John 1: 18
The
Message Bible
No
one has ever seen God,
Not so much as a glimpse.
This
one of-a-kind God-Expression,
Who exists at the very heart of the Father,
Has made Him plain as day.
We read about Madagascar, about its poverty, its people. We
imagined what is must be like. We read about the tourist attractions, the rain
forests, the lemurs, and the marvelous diversity of its flowering plants.
Now we’ve been here nearly a week. We’ve driven down the
streets and roads, rich with potholes, big potholes. We’ve jostled with semi’s,
trucks, big busses, little busses, pickups, luxury cars, small cars, motor
cycles, scooters, oxen-pulled carts, hand carts piled higher than I ever would
have imagined, rickshaws, bicyclists, pedestrians—hundreds of pedestrians,
dogs, and chickens. None of these gives an inch on the road. All take
death-defying (and sometimes not defying) chances.
The cities are brown, dirty, bustling with life. The
countryside is a rich green, the result of daily rains. The hills are bare of
forests, bare of the diversity. The valleys are all partitioned off into
thousands of rice paddies. There is a vast carefully engineered network of
aquifers carrying the life giving streams to more paddies higher up on the
sides of the hills. Bare paddies have women and girls working ankle to calf
deep in the water and mud with large handfuls of rice plants that are planted
in neat rows.
Now I know the real Madagascar a little bit. It’s not like I
imagined. It’s not like the way it is painted in tour guide books. In a similar
way, God was described, painted, represented a thousand ways to me as a child.
I formed pictures of Him as a vengeful, exacting, controlling tyrant. Then I
met Christ, full of love, mercy, and grace.
Thank You, heavenly
Father, for sending Christ so that I might know the real God.
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