We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Do you think there is any way we can enhance God’s well-being?
7 comments:
Maybe the way a new parent takes excessive pleasure in everything that his/her baby does? I go back to Phil. 2, also. God chooses to let us enhance his well-being, possibly. We certainly cannot do anything to "complete" God.
Carter,
Thanks. "God chooses to let us enhance his well-being, possibly" is an interesting way of putting it. That is, it goes past the mere structure of the created world, being human, and children of God, to situate this possibility more directly in God's choice.
I do wonder however, if the parent analogy works. Parents might not take much pleasure in a crying infant at 3AM.
But would 'to enhance' be connected to the notion of pleasure? Partially, perhaps?
(Tongue in cheek) Perfect parents enjoy the 3 a.m. crying.
Perhaps. By the time I left l'Abri, in 1974, that God loved the world the same way some parents love a child before the child is born. Perhaps. I note that there are numerous scriptures which attest to something being "pleasing" to God. By doing those things, by pleasing God, do we not enhance God's well-being?
Carter,
To please God would indeed seem to be one way to enhance God's well- being, and God seems open to this taking place. But some would argue, notably a respected group of church fathers, that there is no way we can enhance God's well-being, as God is not affected by our actions. God, for them, is the great un-affected One.
First, let me correct my grammar. In my last post I meant to say that when "I left l'abri,I had decided . . .."
As for "the Great Unaffected One"--the Lord has chosen to send his only son, who wept at the death of his friend; the Lord has chosen to have compassion; the Lord chooses to bless. I believe he chose to be affected. I keep going back to Phillippians 2: he "made himself nothing" and "humbled himself."
Both/and or I risk putting my god into a box that fits my thought limitations.
Carter,
Good points. God's choice to show us benevolence and love would indeed seem to leave him open to being affected by those whom he bestows these on.
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