A High View of God
(as taught to me by a teenager)

Don’t you love how God uses people from all stages of life to teach us things?  I mean I love sitting down with my friends and chatting about life, but it’s just as interesting (if not more) to sit down with older people and hear how God has worked in their life.  And kids!  Who doesn’t getting a refreshing view on life when you sit down with a 5 year old?

A couple of weeks ago, God used the teenage girls that I disciple to give me that fresh perspective. 

After we had finished the introduction to our study on prayer, we talked for a few minutes about our personal prayer lives.  Seemingly out of nowhere, Eva piped in and began to very animatedly describe how when she is praying, she often gets sidetracked thinking about things she can’t understand like how God is eternal and how nobody created Him and how He is everywhere.  You know, those kind of things you used to think when you were younger but don’t really anymore?  The kind of thoughts that made your stomach hurt or made you feel a little dizzy because you just couldn’t understand them?  

I’m pretty sure Eva thought I was going to rebuke her for not being more focused when she sits down to pray, but, of course, I didn’t.  I was so excited to see her contemplating these things and thinking outside the box of “religion.” 

And in my own life God used Eva to bring me back to a higher view of Him.  He used her to remind me that sometimes it’s good to be like a child and contemplate those things we have come to just “accept that we will never understand.”  It’s good to see stop and see just how big and transcendent God really is.  You see, in my own life, just a couple days before this study, the Lord had been gently showing me how small and “predictable” my view of Him had become and how I needed to spend time contemplating His greatness.

So instead of rebuking Eva, I told her how wonderful it was that she was thinking those thoughts.  I told her that is a form of worship and that she should take those seemingly random thoughts back to the Lord and talk with Him about them....that she should praise Him for how big He must be that we can never understand Him.  I told her that we “old people” tend to get bogged down with “life” and have a view of God that is much too small and that we need to think about these things more often (at which point, she laughed and told me I wasn’t old…that’s always nice to hear, lol!).  I told her I hope she never stops thinking thoughts like this and having a big view of our very big God.  And I told myself the same thing.

Thank you, Lord, for using people like Eva to teach me more about You!