Giving Jesus the Highest Place

 A father, shortly before he died, was reviewing a life well lived with his grown daughter. "I regret, though," he said, "that a personal faith in God isn't part of your life." (I believe that was yet another seed sown, and she will come to know Him.) The exchange got me thinking about the messages my Boomer generation caught about God as we were growing up. In our small town, we were probably 80% Catholic and 20% Protestant; the people who didn't attend church at all were few and perhaps disinclined to admit it. (On every block were multiple homes containing families with anywhere from six to twelve children, usually with three to four bedrooms and one bathroom for everyone. My husband, until he was seven, shared a tiny bedroom with all five of his siblings. And this wasn't only the Catholics. Fun times!) Regarding the attitudes we picked up during childhood, I recall the following:

--God was going to punish you if you weren't a good boy or girl

--God's default state was "angry"

--God was very far away

--Whether you went to heaven or hell depended on your good deeds outweighing your bad

--If you had actual faith in God, beyond going to church and filling your pew on Sundays, that was fine, but let's not go off the deep end

Your faith was a part of your life. Maybe it was represented by the orange wedge in the pie chart above, or even the red. The blue, though--except for clergy, that would have been too extreme. Too heavenly minded and no earthly good. Too "Holy Joe" and not enough beer. At best, the comment might have been, "She's kind of weird." 

But I don't believe any of this is a correct view. Life isn't a pie cut into varying sections marked "family," "job," "hobbies," "home maintenance," "finances," and "God." Because that model portrays everything else about your life as lying outside God's purview. If He isn't God of all those other things, what exactly is He God of? Where does the "God section" overlap anything that's most important to you? No, the truth is, faith in God (through Jesus) is the umbrella over our lives under which everything else falls. Our families, jobs, hobbies, home maintenance, finances, and whatever else, are all subject to His will, the Holy Spirit's leading, bathed in prayer, and conducted according to His word and ways. "If He's not Lord of all, He's not Lord at all," is a true truism, and though we won't perfect that in this life (and there's grace for that), the view we need to take is that the components of our lives are under Him, not next to Him. 

So my prayer is that, through Christ, the father's daughter will go exceedingly abundantly above all her father asked or thought. That she won't make Jesus just a part of her life, but that He'll be her covering over all.