God will never give you more than you can handle.

or

How me me me dressed-up as faith!  So many who have “more than they can handle!”  And that’s why we need God!

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Poor God!  The years, decades, centuries, and millennia keep ticking-by and still the “self-centric” and politically biblically correct binary arguments continue unabated.   The verse-offs, the drive-by spraying of biblical bullets, the hair-splitting intellectual wordplay (dressed up as faith) seemingly the obsession of those charged with The Great Commission.

Poor God!  Whatever, wherever and whoever this “we see darkly now” God is – we are determined to see clearly and define (correctly) what lies beyond.  Needy of being correct.  Needy of being one with One.  Needy of so much the bible says is absolutely and completely missing the mark.  But when did that ever get in the way of being biblically correct?

I got caught up in the “what is love” and the four different kind of “love” a while back.  The Greek debated and defined, the bible scoured and catalogued, the words filleted weighed and scaled into perfect academic bullets.  Poor God.

I bought-into this mythical “biblical enemy” called the Philistines.  The argumentative and divisive elite that only existed in the verses of the Gospels – but never in me today (or anyone else of correct belief).  We had left all that behind.  As we split and fracture into an ever-increasing debilitated “Body of Christ”.  Using ever more irrelevant imagery of weird bodily organs to validate why this fracturing is a good thing.  Poor God.

I found comfort in coming to the Father through God Soft Hands Jesus.  That I had fulfilled all the correct bits I was taught.  That others failed to grasp.  That others argued and debated just as I argued and debated (except that my arguing was my correct teaching).  I lost my fear of the dreaded atheists.  Felt called to be amongst them.  I found joy in this digital community where souls are written onto a page instead of hiding behind the infamous Church Smile.  Poor God!

Poor Paul! Self-centrically biblically incorrect.

And then found I was shedding beliefs as trees shed leaves.

Found something special in just one humble bucket of earth from which we all come and all return.  Became connected not with the massive mustard seed tree of The Kingdom, but the even bigger and silent root network under the surface.  A connection that is out of sight and not completely understood.  A network that finds life in this big bucket of earth that is all of us together. An earth that is not about where I am, what I am, where I am and what I believe … where being the right branches, the right fruit, the right leaves with the right amount of growth … where all of that could not and would not be possible without those silent roots out of sight and connected to the earth that is all of us. Unrestrained and chaotic. Free and finding life everywhere in everything.

We have a fig tree. We keep it in a large patio pot. Restricts its size and with that its ability to fruit – we have a controlled fig tree that will never be a “fig tree”. All because we have determined that we do not want it to take over our garden, take over our sunlight, get in the way of all the other stuff that makes our garden “our garden” …

So too I found this “faith focus” on the visible and definable limiting my growth and my fruiting.  Kept me from something very special and wondrous.  Separated me no differently from “the Philistines” and their self-imposed passionately protected barriers to relationship with anyone else (other than like-minded believers of their beliefs).

Just we call that “backsliding” … label it as “false teaching” … and protect our killer verses with a self-centric passion no different to the elite of the Gospel with whom GSHJ spent so many verses challenging in love.

Correct belief and biblical correctness is a mighty yoke we seek to wear and carry.

God will indeed never give us more than we can handle. 

It’s just that we have already done that to ourselves.  We choose to carry the unbearable.  We seek ways to weigh ourselves down with “the bible”.  We love to sweat and moan under the burden of duty and service.  We willingly find this earthly grind to be a sacrifice never intended.  We actively avoid living in the moment – unless in prayer or devotions.  We avoid loving without condition – unless thanking God that He does us.  We put so much between us and the fruit of each and every moment – that is the eternity here and right now we refuse to see.

Love.  You, me and something that connects ALL of us.

Correct belief is what gets in the way of Love.  Grind and sacrifice make Love transaction.  Duty and service make Love a job.  Community and gathering together (with those who believe as we do) make Love conditional.

The Philistines aren’t the enemy.  Being correct in my biblical beliefs is.

If I allow.

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