Symbolism

Nearly everything is symbolic.

I've told someone before that I would easily be superstitious if I didn't believe in God.  Weird, right?  Doesn't seem like an INTJ.  But one can be superstitious and atheistic, and I have no doubt that I would be both had God not intervened in my life.

One can deny the existence of God all day long, but I think any IN-J type would have a hard time denying the compelling evidence of relationships between probably unrelated things.  You get bad dreams about someone and soon afterwards, something terrible happens to them.  You've recently been thinking on the brevity of your childhood, and you find that the community playground is being reconstructed into a bank.

On the basic level of explaining the relationship between Ni and Se functions*, Dr. A.J. Drenth says it very well:

"What seems to be occurring is that many INJs have a highly sensitive inferior function,  Extraverted Sensation (Se), which gathers copious amounts of sensory information from the outside world, including subtleties that other personality types tend to miss.  Their Ni then subconsciously processes this data in order to make sense of it, like assembling pieces of a puzzle.  Once finished, Ni generates an impression that seems to come out of 'nowhere'".

These subtleties are often of a symbolic nature for me.  And I would venture to say that this is because I believe in God.

Our God is a symbolic God.  He uses parallels, motifs, and metaphors, just like you'd find in a work of classic literature -- not to throw us into confusion, but as part of the perfect design He has for this universe.  There's already overwhelming evidence of this design, but God also includes this deeper layer of architecture for the ones whom He has created to understand it.

The Bible is God's work of classic literature, and that's where we find examples of his symbolism.  The rainbow after the flood, a promise never to drown the earth again; Martha compared to her sister Mary, a picture of religion versus relationship; and the most poignant of all, the sacrificial lamb finally fulfilled by the death of Jesus.

Today, I see God arranging the entirety of His creation to reflect his plan.  The smallest streams of the river of His design all connect into one.  And if He is the commander of snow, trees, armies, stars, animals, words, governments, music, time . . . why would He not command them to accomplish His will, even at the most microscopic level?

Recently I was having a hard night, and I had shut myself in my room in complete darkness.  I was silently screaming out to God, desperate for answers to some of my deepest problems.  Pacing back and forth across my floor, I only grew more and more frantic, when suddenly . . . the lights flickered on.

I froze.  I darted over to the outlet to which the string lights were connected.  The only way to turn the lights on was to plug them in, and I had left the end of the cord just barely hanging out of the outlet.  Though I hadn't touched the lights, they had reconnected themselves to the power source.

And I realized that God was reconnecting me to His source of unending strength and love.

I see these patterns everywhere.  In the weather, in the city, in everything.  I see it in the people who show up at church; I see it in the sailboats on our lake.  I see it in anniversaries and natural disasters.

I wonder if I'm the only one sometimes -- is this an INTJ thing?  I'd love to know.  Any INTJs who have thoughts, feel free to comment.  (I love getting comments on my posts because it gives me hope that society could actually be interested in things of such cerebral nature.)

*If you don't know about cerebral functions, don't panic.  I didn't for a long time either.  You can do an Internet search or wait for an upcoming post which will explain them in full.