God Does Not Play Favorites
"God does not play favorites. The more you enlarge your capacity for His presence by becoming excellent at what you do, the more the Father will entrust to you. That's how you grow in the Kingdom."
Matt Tommey (Prophetic Art, pg. 18)
This quote threw me back on my heels this morning. It was exactly what I needed to hear while I sipped my coffee after reading through Flannery O'Connor’s prayer journal entries, thinking how similar the way that she talked to God is to my own communication with him. She lived so long before me, and yet her feelings of why she cannot see God as well as she wants to are exactly my own.
"Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon...I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me push myself aside."
Flannery O’Connor
At the end of the day, each in our respective places in time, we are both young women who are trying to see God behind the shadow of ourselves. And that is truly what is in the way, isn't it? Simply the shadow of ourselves.
I have a recurrent conversation with the same friend that gave me the copy of Flannery O'Connor’s prayer journal about other people and their capacity for depth. Until this morning, I've never quite figured out how to word my thoughts on the issue - or maybe I didn't even fully know what I thought - but these two excerpts combined from Tommey and O'Connor have given me clarity. Specifically, the very to-the-point statement given by Tommey: "God does not play favorites."
There! That's it! That's what I think. We are all born with different gifts and abilities, but none of those make us less or more valuable than our fellow humans. We all have a role to play in the world, and if any of us choose not to fulfill what we are called to then there is a hole that is left by our absence: we are not replaceable because we are all individual. So no, none of us are born the same, and we all have different capacities for earthly achievement, but no person is born with a diminished capacity for seeing God. Because God does not play favorites!
This is directly correlated with our "depth" as people. Because what is depth other than a connection with God? I cannot believe that certain people are born slighted out of the kingdom of God with a lesser capacity to experience him, because that belief cannot coexist with the reality that God desires for all of his creation to know him.
"My dwelling place shall be with them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people."
Ezekiel 37:27, ESV.
God wants to know us, and for us to know Him, not only after this earthly life, but in the thick of it. He wants us to experience his love and his goodness and share it with those around us. He is a just God. If He were to disenfranchise a portion of his creation in their capacity to know him, it would be in direct opposition to who He is.
