Jonathan's letter to God

Cute, isn't it? And we can chuckle over this because we know it was written by a kid. We can see that his brain is starting to kick in with a higher level of critical thinking skill, but he hasn't arrived as an expert logician just yet.

God makes allowances for erroneous reasoning like this. Jesus probably got a chuckle out of it himself—we know that He likes kids, and Jonathan's heart seems to be in the right place.   The young author directly compliments God for doing the right thing, and, reading between the lines, we see that Johnathan acknowledges that it is due to God's goodness and provision that we have a country.

So, how does this relate to a runaway bride?  

We also can see that even at a young age, Johnathan has developed some rigid ideas about proprieties and he is unabashed about sharing his opinions with God. This is a natural part of the growing and learning process; we do not fault him for trying to make sense of the dinosaur's extinction. However, he has made some presumptions and directly accused God of letting the dinosaur become extinct. We must judge if that is accurate, otherwise we will eventually end up with a badly mangled world view. 
Did God let the dinosaur become extinct, and if so, did He allow it so that we could have a country?

I am not here to answer such questions.* The issue for today's post is to look at how human reasoning and rigid paradigms are often not God's ways.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:9

The point of today's post is two-fold: (a) God had His own purpose for the dinosaur, and (b) Jonathan's opinion about the right or wrong thing does not change God's purpose.

God had His own purpose for bringing KatieLyn and Joe together, and neither KatieLyn's opinion nor her mother's matter squat as to the rightness or wrongness of His purpose. The place that their opinions do matter is in the directing of each's own human will to either accept God's purpose by faith or to choose to rely on her own reasoning instead.

KatieLyn decided to follow her mom and go with her own reasoning; because of the codependency, (see earlier posts from last fall,)  the pressure to use worldly wisdom (rather than to walk by faith) was enormous.

The Lesson
Human reasoning is incompatible with God's purpose. This is why the early church at Rome was instructed to have their minds renewed.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:2

This is what KatieLyn tried to do until overtaken by fear, and it is what her mom refused to do:  be transformed by the renewing of her mind. This is why she became confused after hearing the will of God, and it is why her mother was never sure about the will of God in the first place. When tested, and Satan used the dirty trick of implementing her mom in the test, KatieLyn failed to discern what is the will of God.  Even though her mind had started to be renewed and had begun to distinguish the will of God, the fighting with her mom took her right back to her old way of thinking. (See post from 10/30/15 and many others.)

Johnathan, the young scribe whose letter is pictured above, had his heart in the right place, mostly. The result is a strange concoction of being able to honor God and praise His wisdom while still making a proud judgment of God's decision.  He could have just as easily concluded that God did the wrong thing based upon some other reason because Johnathan's level of discernment was, let's be nice and say that it was "age appropriate." His level of reasoning caused him to believe that dinosaurs and civilized countries cannot coexist.

This is the fallacy that KatieLyn fell for. She was so trapped in her codependency that she reasoned a new family could not coexist with her old one; and she could not leave her old one. Her result was a strange concoction of giving lip-service to the Lord while making the decision all by herself.




* For the record, I believe that the Holy Spirit inspired men to write the Holy Scriptures for men. As such, to an observer on Earth, the world would appear to be formed in six literal earth-days, and on the seventh, God rested. Angels were created in another realm outside of earth's time and that spiritual realm can interface with Earth's physical realm. When speaking of the fall of Lucifer, phrases like "before time" are often misdirected; saying "outside of time" is a better choice. He fell into earth's time. There was no "time out" during the six days of creation. Dinosaurs still existed in the days of Job, where two (Behemoth and Leviathan) are described, but were on the way to extinction even then. The same factors that caused mankind's lifespan to drop into double digits completely wiped out the dinosaurs. Job did have a country, however, so Johnathan's assumption is not entirely accurate.