Well new doors have opened and life seems to be moving apace and I am stepping along to the beat and rhythm of life accordingly. The history course is absolutely fantastic and I am always playing catch up with my reading.. I had a strange experience though yesterday which made me think..
I had to go for an echo-cardiogram.. there is a genetic problem in my family and my blood pressure is high so the doctor just wanted to check it out.. Never before have I felt like I was so superfluous to a human encounter. I had two technicians attending me and they chatted to each other as they swapped stories of how various machines recorded and measured while they recorded and measured my heart.
It was my heart.. true.. but somehow I felt that the heart was the star of the show and I just simply had to be there to bring it along for the technicians to look at on a little screen. My duty was to lay there patiently – (as patients do..) waiting for them to say I could take my heart home again. The technicians were lovely to me.. but weren’t really interested in anything I had to say or do.. other than offer my heart to their probe and the rest of me faded into the background.
Then I began to think about it all.. When we offer God something does he just focus on what we offer and be very sweet and gracious or completely ignore the remainder of our lives? We try to offer our best to God for service and ask for healing of those parts we can see are damaged but when we offer these things to God for his attention is that really what He sees?
I concluded that the way we de-construct things is a very human tendency in order to get a grip on our world. We de-construct our body into systems, we uncover the genetic code. Our understanding of the universe and even apple crumble on Master Chef all become de-constructed so that we can better understand and present it. It is part of how we learn about the world and relate to ourselves and to others. However, when we de-construct we inevitably dismantle and this dismantling is the opposite of how God works with us; God in His Holiness and purity actually reconstructs us in order to make us whole again.
Healing is part of this reconstruction and God doesn’t just look at what we offer : our pain, our grief, our skills, our intellect, our compassion our money, our bum on the church pew without seeing us as we are meant to be.. as whole and delightful creatures of His Creation incorporated within His Church and Heaven. It seemed pertinent to me that when we offer some part of our lives to God for service or healing that we forget the fundamental message that God has told us over and over through the ages: He cannot de-construct us. God’s blueprint sees us as whole and God cannot ignore the rest of our lives – nor can he ignore the rest of His church to which we belong…. If, when we offer part of our lives to God, we expect God to simply focus on that part alone we miss out on the whole picture which He is longing to reveal to us.
Yesterday, I offered my heart to two very kind and skilled technicians with a view to them knowing what was wrong with it. Thankfully I am aware that within the mystery of my relationship with God that I am much more than the sum of my parts..
annwhitworth 