#2 in the “Mysterious God” series
I love the imagery in John chapter 5. There is a pool in Jerusalem by the sheep market. The name of the pool is Bethesda. On any normal day the water would be decently clean, used for bathing, and further upstream at the upper pool, for drinking. But every so often something extraordinary would happen. An angel would come and trouble the waters. Stir them up, disturb the molecules, and send them away vibrating with so much life that the first person in the water would be healed.
Contrast this picture with that of an abandoned fish pond in your neighbor’s backyard. There is still water in the pond, if you could call it that. There is no movement, no current, no life; save the algae that grows thick on top. The only reaction you have is to hold your nose and wonder how many thousands of mosquitoes are breeding at this very moment.
If you were given the choice between a pool visited by an angel and a stinky, moldy fish pond, which would you choose for your backyard?
Right. No brainer. Ok, then, what if one of these was the picture of your spirit? Which would you choose?
Did you think the question just got easier? Perhaps. But the application got a whole lot harder.
Allowing our spirits to get stirred, disturbed, disrupted and overwhelmed with life is not as easy as it is desirable. The stirring leaves us most vulnerable to a mysterious God, an unsearchable God, a God who is profoundly more good than He is safe. We shy away from the unpredictable and the unknowable. Anything that jolts us out of our perspective, re-arranges the molecules of our very being, sets us on our ear, and leaves our heads spinning has a tendency to remind us of just how little we are and how enormously BIG God is.
Troubled the waters.
Why does that stand out me? It speaks to me about wonderment. Awe. Intrusions upon your life, bursts of heavenly color, simple beauties and intricately complex challenges. He infuses the molecules of your spirit with the frequency of His glory. Who is this God you serve? If you can hardly comprehend what you just experienced, could you ever hope to understand everything about Him? No. Not ever. But the life comes in the asking, in the wondering, in the willingness to ask and leave the questions unanswered. This is your invitation for Him to come and stir the waters.
What keeps you from giving it? Perhaps you are not even aware of the moment when you stopped inviting Him. As a new Christian you may have been full of wonder and faith enough to move mountains. You wanted God to whip your spirit into a froth. You rejoiced over the perpetual state of wonderment, it was all part of the glorious encounter with your Savior. But slowly over the years, or perhaps all in one painful lump, the permission to stir grew restricted, the angel visited less and less and the first signs of algae appeared. You no longer wanted to be disturbed. You were content with your worldview, not realizing that there is no neutral. Not to grow means you will begin to shrink. Perhaps it was out of a desire for comfort and safety, perhaps it was because of woundedness or a lack of legitimacy.
In the end, if we are afraid of the unanswerable, if we must be in control, if we must not be vulnerable, then we will continue to shrink in upon ourselves until the life waters of our spirit become stagnant. It is like the abandoned fish pond that is never stirred, never refreshed, never troubled, and so becomes a putrid breeding ground for mosquitoes.
Troubled the waters.
We were made for awe. We were made to embrace a mysterious God and day by day, minute by minute to experience and express the wonderment of His ways. The enemy means to belittle and reduce, our God to expand and fulfill. The pool at Bethesda stands for me as not only a window into the works of our Lord, but also as a representation of the life made to flow in and through our spirits.
Having said all that, we can assume the answer to the question of which pool you would like your spirit to be.
So, let’s ask a second question.
Which one of the two pools is your spirit?
rimoftheworld7.com 
So why do people change from seeking the wild stirrings from God to seeing them as too risky? It seems to be a fairly predictable pattern from new believers to well grounded believers who know the Word and understand the Kingdom. What is it about the conventional pathway to maturity that seems to smother our willingness to be changed by a mysterious God?
I have wondered if some of the underlying legitimacy issues get overwhelmed by the immensity of the new experience. That lasts for a while, but eventually they start to come back, along with a whole new breed of religious legitimacy crutches. I also think of a statement I have heard quite often about having too much to lose. In my own experience it has had a whole lot to do with settling the source of my legitimacy so I am not threatened, and God forcing me to wrap my arms around an unpredictable world. It was either be an emotional wreck most of the time or accept that rarely is there a complete absense of tension, loose ends, and untidy events. In the course of the growth I discovered just how much I had limited God to something I could manage.
I believe we close in upon ourselves and ask God to stay in the vestibule after those first months or years of enraptured bliss just because He is so wild and wonderful. There is a crossing over that must come if we are going to live in that state. Most of us crave normalcy and sameness, even though we would articulate the needs for change and romance and adventure. And those experiences with God can be so awe-ful and painful, too. After all, is He safe? He is a lion, of course He isn’t safe. But He is good.