Session #2

Limiting God by Boxing Him In


Are we unknowingly limiting God or boxing him in?  Explore what thoughts others have shared.

Participant R.G., who has been waiting a long time to conceive a child, shared the following after watching this video:

My friends and I have talked about “The Plan” God has for us and how it gets frustrating to wait, and God’ plan for us is always greater than we hoped.  So intellectually I know this, but my feeling that God has “The Plan” under control is much harder.  I pray for babies and God sends me kittens.  So I enjoy our new pets, but still I’m a mess when I go to church and see everyone with their children.  I’m trying to be faithful, but I just feel jaded and angry.

Terry’s reply:

R.G. I have been praying for you. The Lord brought you very strongly to my mind during Mass last weekend. I might be wrong, but I believe he told me that he has given you and your husband a very special calling as parents. He wants to put into your loving care some children who are desperately in need of the love and faith that you can give them, but which they will not receive unless you adopt them. Yours is a higher calling than the parenting that comes through pregnancy. There is something very special about you, and the Lord wants to share that with children whom he has chosen for you.

Another participant shared in response:

Terry, in reading R.G.’s Comment and your reply, I remember how desperately I prayed for a baby, 4 years trying, until we adopted my son (now 20). Three years later we adopted my daughter (now 17). I remember how blessed i felt for having them.


K.A.C. wrote:

What you said in this session is a good reminder of what I have heard before. Yet as I hear it again — about God being boxed in by us while in contrast He and His love are so vast, so deep, so wide beyond our imagination and comprehension — I could feel that my mind and understanding of God and His love for me are being stretched so that I can encompass more of the “bigness” of God. So as I listen to you speaking, I’m expanding in my comprehension of God and His love for me. In short He is now in a bigger box than the one I had put Him in earlier before hearing you. So thank you.

Terry’s reply:

Wonderful!  Now picture him bursting out of the bigger box and completely filling all the space outside the box. All the open space. Make this a prayer meditation. Close your eyes and prayerfully feel your relationship with Jesus. Then visualize, in your imagination, a box, then it bursting open and God is escaping from it and expanding to fill the room you’re in, then the whole house, then your whole neighborhood, your whole city, your whole country, the whole world, and the whole universe.

That’s an image of God that’s more real than anything you’ve ever known him to be.


Session #3 >>> 

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