Independence Day

I'm greatly looking forward to a very relaxing day with the Johnson's and just generally chilling.

I'm very grateful for how they've seemed to adopt me in a sense. That they let me hang out their house and just generally let me a small part of their lives by sharing with me.

They're modeling the type of home I would someday love to have. A place where people are welcome to come over and just enjoy life. It's such an easy way to love people and to honor God.

I was reading John the other day and I was thinking about how God perceives humans, and I wonder if we ever surprise him. Now I know that this raises all sorts of possible debates about sovereignty, free will, God's omniscient nature, and the such, but I'm curious as to where humanity's ability to be surprised came from.

I think surprise can be broken into two types of surprise - delight and shock. Delight will be that surprise that gives you joy, maybe it fulfills a hope in a way you were expecting. Shock is when you are beside yourself (it could be positive or negative), and something really just hits you from out of the blue. Maybe there are other types of surprise, but those have been the ones I've been thinking about this week.

Maybe sometimes surprise is the result of having no pre-established expectations. If you expect something and then it comes to pass, are you surprised that it happened (maybe though you could still be surprised at how it happened)?

I'm not sure what in John triggered this (maybe that John paints Jesus as experiencing all these emotions, and as Jesus was the perfect man he would have felt all the human emotions, and as Jesus the son, maybe he felt surprised sometimes, which then it made me think if God the father ever experienced surprise).

It's funny though because for all the possible debate it could stir up, whether or not God is surprised or not isn't something to get hung up on. It's just something I wondered, and either way, it doesn't stop God from being God.