God.  Who is He and why should we want to follow Him?  I can only tell you about what God is to me, my personal God.  I used to have a punishing God.  He held me in His hands but only because when I did something wrong He was ready to squash me.  He was only present in my life when I did something wrong.  Why would I want to follow a God like that?  I didn’t.  I disconnected myself from God in my teens because He was just too harsh.  Now I always believed in God, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with Him.

Today, I have a different conception of God.  To me, God is a loving, kind, benevolent, omnipotent, nonjudgemental, and just God; among many other righteous things.  But still I wonder.  I wonder if I am worthy to be in His presence.  The Bible says that I am worthy through Jesus Christ, but am I worthy to be in the Holy of Holies with God?  Yes, I am; but I still feel this nagging feeling that I am not worthy.  I feel that if I saw God in my presence today, I would fall on my face because His magnificence would be overwhelming.

Now I know that Jesus died on the cross for my sins and that I am clean in Christ Jesus, but am I really clean?  I sin.  The plain truth is that I sin.  I have crossed lines that I said I would never cross and yet God says He loves me still?  How humbling.  Jesus abolished the law and made a “new” law that always was but he drove it done hard in the New Testament of the Bible.  His new law?  That you love one another as Jesus loves you.  I fall short.  I love others, but would I lay my life down for another?  Would I lay my life down for strangers so that they can go free.  I would lay my life down for my children — probably —  but do I know for sure?  Do I love those that deliberately go out of their way to hurt me?  Probably not.  So I can’t even fulfill the ONE law that God gave me.  And yet, He still loves me.

I don’t understand this God that I serve, but I know that He is more just than any other god that I would serve.  I know that He loves me despite my sin.  I know that He has made a place for me in heaven with Him and that I will dwell in His holiness forever, even today.  I know that I am comforted by God even when bad things happen – and bad things will happen; just as good things will happen.

Who is God?  I have taken my God out of the box that I kept Him in for so long and released Him to do for me what I can not do for myself.  He has made me a more kind and loving person and for that I am forever grateful.   I know that I have a “right” to God’s love and redemption, but I want to feel worthy.  I want to be filled with His love and have that pour out to others.  Like David, I want God to say, “this is a man after my own heart.”  I want others to know God, not through my lips, but through my actions.

Today, when I meditate on God, He is holding me in his arms like an infant in swaddling clothes and He is looking at me like a mother looks at her newborn child.  He is looking at me with the wonderment that this adult…this child, is His.