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    Taping Over God
    Taping Over God
    Taping Over God
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    Taping Over God

    By Jim Stevens

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    About this ebook

    Like so many others, Jim struggled with the unanswered questions about God, and the certainty with which many Christians seemed to present ideas about God, but at the same time as he was pulled towards cynicism, he was still continually drawn towards God with ongoing intrigue and the hope that God was better than he had thought.
    What if there is more to God than we first thought? And what does God really want from us anyway?

    In Taping Over God, Jim looks at how updating our early, and less developed ideas about God with deeper thoughts and further conversations can lead to a greater awareness of God and life, steering us towards richer and more meaningful relationships, maturity, and repair for us and the world around us.

    By reading Taping Over God, you will confront the deep desire we all feel to be right and to have all the answers, and come through, discovering practical ways to find and experience God.

    About The Author.

    Jim Stevens is a pastor from Melbourne, Australia, where he lives with his wife and 2 daughters and has been pastoring in churches since 2004. Experiencing church both as an outsider and as a contributor, Jim has been a thoughtful observer of the ways in which faith and God are understood and presented in vastly different ways by those within the church as well as those outside the church. Jim has a strong focus on presenting God in a relational, practical and humorous way as life is just better with more laughter and closer relationships.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJim Stevens
    Release dateAug 27, 2018
    ISBN9780648371984
    Taping Over God
    Author

    Jim Stevens

    Jim Stevens is a pastor from Melbourne, Australia, where he lives with his wife and 2 daughters and has been pastoring in churches since 2004. Experiencing church both as an outsider and as a contributor, Jim has been a thoughtful observer of the ways in which faith and God are understood and presented in vastly different ways by those within the church as well as those outside the church. Jim has a strong focus on presenting God in a relational, practical and humorous way as life is just better with more laughter and closer relationships.

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      Book preview

      Taping Over God - Jim Stevens

      Introduction

      Mystery isn’t something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand!¹

      My intention in putting all these thoughts onto pages is that you and I might understand God to be greater than we thought. I am also aware that I cannot even come close to showing very much of the bigness, closeness or the goodness of God in these pages. Hopefully our tiny understanding and appreciation of God is what grows in our everyday lives as we participate in this ongoing conversation.

      What we writers do: We reduce the magnificence of human beings to statistics, and illustrations, and article leads. Journalism—and indeed all art—is not reality but a mere portrayal or depiction that will never do it justice.²

      As I write here about God and life (massive topics that they are) I will undoubtedly reduce both to words on pages but in doing so my hope is that somehow reading and thinking about both God and life intentionally will enlarge our thoughts, ideas, and responses.

      In the same way that we intentionally strain our muscles so that they can heal even stronger, I hope that our thoughts also strain and heal to be bigger and better than before.

      When we write or talk about God, the whole amount of content is really part of an introduction as it’s quite obnoxious to think we have come to the final conclusions about an infinite God. We all interpret, understand and imagine God a little (or a lot) differently. As part of my research for this book I asked my 11-year-old daughter, Aurora, how she imagined God. She said, When I imagine God, he looks like a ghost. When I asked her to give me some more detail she said, He looks like a big skinny blanket with eyes! Sometimes he’s floating around and sometimes he’s sitting on a throne. My imagination of God is completely different to hers and that’s quite alright too. Because how we imagine God isn’t a competition of accuracy, and my descriptions of God can’t possibly be 100% accurate either.

      My attempts here aren’t to show the final conclusions about God, but rather to hopefully show God to be more than we thought and better than we thought. And in doing that I hope to relieve some of the pressure that we might feel, to somehow get God to like us and be for us.

      My experience and understanding only begins to scratch the very surface of becoming aware of God. However, as you read this and as it sparks conversations between yourself and those close to you, you might see a better picture of a God who I am also coming to know a little better. And as we continue to engage in thought and conversation about a God who’s not restricted to the boundaries we try to make God fit into, some of the anxiety we feel about God will hopefully dissolve.

