Untameable!

Yesterday was an awesome day - I ran around town doing errands all day long with worship music on the CD player in the car. After years without one, I was enjoying the luxury!

One of the songs gripped me in a new way - so dramatically that I caught my breath:

Indescribable, uncontainable,
You placed the stars in the sky and You know them by name.
You are amazing God
All powerful, untameable,
Awestruck we fall to our knees as we humbly proclaim
You are amazing God
(Chris Tomlin, "Indescribable")

There is much in this short chorus to evoke worship and reflection. But what I heard with new ears was one word: Untameable.

Untameable - as in, He can't be tamed. When we tame an animal we try to bring it under submission, to make it fit our purposes and needs. In short, we try to control it. Not so with God. As others have said before me, a God we can control is no God at all.

But the practical implications of this are truly profound. We can't put Him in a box. He reserves the right to act in ways that don't fit our preconceptions. He has revealed what we need to know in His Word, but we make a serious effort when we think His Word is all there is to Him. It's not. It's just a tool He gave so we could know something of Him who is beyond knowledge. We simply can't handle any more. My intellectual bent loves to parse Greek words and dissect phrases - but if I think by doing so that I've figured Him out, then I need to start over. Any conclusion that limits God or makes Him smaller is wrong.

God's "untameable"-ness also means that He reserves the right to interrupt my life - or my day. He hears my prayer requests and knows what's on my to-do list, but it remains MY list -- not His. If He wants me to be part of the answer to my prayers for an ill, lonely church member by shifting my schedule around to send me on an errand of mercy, that's His prerogative - even if I thought that the job should go to someone else. If He calls me to lay down something as simply as my list or as life-changing as my career, it's really His call. Why should I expect Him to get with my program? He's Untameable.

Thankfully, our Untameable God also is a God of grace, mercy, love, goodness. And He exercises these in Untameable ways as well. A dear friend has a blog titled Scandalous Grace. Others has emphasized the riches of His love. A local church proclaims weekly, "God is good all the time//All the time God is good." We put limits on our mercy. He doesn't. The Untameable God is a limitless God.

Is it scary to trust ourselves into the hands of someone so - untameable? Sure. But what better place to land.

“Then he isn’t safe?” asked Lucy.“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver…”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

"People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time."

- C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe