I’ve Sacked…God!!

 

Throughout the course of my working life I’ve had more than fifty jobs, what a contrast to that of good friend of mine who has been with TELSTRA for almost thirty years, it’s the only job he’s ever had. I need to make a confession… to my embarrasment, I’ve been sacked from more than a third of these jobs, now in a few instances this was not necessarily a reflection of my performance other factors were at play, but on the whole it was. Truth be told, I just didn’t live up to expectations. In many instances I had a number of employers who were willing to carry me, they were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, but there comes a point where little doubt remains and in the cold light of day the only choice that remained, was to let me go or ‘sack me’. Apart from some embarrassment, I don’t look back with feelings of resentment or injustice, these decisions, were almost always fair and amicable, and the end of the day if you ‘don’t perform’ there really is no other choice.

 

In AA when they talk about God (which they do most of the time) they describe him as ‘ The God of my understanding’  When I first started attending a ‘twelve step’ fellowship almost ten years ago, I found this phrase a little strange, it was not a phrase I’d ever heard before, it seemed to encourage syncretism and or pluralism. After a few months I changed my opinion completely. Seems to me that we all have an image of God (or Jesus for that matter) and for many this image is nothing short of ‘infantile’ its one thing to believe in ‘Santa Claus’ when you are a child, but if at the age of 20 your still writing letters to Father Christmas something is seriously amiss.

 

I came back to faith almost 9yrs ago, at the time my concept of God was ‘horrible’ indeed, having grown up in a Church that was strongly fundamentalist, my image of God left much to be desired. Now I would say that this is the ‘norm’ for many Christians, if one continues to carry this image (and many do for a whole lifetime!) something is seriously ammis. At the same time that I attended AA I also started seeing a Christian Psychologist, about six months into this relationship she made a startling, yet brilliant suggestion, ‘your image of God sucks…why don’t you just sack God’?

 

And so this is what I did! My picture of God was completely dysfunctional. I took an A4 sheet of paper I wrote down in detail what this ‘god of my understanding’ looked like, nothing was spared… nothing! When I finished I looked at what I’d written…it was not a pretty picture, yet it was an accurate and also brutally honest description of the god that had been with me for most of my life. When I had finished writing this list, I took a black pen and across the page, in bold writing I wrote this word  ‘SACKED’

 

What happened next?

 

…To be continued