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
