We Need a Bigger Box!
I am constantly amazed at my own self-made limitations on the goodness of God! Whenever I think I’ve let Him “out of the box” I had put Him in previously, I eventually find that I’ve only given Him a slightly bigger box. And I wish I could do away with these “boxes” once and for all!
For a great many years, it was my box of doctrines that defined who He was and what He had done and what He would someday do. My box had very little to say about what He was up to at the present moment, other than trying to get other people to have a box like mine ;-). It was a very nice box, all tidy and crisp and well defined. But it was hard to live in the broken world with a God who was so hard to find in the present.
When I began to hear Him speak into my life to heal the wounds I had carried around for decades, I was so sure I had given God free reign and let Him “out of the box.” To be sure, it was light years beyond where I had held Him before, and the life that came from giving Him more room to move around was amazing. Then down the road a bit I discovered how God could mentor me in so many other ways than I had imagined, and had to let Him out of the box that limited His actions in the present to healing. Then He began to come to me as “Father” which again became an out-of-the-box experience. And it seems to go on this way, over and over.
Each time I think I’ve finally let Him go free, I find yet another way I have boxed Him in and not believed or not trusted. Perhaps it will go on this way for a while. We have so much more to do on this road to wholeness. Not that I’m giving up on the dream of giving God complete reign in my life — I truly do want that. But I’m finally coming to know that my every yearning for more of God needs to come with my yearning for more growth and restoration, so that I can yearn still more for more of God, and a more out-of-the-box kind of trust. And if I cannot make that leap all at once, I will at least yearn each day for a less restrictive box than the one I had yesterday, and the light to see where I might need to let go.