This is my first blog on blogspot.com. I decided to start blogging here because I didn't have the capacity on my website to have a comment stream....and I was missing the conversation that writing one's thoughts is supposed to create. The title of my blog is inspired by one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists - Josh Garrels. The song is called "Farther Along" and it speaks, in a word, about the progress of the human soul towards wholeness....and the role God plays in this.
I was talking with a friend casually in a parking lot the other day and she was telling me about how she was heading to the hospital because her boyfriend was sick. She was speaking fast and she was distracted, and then threw in the casual "Well, you know, God's in control." When she uttered that phrase, I immediately shot out, "Really? Think so?" My response seemed to snap her into a consciousness with what she was saying. "Huh?"
"Do you think God is really in control?" I said.
"Well, yeah, right? I mean...yeah. I think he is," She replied.
"Did he make your boyfriend sick?" I said.
"No, but he allowed it........right?" came the increasingly tentative response.
We went on to have a wonderful and gentle conversation about what God is like and what we believe and why we believe it. I can't say either of our beliefs changed over the course of the conversation, but perhaps we had become more conscious of what those beliefs were and why we believed them. I think we had become more conscious of the questions that our beliefs raised about God and people and the nature of those things. See, every belief raises a question behind it. The question that accompanies those questions is whether we should fear those questions or not. Should we fear what we cannot know or explain? Why do we try to draw concretes from something that cannot be known concretely?
A person I am very close to told me the other day that all this introspection is not a healthy thing. I try to understand what was meant in that statement, but all I see is fear of the unknown and the desire to keep those things that are unseen in us hidden away. So, in this blog, which I will be writing more regularly, I will seek to simply give myself and others the permission to sail the Ocean of God's grace in a boat called "doubt" and see if it gets any of closer to a conscious faith - where real power begins to show itself by transforming us.
Seth
Not knowing is what faith is, that's where the power of God resides. I think it's good to question yourself, it's mentally emotionally healthy and once you arrive at the conclusion (whether it's the same as the original conclusion or not), you have learned something new... almost like you're reinforcing your faith. A line in a favorite of mine goes "the hardest thing to do is forget what god does", I think a lot of people blame God rather than looking for a blessing or a lesson which is when a lot of the questioning starts.
ReplyDeleteThis is not meant to incite in any way, but more out of curiosity: define doubt. By doubt, do you mean the kind of epistemic "doubt" that Descartes said was necessary in order to construct a rational/empirical foundation for true religion? Or do you have something else in view? Again, not trying to be nit-picky, but the devil is in the details, as they say. --Stefan (p.s. hope you and Amy are well).
ReplyDeleteHey man...(-: By doubt, I mean something akin to what Osiris is talking about in the comment before yours. I mean doubt as a "losing God", or as I would call it it, dying to self. The kind of doubt that Christ, I believe, experienced on the Cross. Where men like Descartes believed that the end goal was to construct a rational/empirical foundation for true religion, I believe that God is by His very nature (even as I label him with a masculine title) irrational, unempirical, unfathomable. I think the need to come to a rational religion is born of a deep rooted anxiety that lives at the heart of humanity, like the ancients, needing to sacrifice to know where we stand with the gods. I think Christ came to destroy that splinter in our souls. Religion, then, becomes a denial of God as much as it is an acknowledgement of Him.
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