Finding God ...

Image by fabyloveyop from Pixabay

The Me I Was Before looked for God in the mundane, in the everyday things of life.

​One of the mundane things in my life is squeezing a lemon into my water every morning. But I don’t like the seeds floating around in my glass.

One morning, I pondered this activity and found God there in my lemon.

I noticed that some lemons take a bit of massaging before the juices start flowing while others gush even as they are being cut in half, and that some lemons have more juice than others.

I also noticed the seeds that flowed from the lemon along with the juice, and that some lemons have many seeds while others have few. 

In my God/Lemon story, I decided that we are the lemon, full of juice and seeds, and when we get squeezed, whatever is inside of us comes out.

I decided that the juice was all the good stuff in us, and the seeds represented the bad things.

I was proud of my story, and decided that the best lemon was pliable with a lot of eagerly running juices and few seeds; the best person was compassionate with love running freely and sin held in check.

The Me I Am Now remembered this story, and I had some questions ...

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Why did the seeds get a bum rap in my story? Is there something inherent in lemon seeds that makes them bad (other than I didn't like them floating around in my water)? 

There are some very good things about seeds. Every seed has inside of it the blueprint for a whole tree! That tree will produce more lemons with more seeds, which will produce more trees, and so on. 

And why was the lemon juice the thing to be desired? Is there something inherent in the juice of the lemon that makes it good? 

Have you ever gotten lemon juice in a cut? YOUCH!! And what about the thing it does to your face when you suck on a lemon slice? You know what I’m talking about!

Also who is squeezing the lemon - squeezing us? Is it God who squeezes us, forcing out our goodness - and our badness? Yikes.

And what about the whole lemon, before it's cut - does it somehow have less value than its component parts - is it's value negated until it's cut open and squeezed? 

Why can’t the lemon just be what it is, how ever it is? God created it to be a lemon, and he said everything he created was good, didn’t he? 

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You see, the Me I Was Before operated out of a set of assumptions, based on my own beliefs and my personal context. I determined the value of a thing based on that context and a preference in a fixed moment in time. 

My story wasn't wrong; it was just the only story I saw. But it wasn't the only story.

I can’t help but wonder ... what other stories do I tell that arbitrarily (and perhaps unknowingly) assign value to things that God has already declared as good?