Recent graduate and this week's guest blogger Naomi had a realisation today... what are your thoughts on her thoughts? 

Maybe God is more human than we thought? Or to put it another way, maybe to be human is to be like God? I’m not trying to take away from God’s divinity or perfection, but it’s just that I realised today that we have one very crucial (and I have often thought human) thing in common with our creator; the desire to be needed.

You know that great feeling you have when someone in trouble decides to turn to you, when they trust you to help them with their pain? I think God must feel something like that when we take our worries to him. Even more so, because not only does it make him feel loved and wanted, but he knows for a fact that he will be able to help, no matter what.

Maybe we’re made with this need, this emptiness, this yearning for something more, because God needs to be needed? Don't get me wrong, God doesn't need anything from us in the sense that, he isn't lost without us or not perfect or complete without us. But more,  he has designed it in such a way that he yearns for us to want him, because that's why he created us. He’s so invested in everything about us that when we turn to other things for meaning and fulfillment he is jealous of this misplaced faith, especially as he knows exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it.

I know that some people think about it more than others, but I think that everyone considers the possibility of God, and that everyone is searching for something, whether it be love, acceptance, safety… I have never met anyone who has felt complete, or entirely content. But I guess in a lot of cases we don’t have to give it any head space, after all we’re young people in the UK, we couldn’t have it any better! And hear me right, I think God designed our youth with a lot of fun in mind and in no way do I think God and fun are mutually exclusive. But do you ever think about the fact that you will get old? That things will happen to you that will be hard to handle, that will break us? And even if they don’t, that we’re ultimately headed to death and then that’s it. Our chance is done. 

I’ve just been through a time when I’ve been getting on with life (and enjoying myself!) and not thinking about how God fits into the picture at all. Then last night I came down with a crash and painfully realised again how weak I am and how much I need God. No matter how long we fool ourselves that we have it figured out and that we’re doing brilliantly on our own, we can’t escape it.

God made us to be like sheep in need of a shepherd because he is our dad and he wants to look after us, like a shepherd.

And while I do not claim to understand free will and sin and all that jazz (in fact quite the opposite – it constantly confuses me and challenges my faith), looking at it from this point of view does make free will seem all the more generous. God could have left us as innocent children who don’t know right or wrong and who would never dream of doing anything against their parents wishes. But just as a mother cries when her children leave home for University and find their independence, God must have wept when he acknowledged that to give us free will would mean that so many of us would chose not to know him and not to give a damn about his laws.

All I know is that I have been made in a way that means I cannot do anything right without him and I am constantly searching, whether I’m aware of it or not, when I don’t have him in my sight.

As David puts it in Psalm 23: 'The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul'.