How does God do it?

I was talking to a friend earlier today about how I see many similarities in Catholics and Pentecostals. They both have a tendency to get mystical–and oftentimes, loony. The reason for my conversation was because I discovered a Catholic song/prayer that seemed very meaningful to me. My friend is Pentecostal. It’s amazing to me to think that Mother Teresa was a Catholic. She loved Jesus more than I’ll ever do so, and yet her theological framework and understanding of church/salvation is so far removed from what I perceive the truth to be.  A lot of the Catholic faith is just plain loony. But there are several people in that faith who love Jesus more than I’ll ever love him. The same is true for Pentecostals. They’ve always got to be casting out demons, or receiving a “fresh word” from the Lord, or getting filled up with “the anointing,” blah, blah, blah. And yet, there are countless people from within that framework who love Jesus more than I ever will. And then there’s the denomination that I’m currently participating in–the United Methodists. The lack of spirituality that one discovers in this denomination is not anything less than frightening. And yet there are people within this denomination that love Jesus more than I’ll ever.

How does God do it? He gets a hold of us, and we fall in love with him and devote our entire lives to him. And yet we are so loony. We are all confined by the way we perceive God and the truth to be. We have all our presuppositions, which are probably more false than we would care to admit. And yet, we can still see the love and power of God through broken, weak people who keep getting it all wrong. These people attribute things to God that are really the result of their upbringing. They hold wacky beliefs about God or this world. Their denominations/faiths are so off-based.

But somehow, they’ve fallen in love with Jesus, and Jesus still loves them. I would love it if someone thought, “That Tim has such a loony understanding of God and the faith. His framework is so off-based. But he’s in love with Jesus like no one other…how does God do that?”