Mary posted something on facebook the other day that had me picturing when you've lost something in an inaccessible place; like your car keys behind the sofa, or your change down the sidewalk grate, or your ring down the sink drain. You reach and stretch and try to wiggle yourself into position, doing everything in your power and will to retrieve that thing that you have lost.
It is these pictures we have of ourselves that we often use to correlate to other, similar-sounding situations. Only, they don't always have direct correlation. For instance, there is a popular physics discussion about jet aircraft and a treadmill runway. Everyone knows that a treadmill works when you propel yourself forward and that cars propel themselves forward on wheels, but the jet propels itself differently. The wheels aren't propelling anything. The problem is that we hinder our ability to view the problem through filters we create from our own experience.
In the case of our lost item, the obstacle is sometimes insurmountable without outside assistance or intervention. This experience then becomes a filter to how we view something having been lost. This concept of the lost item is often projected onto God. How does an omniscient God lose something? Didn't he know it would get lost? Why wouldn't he know where it was lost? Did he forget?
The outside assistance or intervention is oddly projected onto the lost item, us. Our action is required to bridge the gap of the obstacles sin and death. We are required to cry out to gain his attention. How did it come about that the omnipotent God needed our assistance? Somehow, when you take the limitation of the human searching for their lost possession out of the picture, God doesn't seem so helpless anymore. If God's condition in the situation is not what we deemed it to be through the filter of our experience, one must wonder how our perception of our own condition has been altered from reality.
