June 11

In his book A Grief Observed, CS Lewis writes about the death of his wife, Joy. One of the ideas from that book that has stuck with me is Lewis saying that the hardest thing about the death of a loved one is that they are no longer there to remind you that they aren't who you think they are. We have a tendency to construct an image of people in our minds, and it is in interacting with them that we are reminded that our mental image of them is never perfect. Even with those people we know best, our image of who they are is constantly being adjusted, usually in small, subtle ways, but sometimes in big ways.

One of the events in today's reading in 1 Chronicles reminds me of this. Uzzah is helping to move the ark and he reaches out his hand to steady it on the cart – and God kills him. David doesn't understand and he gets angry. David is reminded that he doesn't know God as well as he thought he did and it makes him mad.

We all do that too. We construct an image in our minds of who God is and what God is like and that image is always deficient. That's one of the reasons why it is so important for us to read our Bibles. We need to be reminded of who God is, not who we've constructed him to be in our own minds. Sometimes as we read the Bible we are shocked at God's holiness, his otherness. God doesn't think about things the way we do. Other times we are shocked at God's love and mercy. The vineyard workers who only work an hour are paid the same as those who work all day.

That's another thing that CS Lewis wrote. In Mere Christianity he points out that the salvation story we read in the Bible must be true because it's too strange for us to have made up. As Isaiah records for us "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord".