I’m terrified of having a routine God. I don’t want to ever feel like I know the Lord completely, but want to be constantly discovering unknown things about him and claiming his new mercies each morning. Unfortunately, it’s incredibly easy to get stuck with a fixed view of who we think God is.
We list off his “omnis” like they are just nice attributes on a job resume. We use the same phrases and old words to describe the one who created us using only the power of speech. It can even be hard to break out of our typical concept of who God is.
I’m currently in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, for the semester. Before I left, I kept getting asked a question I found incomprehensible. People would ask me why I was going to study abroad — not what I was doing or what classes I was taking, but why I would spend 15 weeks of my school year 10 hours in the future.
As someone who loves traveling and changing up my routine, it didn’t make sense to me why I wouldn’t want to be abroad. However, one of the main reasons I chose to do so was because God was becoming routine. I wanted to expand my blasé perspective on a deity who was becoming increasingly monotonous.
I wanted to take off my red, white and blue filter and see God through a South African lens. He has so many different characteristics and Christians around the world can only really grasp a few of them at a time.
God’s people have so many different faces, skin tones, styles of worship and perspectives of him, and I wanted to see which attributes the South African Christians celebrate and understand the most. I wanted to get a glimpse of how other Christians in a different context view and worship the same God as me.
On Sunday I attended a local charismatic church, a much different atmosphere than where I’m used to attending. In light of apartheid, God is seen as one who brings unity and vision to his people, putting them together and not dividing them into factions of belief or race or background. God is someone who brought together when the people sought to break apart.
But he isn’t just global in the sense that he is present everywhere in the world. He is global in that all people can relate to him, and more importantly, he can relate to every person’s experience. Every person in every tongue, tribe and nation can understand and be understood by God.
He is not just the God of the Americans or whatever particular denomination you claim. He’s the God of the poorest South African slums and of the richest American billionaires and everything in between. He doesn’t lean more toward loving a specific class or race or gender, for he is Lord of all creation, not just the particular patch of earth where you stand. Your bit of ground has its perspectives and insights, but so do the other bits of ground. Try taking a step.