THE ORACLE
When it comes to the spiritual life, it's not enough to believe something in the academic sense. What does it take to make it more? Oftentimes life, in all its grittiness, is needed to carve out a path through the obstacles all our genuine, but misguided efforts create. In my case, I needed the past twelve years. My life needed to be stoked until it had finally reached the proper heat for God to begin beating it into shape.
This oftentimes leave me reflecting upon the movie The Matrix - namely about the character they refer to as The Oracle. When Neo comes asking whether he is The One, she tells him no. She conveys that no one can tell you you're The One. It's not something you can be told. It's like being in love, she says. You feel it in your guts. You know it.
She provided him an answer which, on the surface, was not entirely true, but was exactly what he needed to hear to help him make it true. Up to that point, he'd been unconsciously holding back, waiting to find out if all the hype was true. Once he was released from that burden, he began to embody his real potential - not the intellectual head knowledge he would have received from the Oracle had she affirmed his identity, but with the knowing that comes from experience.
This reminds me strikingly of life and of God. I draw two important things from this: God will be God and will follow you everywhere and do whatever is necessary to help you take that next step - even if it's something you can't fully understand at the time, and; becoming one with God isn't something a person can tell you to be or something you just know in an intellectual or emotional sense. Such union is the pure extension of grace and is a manifest experience, predicated on an emptying of yourself, a recognition that you're life is not your own, and the emergence of faith that your destiny has always rested in God's hands.