God I hope you're there!

The story goes when the great theologian Paul Tillich went to the beach in the early part of this century, he'd drop to his knees in the sand, scooping it together into a mount he could sit on and then he'd sit on it, stare at the ocean and cry.

Born in Germany, raised in Poland, educated in Germany where he found his teaching career he was fired when Adolph Hitler rose to power.

Immediately another great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr offered Tillich a job at New York Theological Seminary for a lot less money but he had no real options so he took it.

Besides there are no beaches in Germany and bad things happen when you can't get to the beach.

Adolph Hitler, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and such people get elected to office and life goes to shit when you can't be reminded of the vastness of the sea.

Anyway, the dignified old theologian had a terrible personal life!

His first wife left him when she got pregnant by her lover and his second wife married him after she lost the child she conceived with her husband.

These things happened while he was writing "Systematic Theology" and other books that changed the way people think about God, Jesus and faith.

To this day we believe it's up to us to know when God's doing things, or not, in our lives and in the world.

Before Tillich people waited on God, or some Priest, to slap them beside the head to let them know what was happening.

Tillich wasn't paid much in New York so he went to Harvard and then to Chicago where he made more money and people weren't as "judgmental."

As great as his was his life is as nutty as yours and mine, every bit as messy, flawed, with highs of happiness and discovery mixed with lows of disappointment and frustration.

The words he left behind are uttered in Seminaries and academic institutions around the world.

The messiness of his life is still examined and either vilified or praised as an honest man.

That's no different from how you and I are going to be remembered when we're dead and gone.

Who knows what Paul Tillich thought about sitting there on the clump of sand on the beach, salt water running down his face while staring at the salty ocean?

But I know what I think about when I do the same thing.

It's a big world and I'm a small person.

I've done great things and bad things and hope I'm praised for some while forgiven for others.

God, I hope you're there because I've staked my life on it but if you're not that's okay.

I pray to you every day and especially at night.

I'd rather live in a world believing you're here than one where you're not.

All those years ago on Holy Saturday that's whatever everybody else in the world was thinking too.