Six questions I had to ask (and had to try to answer...).

1. If the Bible is the word of God, and we can never fully grasp the complexity of God nor ever fully understand who or what God is, then how can we expect to ever fully understand the Bible? If there are four layers of the Bible (um... trying to remember them... but failing... the literal, the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical?), and naturally, we grasp one or a couple of those concepts easily and the rest, not so easily, then will we ever be able to fully understand the Bible the way God intended? If God is really God, and His knowledge would blow our minds beyond anything we've ever imagined and He inspired the Bible, anything short of it blowing our minds would probably indicate that we're not grasping any of it, right?

2. On a similar note, if the knowledge of God is beyond anything we can fathom, why do so many of us assume that if we challenge the Bible, we'll walk away agnostic or atheist? If the Bible is the truth, it can't be proven wrong. Right? So why not just dive in? I heard a sermon where the pastor quoted Martin Luther (I think?) as saying as he studied Romans, he "beat Paul into submission". I can't find the direct quote, but I think the point the pastor was making was that we should challenge the Bible until there is nothing left to challenge (which, really, probably won't be in this lifetime).

And to be honest, when I started reading the Bible, I was pretty certain it would end up being wrong in so many ways and I'd end up giving it up early on. But through the guidance of Christians and pastors who have studied the Bible as it should be studied, as well as through sermons and discussions, all of my unanswerable questions ended up answered. Not only that, but they ended up answered in such a way that subsequent questions would dry up too. Anybody who knows me knows that's not an easy feat. I was blessed with the most awesome set of teachers, but at the same time, the way God drove my heart into it, I sought out those teachers. I scoured the internet for pastors and Christians who had the intellect and devotion to Scripture along with the ability to teach it to me in a way that my mind was open to learning it. I'm grateful to have had the drive and the courage to doubt my doubts and actively seek out the answers and work through the conflicts I had with God, Jesus, Christianity and religion. I spent my entire life without that courage and without the need for God and out of nowhere, God chose me. God chose to change my heart and to open me up to Him at just the right time and just the right way that I might know Him. I don't know if I know Him yet, but at least now, I'm working on it.


3. If a person is born in a place where there is no Bible, no church, no missionaries, etc, is s/he choosing a life without God, which would consequently send them to hell? Or did Adam supposedly already make the choice for him/her? Or is it all just meant to point out to Christians even more clearly that we are choosing to let our brothers and sisters die- whether it be by not bringing them the "bread of God", knowing they are without access to anything that might let them make an "educated" decision about religion, or the bread of humans, knowingly letting them die of starvation, malnutrition, and disease from a lack of clean water. If we really did what Jesus commanded and went over there to spread the Gospel, we wouldn't have a choice through empathy to help those in need in any way we could. So when people in the world without the Gospel are starving, sick and dying, who needs the Gospel more- them or us?

4. One question (or argument) I had when I was agnostic/atheist was: Why doesn't God just destroy Satan? I've asked Christians, and I've searched the internet (there's a lot out there on this topic), but the answers never satisfied me. Satan's a part of God's plan. Or, Satan is necessary to divide the goats from the sheep. Or, Satan's trapped in Hell anyway, so he's ultimately harmless (um... except for all the temptation stuff?). Or, Satan is of no consequence and the issue doesn't matter because in the end God will be the final judge. Or, God needed an enemy. How can good exist without evil? So many answers, all sort of missing something- God, I guess.

And then it occurred to me last week as I was driving home from work in traffic, what if God loves Satan? I know, the immediate reaction is that that idea is absurd. But think about it. God loves us and we do horrible, evil things. We were with Him for ten minutes in the Garden of Eden and chose Satan over Him already. Satan is beyond our realm of evil, but God's love is infinite. If God is sovereign over all things and if He has a plan that will be executed no matter who is a part of it, then why would he bother getting rid of Satan? And if God loved Satan, there'd be even less of a reason to off him. Can we really say, "God is love (Satan not included)"? Or "God loves all Creation (except Satan)"? Did God make a mistake in creating Satan? Can the all-sovereign God who created life make mistakes? And if He did, wouldn't He both see them coming and be able to fix them before they happened?

5. Another problem I had was the whole "God is watching over you" thing. How can God be watching over everybody? And secondly, why would He care? Our culture today is one of abandonment and conditional love. It's becoming more and more difficult to believe that somebody who either doesn't know us at all or somebody who knows us inside and out, present, past and future, can love us wholly and unconditionally. It's just not in us to believe that that kind of unconditional love exists, even if our soul longs for it.

