Healing the Blind: Personal experience with God

Why do we put God in a box? Or a Ziploc bag? Or a room with a ceiling? We create these images of who & what God is based SOLELY on our personal experience with Him. Perhaps we should consider that we limit God when we look at Him in such a fashion.

Recently this concept was brought back to mind by someone who commented on my blog. She said:

I think a lot of people have had their experience of salvation and decide that your experience of salvation has to look the same. … God meets us so… individually.

This is SO true! Think about the miracle of Jesus healing the blind. Let’s just imagine

Depraved and helpless

That’s what I am… depraved and helpless.

You may choose to argue it, but you won’t change my mind. Why? Because that’s what scripture tells me about myself. And the older I get, the more I believe it.

It’s a hard thing to accept about yourself. Of course we all want to think that we can change ourselves if given enough motivation, encouragement or self-help books. The truth is, we can’t. We’re helpless to change ourselves and we start out life totally depraved.

“But, you’re a good person” you may say. Umm… no, I’m not. If the voice in my head was on a loud-speaker, it wouldn’t be pretty. How about your ‘inner-voice’… has it said anything recently that made you even more glad no one can read your mind?

Typically when I leave an event, party or even just work I end up ‘rating’

Who I am Hates Who I’ve Been: Part 1

I tend to be reflective on my life and the lives of those around me. It’s one of the ways I learn. What to do, what not to do, what I should have done and what I’ll never be able to do.

I’ll never be able to go back and change the past, yet there are times when that is my fervent wish. In the movie “Back to the Future” (pts. 1, 2 or 3), we get to live the fantasy that we can ‘fix’ the bad things that happened in our past.

Watching Marty McFly try to repair the past without damaging the future is compelling because we want to do it ourselves. How many times have you heard someone say, “If I knew then what I know now… oh what I would have done differently!”? I certainly have said it! But the reality is we can’t.
Even if we long for it, pray for it and dream about it… the past can’t be wished away or erased. We can only learn from it.

But do we?

In 2006 I shared