How safe is God??

I´m been reading a book lately -- How Safe if your God by Mark Buchanan, which has been great - and really made me think.
The whole book is about what he calls the Borderland and the Holy Wild. He explains the analogy of crossing a border from one country to another - but in some places - there is space between leaving one country and entering another - like a no-mans-land where no country claims jurisdiction or responsibility. He suggests that much of Christianity lives in the borderland, where people have left one realm -- but not really entered into another. It´s a place where we can make up our own rules, and live in a ´safe´and well structured way that´s completely of our own making - but not at all what God is calling us to. God is in the Holy Wild. (I love that phrase!) In the Holy Wild, God is not boxed in by the tidy arrangements of church or the limitations of our pre-prepared answers to the pre-prepared questions.

There´s a really interesting chapter on (Doubting) Thomas. To start with - what a demonstration of our own prejudice when we name him ´Doubting´ because of one incident in his life, and ignor the rest. It´s also really interesting to see Jesus reaction to him. The story is in John 20, and is shows us Thomas saying ´unless I see´.... 'I will not believe'. It´s funny that within the church we usually see doubt as the opposite of faith, and as a wholy negative experience, and yet it is doubt (ie the desire to see more, to examine more closely) that brings us to faith. Jesus´reaction to Thomas wasn't in condemnation of his doubt, but an encouragement - to do 2 things.
Firstly he says ´Put your finger here, see my hands. Reach out your hands and put it into my side....´ .... it´s an invitation to come closer, to scrutinise (in the best sense of the world) more rigorously and to experience God himself. Thomas actually didn´t touch Jesus´ hands - but he exclaimed ´My Lord and my God´. It wasn´t the science, the proving, or the carefully crafted theological argument that drew this response, but simply the act of drawing near to Jesus, of him experiencing his resurrected life.
Secondly Jesus says ´because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed´. Another invitation - to go beyond what he has experienced so far, to go beyond doubt and scrutiny.

I love this ..... I think God is always in this attitude of inviting us in, inviting us closer, of giving us chances to see more of Jesus´ life.
"Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith but rather an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is merely to insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously."
I think so often our doubt is not a doubting of God but rather a doubting of the borderland, of the tameness of organised religion, of the safeness of the God that we have made in our own image. But God is calling us beyond that ... into the Holy Wild.