Life is full of fine print.
Stipulations that both qualify and curb the grandiose promises put forward in the main text.
Sometimes we are rightly skeptical and accordingly pour over this fine print to confirm our assumptions. While other times we forget to investigate the caveats and pay the price for our negligence in frustration, disappointment, and often cash. These clauses have become ingrained in our uber-litigious society and yielded such phrases as, ‘no free lunch.’
But what if I told you this legalistic mindset didn’t transcend everything? What if it turns out that wasn’t how God operated?
“If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract! That’s not a holy promise; that’s a business deal.”
God is not looking to enter into a business transaction with us, but a relationship. And relationships do not keep an exacting tally (at least relationships that work) but are foundationally built on trust supplemented with forgiveness, when appropriate.
This approach is outside of the norm we have come to expect from this world, and we are accordingly suspicious. For there is always a catch. However, placed in the context of a relationship, it begins to come into focus. For we have all been in relationships and experienced their imperfect nature, flipping from the role of forgiver to forgivee (sometimes during the same conversation). And a relationship with the Supreme only works if the terms and conditions are voided on his end.
Maybe it is time we too stopped adding our own subtext and conditions to relationships with others, and ultimately God. Caveats may safeguard us to an extent, but they ultimately limit the depth and breadth of experience, relationship, and life. For when we finally drop the conditions, we can enter the unconditional.