      I often think it’s as though we would like God to fit into a 4:5 ratio frame so that we can post God-pictures on Instagram. If only God would fit in the same size frame as a picture on our smartphone we would be able to view God in the same format, through the same filters, which we view almost everything else. But what is so restricting about fitting things into our screens is that it minimises everything. I have found myself looking at pictures of my children on Instagram while the real and wonderful versions of them are sitting or standing in the same room as me, and I think we do that with God too. We might read about God (like right now, so please don’t stop) and we look at photos of God’s creation all over social media, yet we can often miss God in real life. God is in everything and everyone all around us if we could only shift our gaze beyond the borders of what we’re used to.

      As I write this I am approaching the big ‘four-zero’. I have attended churches throughout my entire life and pastored in them since 2004. Shouldn’t I have it all figured out by now like everyone else seems to have? Or are they just pretending to have it all figured out? I know there is still plenty that I’m not certain about. In fact I feel as though I am still at the beginning somehow of understanding God. I know that should be obvious. But for the thousands of sermons listened to (and many preached myself) I, like all of us, am seeing God like the Apostle Paul says in his world famous (for weddings) chapter on love, as though looking into a mirror without enough light or like being stuck in a riddle that I just can’t quite figure out.

      For now we are looking in a mirror that gives only a dim (blurred) reflection [of reality as in a riddle or enigma], but then [when perfection comes] we shall see in reality and face to face! Now I know in part (imperfectly), but then I shall know and understand fully and clearly, even in the same manner as I have been fully and clearly known and understood [by God].³

      Being stuck in this riddle, as some translations of Paul put it, reminds me of perhaps being stuck in a place like the 1980’s movie ‘The Labyrinth’, except without David Bowie in extra-tight spandex pants. Or maybe it’s more like on a cold and frosty morning when the car windscreen is iced over, and you are trying to drive while looking through the tiny space of cleared window. That is how we see life and God. I suppose it can be frustrating at times because I’d like to have all of the answers and certainties but that just isn’t how it is.

      At the same time, as we stumble through the darkness of our understanding, I also trust that as we intentionally seek, we will find at least something, and as we talk and live and look for God we will hopefully find God everywhere. One thing that I am pretty sure of is that it’s ok to not be sure of everything. Not knowing it all is ok. Trust, blended with practical transformation without having all the right answers, seems to be what God is very interested in.

      ¹The Divine Dance. Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell.

      ²Philip Yancey

      ³1 Corinthians 13:12 AMP

      First Thoughts

      Remember making mix tapes? If you are too young to know what I’m talking about then you would have missed out on an important ritual that took place in most homes through the late 1980’s through to the mid 1990’s.

      The time-consuming event of sitting in front of a tape deck and recording songs either from the radio onto cassette or from one tape to another was about creating a masterpiece playlist that you could enjoy listening to and have as a kind of trophy collection of your favourite songs. Making a playlist these days takes only a few taps of a screen and can be updated within seconds. But that makes it a bit less special somehow too. To get a mix tape from someone you loved was a big deal because of the amount of time it would have taken to make while they were thinking of you.

      The centre console and glove compartment of any car worth going in during that ancient era would be stocked full of cassette tapes just waiting to make any car trip better.

      Of course as you would grow tired of a particular song or playlist, you would have to repeat the ritual. You’d need to spend hours rerecording over the tape with new songs. Being young and without much spare cash I would find older tapes with songs I no longer really cared about on it and use those to tape a new mix over the top. But you didn’t decide to read this because you wanted a lesson on cassette tapes and if you did you would be highly disappointed by now! My point here is nothing to do with cassette tapes at all.

      Sometimes when it comes to matters of faith and God, we have often heard some kind of message informing us what it’s all about. Maybe it was a parent, or a relative, or a school teacher, a pastor, a Sunday school teacher, a door-knocker, a person with some kind of God-labelled banner on a city street corner, or someone else that gave us our first impressions or first thoughts about God. Maybe those first thoughts seemed great or maybe they seemed off-putting, but either way, those were our first

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