When one of the more sublime aspects of your faith is the practice of worship--the act of vocally adulating the nature of your God together with a group of people--it's inevitable that you'll want to examine the praises that leave your mouth.

I have to admit that most of the worship words in my arsenal include what I call "default phrases", those I quickly switch to when I run out of more personal terms of endearment. "King of Kings", "Lord of Lords", "the Most Merciful", "All-Powerful", "Most Loving Father"... they're all true, and can for sure be spoken with a sincere heart, but once they reach the status of default-ness, their connotation, their real, raw meaning is sort of lost on you.

What does it mean to be the most powerful? What is God's infinite might and unconditional reign as King of the universe to us?

I started rereading the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis thanks to a wonderfully thoughtful Christmas present from Kylene, where many great and almost too wonderful feats of Aslan the Lion got me dwelling on just this. If he is omnipotent, omniscient, omni-everything... what's the point of even recognizing any tour de force? Why praise Him for His nature, some superior point which is the basis for all potential? Why bother going through all the motions of adoration when His might is uncontested anyway?

He saved me from being the proverbial lost sheep for longer than necessary; I got to reading a passage on young David, today. The one with that big lug of a Philistine Goliath, of course.

Reading all the minute details, it gets to you.

The simplicity of the blow. The sparseness of the victory. Watching it from afar as another soldier, you'd probably notice two dots move in the quiet of the desert, the bigger dot falls, and someone goes, "huh, it's started already?" (not knowing it's over). No lightning, no opening up of the earth.

And looking at David himself gives you a idea, already. Ruddy and handsome, perhaps, but scrawny and undeveloped. All his strength is (was) in his youth and the speed of his spindly legs.

I think David represented that moment the clue to God's power. He had whatever strength he had, but someday he'd grow up to be so much more (to the point of becoming so popular with the ladies that he got a grieving widow to get over it and sleep over haha), his weapons were scant and only those he knew how to wield, but would one day lead armies to battle in the front line in full garb.

God's power, I think, is unlike Goliath's which far surpassed anything David's meager muscle mass could come up with. God's power doesn't just transcend all that we know, but instead meets all levels of strength, then reaches higher and higher up with all the might and force and actual strain that it requires.

And from that, I feel it goes the same with His pain and His love, too. He doesn't surpass ours, doesn't exist on a plane impartial to ours--on the contrary, He goes through it all. Our pain, our love, then multiplies it with the incomprehensible magnitude of His own.

Why indeed did He send His Son to be born and to die here in the first place? He is not on a level above it all; He's in every one.