These Questions of Life

Lately I've been asking these questions:
1. Who is God?
2. Where is God?
3. Is God?
4. ...and how do I read the Bible because I don't know if I can be so literal with it as so many people I know?

Growing up in Southern Baptist...somewhat fundamentalist...churches I know what that version of Christianity is. Having been in it for 26 years, I also know that it's something that doesn't attract me. It doesn't stir me. It holds no wonder for me. I simply can't continue to see God on those terms. So having now officially said that's not me, it leaves me as this kind of blank slate. Now I have to find what I do believe. So the questions I listed above are the ones that I keep asking myself. They are the answers that I need to find.

Well...it's the answers that are so elusive to me. I hear about a God that wants a relationship with me, but how do you have a relationship with a being that isn't "here"? I hear that God loves me but sometimes when I read the bible all I see are a lot of rules. But then I have friends who simply overflow with love. They have relationships with a being that isn't really "here". I've been reading books by a guy named Donald Miller. That's the God that I'm looking for. A God that turns the world into the beautiful example of magnificence. A God that isn't a set of rules, that really is about a relationship.

I've seen a snippet of a talk given by Donald Miller where he was talking about spirituality being like a tree planted by a river and how that tree didn't happen overnight. So developing your spiritual self is not a fast food solution. It's not something you can swing by the nearest spiritual store and just purchase. The conditions have to be right and then it takes time. So I've hopefully put myself into a condition to allow this growth. I'm going to start being honest about the questions that I'm asking. I'm also going to start being ok with saying I don't know. Maybe it's not a matter of being able to prove there is a God or that Jesus was who he claimed to be. But simply having faith that it is. Maybe being very fundamentalist about scripture isn't the point. Maybe the point is bigger than that.

So here is where I am. You can read about Jesus standing up against the religious leaders of his time. Jesus publicly denounced the people who used their religion as a way of oppressing people. So now fast forward to today. I look around and I see people who refer to homosexuals as "fags". But just as a way of letting them know that God really doesn't like them. As a way of witnessing to them. This makes no sense. The Jesus that I read about wouldn't have done that. The Jesus that I really want to find stopped the religious leaders from condemning someone like that. It's funny how Christians in our society focus on certain sins like this. How we look at certain ones and say "Yup...God hates you but he really loves you." This is the "god" that I'm moving away from. The one who is a set of rules. The one who cares more about what I do than me. I'm looking for the Jesus who healed a woman when she touched his robe. But that wasn't enough that she was healed. He so needed to connect with her that he stopped in the middle of a crowd just so he could make a personal connection with her. That's who I'm looking for. To be honest...sometimes it's really hard to find him.