Day 8 & 9 ....oops!

I sat for a long time this morning thinking about the chapters on pleasing God and What makes God smile... I wondered what would my life be like if I could live with a God that literally smiled down on me from the heavens when I did things specifically to please him. I tried to imagine how I might crawl back into that small frame of the boy I once was that I could see in my mind's eye, kneeling beside the bed and saying my prayers so God would smile on me.

I got caught up in Rick Warren's recounting of how he would watch his children sleep and sometimes be overwhelmed by his love for them. I got the fact that God was smiling.

I sat in the window for a long time looking out at the rain and the low sky and the river, gray and heavy under the dark sky flowing by ... and I thought of God ...smiling.

I got an email with images of the Beslan Siege this morning and wondered ... Is God still smiling?

Would my life be better somehow if I could believe that a loving Father figure smiled down on me? Did the terrorists in Beslan believe God was smiling on them? I cannot make sense of these questions today and it saddens me. I cannot see why ... or how this smiling God is part of the lives of so many believers. I really wish I could because I dont want to make anyone wrong.

I want to understand how well-meaning and good people, men and women of Faith can arrive at such different conclusions about the nature of the presence of God in our lives and co-exist. This is a time when intellectual abstractions about dualism and anthropomorphism and worship and fundamentalism and metaphysics just dont cut it for me.

Rick I want to understand how you can believe what you believe ... and live in the 21st Century