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WELL TAKEN.

I repent for my lazy and sloppy writing.

I was aware of what you are describing when I wrote. I was talking about something of a different order but I didn't know how to articulate it and didn't have the energy to try. I don't know that I can do so quickly enough now.

Perhaps it would have been enough to have said something like:

God does seem to love to give us redundant messages in literal and symbolic ways. He seems to delight in patterns that are repeated in a myriad of ways. There are evidently Heavenly realities perhaps even akin to a quasi Platonic ideal--e.g. the patterns of the Tabernacle/Temple taken from the Heavenly reality.

We also see the red Thread of Blood given for sins throughout the Old Testament and the power of The Blood in the New Testament.

I suppose we could add the fractals that seem to be everywhere and the Fibonacci (sp?) ratios that seem to be everywhere.

We also can note that God seems to champion the underdog as a pattern, a habit. Humility before honor; pride before a fall; first shall be last; last shall be first; Love more powerful than military might; servant-hearted sacrifices the quickest route to lofty honor; etc.

Nevertheless, about the time we get into a rut in our thinking; in our personal lives; in our relationship with God; in our personalized, tidy little boxed expectations of God--he seems to delight in surprising us, shocking us, shredding our tidy little boxes.

He seems to delight in demonstrating redundantly that He is bigger than our awareness; bigger than our imaginations of bigger; bigger than the concept of bigger; bigger than our biggest boxes so carefully constructed for Him. Yet He lives in the smallest child's reverent, submitted heart that takes Him at His Word and acts on it.

He seems to delight in creatively challenging us anew. He seems to delight in creatively wooing us anew. He seems to delight in finding or creating new wonders or new views of old wonder for us, HIS Beloved.

Like a star struck Lover He ranges wild and far to bring to us HIS Beloved yet new jewels; yet new wonders; yet new revelations of Himself, of His creation; yet new wonders of His plans for us . . .

His ways are beyond finding out yet He instructs us to follow close to Him in all our ways . . . to match our ways close to His ways as intimately as we can, with His help and guidance manage. And His Word gives us sufficient basics to do that.

And ONE OF the most consistent things about His ways SEEMS TO BE His penchant for surprising us with His creativity--especially about the time we think we have Him figured out--especially at the point of thinking we have Him figured out to the degree that we can begin to use what we think we know of Him to manipulate Him to get what we want "out of" Him apart from relating to Him as HE decrees and leads. We are forever trying to reduce Him to our conceptual, manageable size.

And His response is to be persistently at least a few steps ahead of us pulling the rug out from under such a mentality and habit of ours--until we get to the point that we accept and sink into the desire of Daddy's heart that we "just" relate to Him moment by moment in trusting abandonment to His will for us--flowing with His Spirit as we walk hand in hand with Him--ever attentive and obedient to His voice--regardless of however it is He leads us--as it is faithfully consistent with His Nature and His Word.

He decries cooky-cutter spirituality. We are not His beloved robots. He decries vending machine spirituality. He's not our vending machine--we plug in dead ritual and He dispenses goodies on our orders--NO WAY. He decries valet/butler spirituality--He's NOT our valet. He's NOT our butler. Yet HE DELIGHTS to give us the desires of our hearts--to the degree we delight in Him.

Yes, it's true--as we delight in Him, he creates in us a new heart and a right spirit and our heart's desires become more aligned with His. Nevertheless, He also delights to give us reallllllly petty desires as any Daddy would prefer to give a child baseball nut ice cream which she delights in--instead of chocolate which she doesn't.

And quite often enough, He will delight in leading us to a forest meadow or a mountain height or a surf hammered beach--or even supernaturally an 'off planet' vista and showing us new revelations of Himself that perhaps no one else has seen--just a private, creative revelation of Himself specially made for us for just that moment--not even to be canned and sold at the church book-store in cassette and VHS tapes or DVD's.

God seems to hate ruts. He seems to think they are like graves with the ends knocked out. He has reliable, redundant patterns about many of the basic truths and principles of His creation and particularly of relatinig to Him. But please avoid trying to package Him OR His relationship with YOU in tidy, tiny little boxes. He shreds those sometimes seemingly with great glee.

He wants a creative personal, unique relationship with each of us. And He is well able to engineer it if we will take Him at His word and do what we know to do to walk with Him.

Is that any better MHGinTN?