God, the Boo of my life.

My relationship with God is like the relationship between Boo Radley and Scout and Jem Finch.

Like Scout and Jem I often find myself fearing God in an inappropriate way. I start wondering if God is angry with me, if He has ill intent for my future. And I sometimes think I am too blessed, as if God is over-rewarding me so as to be able to crush me like Job. Similarly, Scout and Jem fear Boo simply because they do not know his motives in life, and they subsequently assume that he is a child-eater. It's difficult for me to merely accept God's grace without some compliance. For that reason I am afraid of God - not the healthy watch-my-step kind of fear, but genuine trepidation at my lack of righteousness.

One summer Scout and Jem (and possibly Dill, I don't remember) discover that Boo is leaving treasures for them in an oak tree. You see, Boo has to communicate with the kids in this way because he is not allowed outside during the day. In this way Boo demonstrates his benign characteristics that would otherwise go unnoticed. Likewise, God does not reveal himself to me because of my fallen nature - I don't truly understand this, nor did the kids know why Boo stayed inside all day - but He leaves me treasures. He gives me loving friends and family, food and health, opportunities, science and literature, cfo and a good youth pastor. He struggles to communicate with me by using signs, whispering reassurances, and I'm convinced He puts thoughts in my head and words in my mouth.

Most recently I didn't know where to go for college. My options were to go to a state school or a j.c. where I would pay significantly less money, or go to Biola and learn about God. At the climax of my indecision I was at school pondering about God's potential plan for me when I remembered a gift of mine. I remembered that I have a knack for interpreting literature and the Bible, and that I can communicate my interpretations with relative ease. I remembered that God had given me this gift. I remembered that we should not bury our gifts but invest in them, strengthen them, and give the fruits of our investments to those whose gifts may vary from our own and to those who need our help. I remembered that Biola is a very good, close to home, Bible college, and that two of the men to whom I look up the most went there. I realized that if I let one of my greatest gifts, and certainly my most useful gift, sit in the ground, it would be as if I didn't care what God gave me, as if I had my own plans... better plans. I realized that whether I'm writing, teaching, pastoring, or disc golfing professionally, God will use the gifts He's given me to advance His Kingdom. How coincidental that I recalled all these things simultaneously.

But it wasn't an accident. It was a treasure placed in the oak tree outside my house while I was unaware.

One halloween night, the prosecutor in the case that Atticus defended, attacks Atticus's two children. Jem's arm is broken. Suddenly someone emerges from the darkness and turns a knife on the drunken man, thus saving the two children. The man who saved them, they later find out, was Boo Radley.

God always saves. Even in the non-life-threatening things. When I haven't prayed in months, when I haven't really worshiped in months, when I haven't told God that I love Him in months, when I haven't really loved anyone but myself in months, when I isolate myself like Svidrigailov or Raskolnikov, God comes to my rescue. He comes to my rescue with verses, with Jeremy's sermons, with chapters of Donald Miller, with loving tugs into prayer from Kate, with Jon Foreman songs, with novels by Harper Lee or Charles Dickens, with office episodes, with noomas, with jokes or stories, with smells, with 7th chords; he can save me from myself with anything. And what's crazy is that most of the time I don't even realize it's Him, just like the kids didn't realize that it was Boo who saved them.

At the end of the novel we discover that Boo has been watching over the children all along.

God has been watching out for me all along.