If I see God as nothing more than a caricature of history or imagination I cannot do anything less than make myself my own ‘god’. And once I realize that in doing so my rendition of being a ‘god’ is embarrassingly inferior to the very caricature I am mimicking, I quickly come to realize that maybe the only thing that can be ‘god’ is a God. And if that is the case, I suddenly find myself hounded by the stunning reality that God is not a caricature.

Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down.

The beauty of God is that He will always be there to pick us up after we’ve exhausted ourselves attempting to be Him.

If there is any evidence that points to the existence of God, it is found in man’s incessant desire to be ‘god’ and his repeated failure to be anything but men who wish to be what they are not.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ stilted rigid by our traditions, held a suffering captive to our denominational creeds, and parsed thin by our need to control our faith rather than submit to it is not compelling to anyone…except the ones who are so enamored with what they’ve created that they’ve forgotten that they created it.

I am not ashamed of my God. But I am deeply ashamed of the fact that we have created a gospel that is far more of ‘us’ and far less of God. And more of ‘us’ is not anything that any of us need, but more of God is everything that we all need.

If the light we have is continually engulfed by the darkness in a way that makes the darkness even darker, maybe we should think about getting our light from Someone else before it gets a whole lot darker.

The best I can do is to ‘pretend’ that I’m my own god. But in the pretending I have to pretend that I’m not pretending, and somehow that doesn’t sound very god-like to me.

Try to be a god and see if you’ve got enough divinity within yourself to save yourself from the mess that you’ll make just by thinking about doing it, much less the mess you’ll make if you actually attempt it.