I was struggling with coming up with a topic for today’s blog post, so I turned to the internet. I googled “blog post prompts” and found a website where I can enter a noun, and get a few topic headlines to write about. I decided to use “God”.

Here’s what I was given:

• God: Expectation vs Reality
• Will God Ever Rule the World?
• The Next Big Thing in God
• God Explained in Fewer than 140 Characters
• This Week’s Top Stories about God

I think it would take more than 140 characters to do justice to the Almighty, and I’m pretty sure that ruling the world is part of the divine agenda. I’ll leave the journalism round-ups to the professionals. That leaves expectation vs reality.

There are a lot of ideas about God that are absorbed either implicitly or explicitly at church. God is portrayed as a divine judge in the sky ready to smite anyone who even innocently displeases. (I feel bad for a lot of the hapless people in the Old Testament who really seemed to be just doing their best. Getting zapped for trying to stop the Ark of the Covenant from falling to the ground hardly strikes me as a capital offense, for example.) A lot of people are judgmental and itching to smite, and I think they’ve created God in their own image.

The reality of God, I’ve found, is different. God is loving, patient, and merciful. God throws a party when the prodigal returns. No smiting needed. God doesn’t send us to hell; I think we send ourselves there. God goes into all of our dark places and brings us home.

God, in fewer than 140 characters, is love. And this love will rule the world. This good news should be the top story this week and every week, and if we allow it, this divine love can be the next big thing.