Living in a Safe World Because of the Presence of God

Continued from here.

I have been sharing my journey of processing something I learned in Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God. Willard talks about the reality that God is located everywhere simultaneously, which has profound meaning when you truly consider the implications of this truth.

I ended my last blog entry by saying that the only part of this earth that isn’t filled with the presence of God is people – all those who remain separated from Him by their own choice. I said this has deep implications for someone like me, who was severely abused in childhood and grew up viewing this world as an unsafe place. Let me elaborate on what I mean by this.

The Bible tells us that Jesus was a man of suffering who was familiar with pain. I never think of Jesus in this way because he was so joyful. (See Luke 10:21 and Heb. 12:2.) How could Jesus be both a man of suffering & pain AND a man of joy?

Willard says that Jesus was joyful because he saw the world through spiritual eyes. He knew the world was a safe place because it was filled with God.

Being fearful of living in an unsafe world has been my state of being for my entire life. When the illusion of safety is stripped away from you as a young child through people doing things to your body and spirit that should never be done, you grow up believing that the world is an unsafe place. This shapes your personality, putting you always “on your guard” – always looking for ways to protect yourself through either fight or flight. In other words, you grow into an adult with a victim mentality.

But God does not want us living our lives through victim’s eyes. He has made us victorious through Jesus, and He wants us approaching life through the eyes of a victor, not a victim.

God gave me a powerful visual of this a few years ago. I was falling prey to my tendency toward viewing myself as a victim, and God gave me a picture of myself cowering like a small child in my church’s parking lot while wearing the Armor of God. I clearly had everything I needed to be victorious in a fight, but I was behaving like the helpless abused child I was rather than the Warrior of God that I am.

Continued here.

[Graphic: Photograph of a wooden plaque that says, “God is bigger.” Courtesy Grace Daniels.]