The Seeking God Series

Last year, just before I started theological college, I made this picture.

I did it because I wanted to make a permanant reminder of how I felt about God. I wanted to mark who God was for me right then just in case, when times got hard and academic work overwhelmed me, I lost my way a little. I'm now so grateful for this reminder. It is like a slice out of my life of faith that reminds me of what was, and is, important to me.

These last few months have been wonderful, I have explored new ideas and had many new experiences. I love exploring the scholarship behind the Bible and Theology, to think about the history of religion and how the world has changed. More than anything it enhances my faith. To me, God is truth and there is nothing to be afriad of when heading out into the world to weigh the evidence. That, after all, was how I came to find faith in the first place as a very sceptical Biology undergraduate.

 

To question is essential to any alive faith. If you have never questioned your beliefs then how can you help anyone else in their questioning? If you have never reasoned it out with yourself then how can you stand up and present this stuff week in week out with any conviction? Studying with this level of intensity shakes everything up and you have to wait a while to see how things settle. That is where I am right now and that is what this series is about, forging ahead and putting down some of things I am seeing along the way.

Quite like becoming a Christian for the first time I feel like I am stepping out of one world, full of familiar assumptions and understandings, into something brand new that I don't quite understand yet. As Taylor Swift would say it is miserable and magical! All I know, and what I knew then, is that I have to step out of what is comfortable to discover what is ahead of me.

So that is what this little blog series is all about. I'm not presuming to be able to describe God to you. If I could so easily put God into a blog post what kind of God would that be? No, one thing I have constantly found is that the moment you try to squeeze God into a box, God bursts the box right open.

Rather I'm going to talk about what I have seen so far as I navigate this time of change for myself. This series, like all blogging, is partly to aid my own journey. To give expression to the things I am discovering and the things I rediscovering from my past. To put words to things that I haven't attempted to put words to before.

Each week I'm going to look at one of the words for God I stuck in that frame, written out in scrabble tiles, and share some thoughts for your perusal. I'm offering this little series not to tell you what you should think but in the hope that they provide a springboard and a starting place for your own explorations.

One thing I know from the years that I have been on this strange and wonderful journey is that it is always surprising, always inspiring and always, always brings life.

 

You are most welcome to join me.