I feel blasphemous saying this. But I think God is big enough to handle me. To handle my questions and my searching for understanding.

And so I’ll say: I wonder if maybe the point isn’t to go back and try to fit Jesus into the testimonies written in our Bible. Maybe the point is to have our own encounters, our own experiences, and our own relationship with God. Maybe He is still that real for us. Maybe Jesus in the flesh, Jesus accepting the little children, is proof that His heart is for us to come out of hiding and walk with Him again. All over. Maybe even for the first time.

Maybe instead of looking to the Bible for direction, maybe we should look to God for direction? Did Jesus in the flesh not show us that God is that personal? Did He not say Holy Spirit would be with us?

How do we then know that we have experienced God? Versus our own thoughts and feelings?

People can get a little crazy with this stuff. That’s probably what many of us are afraid of. Especially the more intellectual types.

Lean not on my own understanding, sure. Easier said than done. How does that play out practically?

It all boils down to trust. I need a God who is that big. A God who is bigger than me.

As a person who writes every day, this is not such a far stretch for me. I write most often for myself. I am not writing theological legal briefs with every stroke of the pen. I have no intention that people six thousand years from now will read my writing. But if they do, I hope it will encourage them to seek their own relationship with the God I know that I know. When so much else is unknown.

Just food for thought. I’m not saying throw out the Bible. I’m just saying, as a writer, maybe the highest goal isn’t making sense of every little line of the Bible and using it as the mirror to make sense of our experiences. Maybe the highest goal is taking the main points and living our own stories out.