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Why do we search for God?  It’s an intriguing question and one that I have spent way too much time pondering and wrestling with.  The word theology, broken down can mean God logic.  We’re trying to understand who God is because if we are created in God’s image, the purpose of our search is to inform ourselves of our own humanity.  We’re looking to understand who we are as human beings.

A little while ago, my son and I were playing a wrestling game.  During the game he inadvertently hit me and it hurt.  I voiced my displeasure and instead of staying in the game, he ran to his room.  As I approached him, I could see that he was afraid.  He wouldn’t look at me.  I could tell that he was afraid that my image of him had changed and that it was possible I didn’t love him.  He was captivated by what I would call a lie, and his fear was driving him away from me.  I spent the next twenty minutes just sitting with him to convince him that there was nothing he could do to make me stop loving him.  And when he finally let go, he crumbled into my arms and started crying.  He had discovered that the lie was untrue.

I get that moment.  I often wonder if the tension in our search includes the possibility that maybe we’re just not cut from the same cloth as God.  Maybe we’re the one exception to the story.  We’re the one individual that is part of the story that God leaves on the outside.  We see the evidence in our lives that suggests, “How can I do THAT, and still be a child of God?  How can God love me when there’s just so much evidence to the contrary.” What if the problem is not God’s capacity to love humanity, even when it does something evil, but our capacity to love the self when we do something evil?

In Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity, I explore this tension as the central question of the human experience, one that disconnects us from our father.   We see the fruit in our lives and wonder, how can I be good?  How can God love me when I’ve done that?  How can I be a child of God when I am capable of doing something so counter to who God is?”  And in the process of questioning, we run.  And if we run, we lose our capacity to understand our dignity, our identity, and our purpose.

I also wonder if we’re afraid to be children of God.  If we are created in God’s image, we also hold the capacity to create a reality.  And in this capacity we also hold the capacity to construct a false reality, one that captivates us in a lie and makes us run.  To be children of God means we are powerful.  So the capacity to create also means we can get it wrong.  We can judge ourselves as wanting and even worthless.  And when we run, we perpetuate the lie.

One of the more provocative notions in Scripture is how Jesus reframes God not as a distant and uncaring God, but as a Father.  Jesus actually commands us to call God, “Father.”  It’s right there in the story.  And it’s easy to see this shift as something new.  But what if it’s instead really old.  If we go back to the beginning of the story, Adam and Eve had no parents.  God was in essence their Father.  And so Jesus’ command is to rediscover the perspective that has always been true.  It’s not something we make true, but something we discover is already true.

And when we do, when we open ourselves to a new reality, a new way of seeing God, we don’t find a father that can’t get over our sin.  We find a Father that has always been able to get over it.  We find a father waiting at the edge of the porch for us to come home so he can embrace us.  God never loses site of who we are, even when we do.  And that is salvation.