It’s been said that other people cannot make us mad. Other people cannot make us happy, irritated, scared, etc. Rather, all these emotions were already within us. In those moments of joy, anger, irritation, or fear, we are putting ourselves into others. Psychologists call this phenomenon projection.
What happens when God projects? Read More
1 John 4.13 tells us: “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.” I don’t know, reader, where you are right now or what you’re thinking or how your day has gone; but, I’m going to ask you to stop, take a moment, arrive at yourself where you are, and read that verse once more, fully listening with your whole being. “By this we know that we abide in him and he [abides] in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.”
Oh my! Really? Really? What we think we understand as “God,” the “Creator,” the “Being” of all beings, this entity that is beyond all entities since this entity created entities, this something/someone that has to be so other than we: GOD HAS PROJECTED GOD’S SELF INTO US to the point that this phenomenon is the very thing that assures us of God’s abidance in us and ours in God. Whereas our projections manifest more energetically, in good days or bad, God’s projection means that something actually takes place–has actually been created–within us: God’s Spirit. Of course it’s this way. We’re supposedly people of the rumor: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…”
Check this out, if you have ears to hear it: This means that we carry everything within us…no, literally, everything within us. The very something bringing something instead of nothing–existence–resides within you and me. The same God who cannot be separated in any way, shape, or form from the stuff God made–we carry this same God with us wherever we exist. Think of it in terms of potential. What is God capable of? What are God’s limits? You see? That God, we’re told in this passage, has put God’s self within us (which is no different than saying we are in God).
Whereas we have mostly to deal with our own stuff when we find others are irritating us, angering us, scaring us, making us happy, etc. because we are then face-to-face with our projection, God has only to deal with all of existence–you, me, the earth, the cosmos, more than we can ever know–when, well, God finds things existing because God is then face-to-face with God’s own projection. We are God’s projections of God’s self (Genesis 1.26).
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