God at the Center of Our Lives

I appreciated the quote Marguerite Shuster, “The Mystery of Original Sin,” Global Gospel Project, Christianity Today 57/3 (April 2013), included by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. She writes of creation the fall and why God placed the tree at the center of the Garden of Eden. It is the place where God belongs in our lives!

God is not a boundary around the edges of our lives, a limit to our abilities that we are always striving to surpass. Nor, we might add, is he the keeper of a boundary imposed by legalists who think we can be changed through an ever more encompassing set of rules. He belongs in the center. Were God merely an outer boundary, we would be left with an inner boundlessness, an emptiness at the heart of things—left, that is, without any true organizing center for our lives. It is only when our relationship of glad obedience to God governs everything that we will be truly free. Then we will find no need for a boundary at all. The more we find ourselves needing to shore up boundaries, or feeling driven to escape them, the surer we may be that something is wrong at the center.