Let's get real

I went to a Beth Moore conference this past weekend. Hands down she is my favorite women's speaker. She's actually my favorite speaker period... just don't tell my dad that! This weekend she spoke on friendships. The first night was friendship with man and the morning after was friendship with God. She certainly rocked my boat.

Combined with the weekend, studying notes I'd taken down and re-reading scriptures she gave, I've come to several conclusions. Not only do we not know how to be friends to one another we have no idea how to be a friend of God. We settle for the mediocre life of feeling like God is only there to 'tell us what to do' and that he's not there to be a friend. We don't treat him as such and most of the time we don't want him as that. Of course because being a friend means we have to be close, we have to be vulnerable. If we lived more like God was our true friend, how much freedom could we experience?

I love how the message states 2 Corinthians 3:16-18:

Whenever, though, they turn to face God as Moses did, God removes the veil and there they are—face-to-face! They suddenly recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. And when God is personally present, a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation is recognized as obsolete. We're free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.

We come to God with veiled faces. He's there... right next to us. Face to face with us desiring an intimate, meaningful relationship and begging us to take the veil down so he can look into our eyes, but we don't. We're scared or we're vulnerable or were just too stinkin' proud. We can't live in the freedom and the liberty God has called us to because we're too busy with this thing in front of our lives. We cover up our real selves and no one really knows who we are... since we're either ashamed of it or we're just too scared. When Jesus died on the cross God ripped the veil. We respond to that by putting up a veil of our own. I use 'we' because I'm right there... I live that life of having a veil up in front of God. I think I'm pretty tired of it. I'm tired of pretending to be something I'm not with God. I can be real with everyone else, but God's a different story. Like he doesn't already know who I am! It gets old... living with a veiled face when I need to just get real and honest. I need to rip it down... tear it off, grab God by the face, put our foreheads together and look straight in his eyes and declare, "It's gone. I've ripped it down and I'm ready... ready to get real."