GOOD GOD!

For many years I was confused by the word "good." In the selfishness of my immaturity, I often mistook "good" to mean "boring" or "unattractive." I could not imagine ever wanting to be thought of as "good." Because the "good" rarely got any attention (they certainly didn't get mine!) I was proud to be a bit off the beaten path. Warped even...

What was I thinking? Here I am years later and one of my greatest dreams is just to be a "good" person. Someone who thinks of others first. Someone who has no hidden agendas. Someone who does the next right thing day to day.

But who can truly be good? Over the years people who I've thought were good were revealed to be frauds...or at the very least, hypocrites. But I'm the last person who can judge them. We are all capable of falling into self obsession.

So to be good, I have to find someone who is good. We hear it every week at church. "God is good all the time." But then reading the Bible sometimes it seems that His definition of "good" is not the same as ours....

We think that good is "no war"
We think that good is "no sickness"
We think that good is "no anger"
We think that good is "no disapproving"
We think that good is "nobody goes to hell"

and on and on.... and sometimes we think, "who are we kidding? -- God is good all the time? Some of that stuff in the Bible doesn't seem all that good to me."

So is God REALLY good?

He has already told us that we don't think like he does. I am so far from understanding how He thinks.

It's like when we were young children and our parents said, "No-No." And we knew if we did it anyway there would be dire consequences. Yet as we grew older we began to question, "Why?" And when the answer was, "because I said so," we thought, "Now that's just arrogant. They just want power over me." So in our own arrogance, we rebelled.

That's kind of where we are now, I think. We want so much to be something God can be proud of but we have our own ideas of what that is and how to obtain it. We never voice it, but our actions say we think God is just arrogant. Sometimes our choices leave us further from God's heart than we want to be. Further from his goodness. We are caught up in what we think...

Let's think again. I want to know what he thinks. I want to trust that He is good. I want to be good in His eyes...the one who knows me best...

My hope is that my family -- the people who are around me all the time--will one day describe me as a really good person. And that can only happen if I understand what "good" is...

So tell me--what is it?