Why god?

Choose this day whom you will serve…as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.
Joshua 24:15

Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.
John 6:68
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This week, I ventured to ask a dangerous question: 
“Why do I choose to believe in God?”

This question is dangerous because it opened up a whole can of worms that I was not quite ready for when the question popped into my head after reading the texts for this coming Sunday. My first response to this unbidden question was similar to Simon Peter’s: “To whom else would I go?” This Triune God is the God I grew up knowing. This is the God we prayed to when my mother tucked us in to bed each night. This is the God I learned about on felt boards in Sunday School. This is the God to whom I credit with every beautiful splash of nature I encounter. 

But did I choose the Christian, Triune God simply because I was born into a family that honors this God? Would it be different if I was born into a family who worshiped Buddha? 

Throughout this week, I’ve wrestled with this question of “Why God?” And, as I am wont to do when I don’t want to go through an existential crisis alone, I invited others into the wrestling. Come to find out, there is good company to be found among people who take this question seriously.

Themes of wrestling revolved around the belief that God is bigger than religion, language, or culture; that our concepts of God have evolved from our two-dimensional childhood God to one that perhaps transcends our ability to understand; that maybe we just don’t know or haven’t chosen at all. And the reality is, what is Faith if not the continued seeking for that which we do not fully comprehend? 

Where I’ve landed on the other side of this midnight wrestling in the wilderness is not into calm intellectual discourse or logical apologetics, but rather into the breathless, murky depths of relationship. My personal experience of the Divine is with the God who chose to become one with Their created, not to enslave us or use us for Their own benefit, but simply because God wanted to be close to us, wanted a relationship with us. My personal experience with the Divine is of a God who continues to choose humanity over and over again, not because They need us but because They want us. My personal experience with the Divine is in the harrowing moments of my life when I am seeking not a God that transcends my pain but one who intimately knows it because He chose it on a cross over 2000 years ago, and chooses continually to sit in it with me again. At the end of the day, my choice to serve this God is because this God first chose to serve me. I have not found this depth of relationship, desire, humility, and oneness from any other face of God.

As for me, I choose God in the wrestling, not in spite of the wrestling. I choose God, unapologetically illogically. I choose God because in God there is a promise of eternal life in relationship with the Divine. To whom else would I want to go?