Stalking God

I finished Evolving in Monkey Town today. Somewhere near the end, she says something along the lines of "Faith is like a book in a foreign language; sometimes, you just have to hold onto the mystery." (I'm terribly annoyed that I didn't get that quote right, or even particularly close, just so you know).
It reminded me of a Death Cab for Cutie song, which tells you more about my pseudo-emergent, hipster roots than anything else, but the link was important.

I will Possess Your Heart starts out: "How I wish you could see the potential, the potential of you and me. Its like a book elegantly bound but in a language that you can't read, just yet."

I wonder, if God is like the antique Swedish book my grandmother gave me, with its fine gold-leaf scrolling and letters I can't identify, I wonder what I'm supposed to do with him.

I have grown up being asked to dole out answers. And I like doing it. I like sounding like the authority, being the one who always will steer you in the right direction. In high school, I would never admit to not knowing something. Instead, I would simply make something up, and see if anyone ever doubted me (They rarely did).

Lately, I  think I've started to do the same thing with God. To be perfectly honest: I have no idea if God elected us before we were born. I don't know how God speaks to us, or if he has a clear cut will for my life. I'm not sure when or how the world was created and I do not know how the world will end. Yet, there are papers floating around academia with my name attached to particular trains of thought. There are people who can without a doubt assure people that I believe in literary framework theory for Genesis or that I am a staunch Pre-Trib Dispensationalist.

I've grabbed my red ink pen and inserted English characters over the Swedish writing, creating my own novel and telling everyone that this is what truth is.

The song by Death Cab is the greatest stalker song of my generation. The man is suggesting that he will learn the language of this book that seems so nice on the outside -- he will win over her heart.

Am I playing the same game with God? Am I forcing myself to learn his novel at the expense of knowing him?

The Swedish novel my grandmother gave me has sat on my shelf since I was 12. I have never once thought about learning Swedish or getting rid of the book. Instead, every now and then, I pull the book off the shelf, and wipe the dust from its cover. I gently flip through the brittle pages and run my finger over the slightly raised text. I smile and breathe in the memories that I've had with my grandmother, imagining her mother reading this book in a land that seems wholly imaginary to me.

The point is not to read the story but to embrace my heritage: to soak in who I am and where I came from. And I think, increasingly lately, that may be the point of my faith as well.

Instead of living in the presence of God and using his word as a tool to grow deeper in love with him, I've turned it into a textbook to give me the history of the world. I've used it like a crystal ball to determine my future. I've used it as poison to shove down the throats of those who theologically disagree.  I've tried to learn the language, missing the beauty of the unknown. I've started to stalk God, determining to know all of his details, demanding that I find out the truth.