Confining God to the Courtyard of Our Hearts
LIGHT
My eyes fly open, and I lift my head from the uncomfortable pillow trying to locate the source of the sound.
DARK
A blaring alarm sounds above the bed in our hotel room, accompanied by a blinding, flashing white light.
LIGHT
The light flashes illuminating the darkened room.
DARK
Then sudden consuming darkness.
LIGHT
Another flash reveals the empty bed beside me, and a slow panic creeps through me.
DARK
Where is Ryan? What is this light? What is happening?
Somewhere within my brain the noise and light register as a fire alarm and I know I need to move, but my body seems disconnected from my brain at this interruption from deep sleep at 5:30 a.m. In the next flash of light, I see Ryan pulling on his tennis shoes, urging me to get up as well. I stand trying to find my shoes in the light-dark strobe light straight out of horror movie.
“I can’t see anything,” I say, panic rising higher, faster than before. Just as suddenly as this horror show began the room is fully lit in a warm light from the lamp on the dresser, and I realize in the same moment, I could have turned on the lamp beside the bed. My vision restored, I pull on my shoes and we head out the door to the nearest set of stairs at the end of the hallway.
Fenced In
In mid-October, my husband and I went on our first vacation in three years, and our first trip anywhere without our son. It was much needed time away, a luxury we don’t often come by. After our rude awakening, fire alarm blaring in our ears, we moved to the nearest set of stairs. Rather than maneuver the labyrinth of hallways leading back to the main stairwell, we chose the one right next to our room.
A woman and her daughter waited at the bottom of the stairwell next to the exit doors. Assuming they were waiting for the all clear inside because of the cool early morning air, Ryan and I opened the exit door to wait outside. But all we found was a small courtyard beyond the door. I held the door open, afraid to let it shut behind us. The small area was fenced in with no gate to enter or exit. This was not a true exit. We had nowhere to go. We were boxed in.
Without meaning to we lead God into the fenced-in courtyard of our hearts, giving Him the instructions on what He’s allowed to do within its limits, how far He’s allowed to reach within us. God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all in control. The idea of us locking Him away in this interior courtyard to twiddle His thumbs and only exert His hand when we want Him to is a silly one, at best. At worst, it’s a denial of who God truly is, what He is really capable of, and His absolute sovereignty in our lives.
But this is what we do, more often than we don’t. We walk into the throne room of grace and mercy with a brash boldness, exclaiming to the Lord of Hosts, “I’ve got this, God. You can sit this battle out.” God looks on us as we might a child playing pretend, with a chuckle and a shake of the head. How cute. When I try to box God up and define His limits for Him, I miss out. I miss feeling the fullness of His spirit at work in my life and the full extent of His blessings. I miss the abiding love offered to me through Jesus.
Grasping For Control
In the midst of a chaotic world, where it seems our hold on any kind of normalcy is fragile and brittle at best, I turn to the only things I think I can control. Limiting God and closing Him up in a box within us is less a sign of our narcissistic, self-involved tendency and more about our need for consistency, for routine, for a semblance of a guarantee. After living through the last 18 months, dealt blow after blow after blow and the realization of how little we truly have control over, it’s only natural to exert what infinitesimal amount of control we have, but we cannot expect the God of the universe to come under our control.
God, who holds the whole world in his outstretched palm like a shiny, round marble;
God, who was present in the dark of the beginning, the before, and who remains always;
God, who commands oceans, mountains, and hurricanes.
If you think about it, it’s laughable we feel we have the same kind of control as God. I can’t even control sudden outbursts of toddler anger or the food he puts in his mouth, much less command an ocean to be still or a mountain to please move over to left just a bit. This is how we think about God when we confine Him to that inner courtyard of our heart, telling Him what He can and cannot get involved with in our lives.
If you’ve never been awoken in the middle of the night by a fire alarm and a strobing light, there’s nothing quite as jarring. Mothers expect their babies to cry out in the wee hours of the morning. Dog owners expect their dogs to bark at passersby or the mail carrier. But almost no one expects to be drug from sleep by flashing light and deafening sound.
It’s a wakeup call to danger and to our need for control. Only after we see the limits we put on God, the confinement we placed Him within inside our hearts can we begin the work of deconstructing them. In their place, a dusty path, a warm welcoming glow, and a delighted smile from our friend, Jesus.
Feature photo by Frank Albrecht on Unsplash
