When I was young, I went on a whirlwind tour of the Midwest with my grandparents. Just me, the two of them, and a cooler full of Shasta. What I learned on that trip was that:
1. My Grandma can find a garage sale in any state, county, or municipality.
2. Somehow my grandparents had managed to find a place that still sold Shasta. Unless, of course, they'd been stockpiling it since the mid-1970s. In which case, I don't hold out too much hope for living a long life. Truth be told, I downed quite a few of those Shastas.
But, there was another interesting thing I learned on the trip. I learned that my Grandma prefaces almost any answer to any question you ask her with the phrase, "Lord willing." This will be illustrated by the following exchange:
Me: "Grandma, when are we eating dinner?"
Grandma: "Lord willing, we'll stop somewhere about 6 o'clock."
To be honest, as a youngster, I found this a little disconcerting. I mean, I believed in God and all, but I also really hoped that "Lord willing" wasn't code for, "Quite honestly, I brought no money on this trip, so really, Sara, our getting dinner tonight will have to be an act of Divine Intervention...or some serious panhandling." What can I say? As a child, I had an overactive imagination.
Since that trip, I've thought about that phrase "Lord willing." Usually, I think it's kind of funny. I mean, to say it all the time, in answer to almost any question, seems a little much. I guess I felt a little too sophisticated in my understanding of God to really think that my every meal, my every place to rest my head at night, my every long-anticipated stop to stretch my legs was really possible only because the Lord willed it. I guess I felt that my Grandma's way of viewing God was a little too simple for me, a little too lacking in the rigor needed to really get at God.
But, the truth is, I think my Grandma was right. You see, I didn't want to think of God as a God of simple things. I liked those stories of God as seen on a grand scale. You know, a few loaves and fish turned into a meal for thousands, a giant flood, those sorts of things. I didn't see God as a God of the day to day. I didn't see Him as, literally, my daily bread.
The problem is, when I didn't see God as a God of the every day, He was pretty easy to ignore. And, even when I started to think about God more, I did so by studying the only thing that made sense to me, all His rules and regulations. The thing is, I really believe in those things. I fact, I believe in them quite strongly. But knowing the why and how of the ethics laid out in the Bible didn't really help me to understand God any more than I did before because I was failing to build a relationship with Him.
The positive side of understanding the ethics of Christianity is that it helps me to understand the boundaries of a relationship with God. And, I have a real interest in apologetics because there's a lot of intellectual rigor to it. But, if I'm honest, I have to admit that I like apologetics because I need apologetics. I need a logical and reasonable system that explains the ethics of Christianity because, when we get right down to it, I don't love God enough to take Him at His word, understand that His commands are true, and commit myself to following them.
I need someone else (preferably C.S. Lewis) to reason it out for me, to give me a good enough explanation so that I will follow God's commands. I don't always have the "love that surpasses knowledge" (Ephesians 3:19). I'm working on it, but I, in my sinfulness and humanness, struggle to move past a need for explanations, a need for logic, a need for reason. Sometimes I struggle to simply love God enough to follow Him without the need for a good enough explanation. If I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that God doesn't need to give me an explanation. He is God. I should follow Him out of love, even if His rules seem hard to follow.
So I, despite my ability to give a reasoned explanation for any number of Christianity's moral stances, am really far behind my Grandma who understands that there needs to be no explanation, that God is the God of all things both great and small. She knows the truth that we are to be, "always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Ephesians 5:20). It may seem silly to give thanks for the little things in life, but, in so doing, we learn humility. We learn to recognize that God is always present, always watching. That He isn't God merely on Sundays, but on every single day of the week. That we must remember that our every breath, every meal, every day are all owing to Him. And, when we take the time to recognize Him in these seemingly small things, it will be hard to forget Him in the the larger things.
It's a lesson I'm trying to learn. Lord willing, someday I will.
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