me.

…just like the words on the front page. Then I flip it.

Front, the writer-me: “What if it’s not just a game?” 

and flip it again.

Back, the trainer-me: “Making more of the game.”

I am looking at myself. Front and back pages written on. A whole lot of blank, but lined, pages in the middle. Anyone who looked at it would think it was a mistake. That someone accidentally wrote in someone else’s steno pad. But no, they are both me. In fact, they define me. Two sides of the same coin, they say. Two sides of the same notebook.

And I’ll keep writing them. From one end, keep imagining. From the other, keep making it so. And at God’s perfect pace, the two will meet somewhere in the middle. Perhaps a little toward the writer, but more likely a bit more toward the trainer. And on that day I will be two sides of the same page.

But that won’t be the end. Because then there will be the filling of all the back pages to the front or all the front pages toward the back. Or until something stops me, mid-pencil or mid-thought. Like my computer keyboard that shouts, stop writing on paper.

Notebook, you’ve made your point. It’s the two disparate parts of me that are me. Writing myself to the middle.

Praying in pencil

I make my prayer list in pencil.

Oh, I have my regular categories: family, friends, my vocational pursuits, the world, my enemies. Those are all written in pen. They’re there to stay. But what’s in the categories, that is the things I am praying for or about, the people I hold onto tightly and hoist high, the folks for whom I am so grateful, those are all written in pencil. Because they change.

The objectives of my prayers are changing all the time. I write them in pencil because I expect them to change, the circumstance to be resolved, an answer to become clear. And then I erase them.

Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of things have been on that list for some time. And plenty keep popping up there – especially in my “enemies” category. That’s actually, where I started the pencil thing. I resisted writing those things, those people, those inconvenient aggravations, in pen. So I, in my great wisdom and power, wrote them in pencil …so I could erase them if they talked back or got too confrontational.

But today I realize this practice has spilled out into the rest of the list. This penciling in. This temporary nature. Not because I am afraid of what I’m writing or can’t face it, but so I can replace it with the next thing. My prayer list is a revolving page of the conversation God and I are having. My eraser is my thank you.

Today I erased Justin, a friend’s 43 year old nephew, because miraculously he has pulled through a critical time when things looked very grim. I don’t know what the future holds for Justin. Actually, I have never even met him. But I penciled him in for a time and then erased him into the rest of what God has in store.

Writing things down is a funny thing. Some people don’t do it, especially the tough stuff, because it seems more real when we put it in print. I, on the other hand, write boldly in pencil – or, a bit more cautiously by cursor on a computer screen. Both are temporary. But the penciled one, I hold privately; the erasures are the only evidence a conversation ever took place. The other, this screen, is public, and I may be deceiving myself to think it’s nature is temporary. Because perhaps someone reads it or shares it and then who knows where it goes or what it becomes?

I think God’s okay with that. From the beginning He was One to share what He spoke. And people, perhaps even people something like me, wrote it down. Word processors, nah. I don’t think they even had pencils. I’m glad. What if someone had erased it?