Somebody told me yesterday that they were a swinger. They expected me to be my usual liberal self and accept it. But I didn't. Sure, there's the obvious God component, where the intimacy of marriage creates an atmosphere of worship that allows us to draw closer to God and to knowing God, but that's not why I reacted badly. The reason I completely disagree with swinging is it validates our most pessimistic faculties; it confirms to us that we are not worthy of unconditional loyalty and love. It confirms that we just are not capable of that, even if it is what God intended for us. I know if any swingers read this, they'll probably resent it, telling themselves they're fine with what they're doing, it's all consensual, that it doesn't harm them in any way. But from my perspective, it so does. Can you imagine a love that never fades? A love built on respect, trust, loyalty, admiration, and sacrifice? A love that is earned through work but that is so worth it that the work in itself is rewarding? A love that replenishes the soul and helps us to see God? The kind of fairy tale love but on an infinitely greater scale- it's the kind of love the romantics set their sights on and the pessimists spend their lives scoffing. But what's wrong with wanting it? What's wrong with wanting the perfect love? Keeping in mind that "perfect" doesn't mean effortless or lazy, but earned and growing and deepening and causing us to rejoice in it, why do we settle for less? And even worse, why do we spend our lives confirming our worst case scenario for love? What benefit does that serve on a permanent level? How does it replenish our soul in a long term way? Can anybody argue that it does?

So our resistance to unconditional love aside, how can He watch over all of us and why would He care to? If God is really God and is sovereign over everything, then He created the world and everything in it. If God can pull together an entire universe out of the dust which He also created, how is it not in His capacity to watch over you? How is it not in His capacity to play an active role on multiple levels within your life? And if God is all sovereign and created life, He created you the way you are. That alone is setting you up for living your life somehow. He threw you into this particular family, knowing these events would occur in your life, knowing all you would go through, how much you would have to handle, how strong your character would have to be to make your life such that it accomplishes what it should as part of God's plan- how can He not be there? Why would He put so much effort into something and not stay to see it play out?

6. I used to say, "God is just a crutch the religious lean on so they don't have to handle everything on their own." It made the religious weaker than me because I was struggling with my stuff alone, with no God around to rely on or to tell me everything was going to be ok. That made me more resilient and more able to cope than religious people.

The first flaw with that concept is the idea of being alone. While I didn't have God to lean on, I did have friends and family and dogs around. I did have the love and support of those around me. Even if I'd reject that support so often, it was there.

The second flaw with that concept is if you truly know God, or since I'm not sure anybody can really know God, if you are truly seeking to know God, and you pray wholeheartedly in the hardest times to the point of meditation- I mean, give all of your soul and attention to prayer in those moments- you probably end up stronger than if you just handled it all alone. Why? Because in prayer, you not only have to face everything in order to ask for help with it, face your helplessness, but also give it all up to God. You give up the things you can't control: give up your anxiety, give up your grudges, give up your hurt. Basically, you give up all of your coping mechanisms. You let go of repression, grudges, resentment- all these ways that we close up our souls to protect them. How is that weak?

Sure, some people use God as a coping mechanism and those cases are particularly sad to me because it's unlikely they actually know God, instead are looking for a quick fix, an instant release of their burdens. They're using God to disguise repression. I guess it's idolatry, really. You're using this one small fraction of what you believe God to be and you're worshiping it for your benefit.

When I was betrayed a few months ago, I was careful in how I prayed for healing. I'm still new at praying, and part of me still believes I might pray "wrong" and ask for the wrong things and God will give me those wrong things just to show me the flaws in my prayer. So I was careful. I didn't pray for my heart to be instantly mended or for the pain to stop. I did pray for the strength to eat enough to survive (my eating kind of collapsed for a while). But most of all, I prayed that God teach me whatever He needed to teach me. Whatever growth this event of suffering and pain was meant to lead me to, let it happen. And give me the strength to endure until I'm ready to learn it. In all my pain, I gave it up to God. I didn't repress it. I didn't turn it into anger. And every night, as I prayed for my growth, I prayed for my betrayer's growth also.

Please God, open his heart. Please God, help him feel this hurt. Let him feel it with all his soul until he is crushed into submission like I am.

I'll admit that part of it was spite, but the major part was just to make this pain worthwhile. If this pain could change two people, to allow extreme growth in God for two of us, then it'd make this burden on my soul a lot easier to carry. If God broke me both because I needed to be broken and because by breaking me, He'd open somebody else's eyes too? Go for it. Break me to pieces, God. But just for me? All this just for my growth alone? Am I worth that? I guess God thinks so if that's His plan.

So is God my crutch? No. Jesus, beaten and tortured, carried his cross. No way will I lean on Him selfishly without taking that into account. Yes, God loves me, but knowing what He did for me, knowing the sacrifice, knowing the pain He must have endured to walk with me, I can't let him carry my bags. His love should be enough to give me the strength to carry my own. Not only that, but His love should be enough to give me the strength to help carry others' bags too.

I know this post was ridiculously long and it took me a few days of intermittent writing to finally finish it, but I hope it might maybe answer a few people's questions or stir up some thought...

The soul is an eternal thing. Why do we feed it temporary things when it needs eternal food?

Did it rain in the Garden of Eden?

Sitting here listening to the thunder rumble, I wondered if it rained in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve weren't clothed in the beginning, so I'd imagine that if it did rain, they'd be a little uncomfortable.... But without rain, how was food abundant? How did the plants grow?

I do have a bit of trouble with the Creation story still. I believe in evolution and I just don't think there is any way of convincing me that the evidence of the world being billions of years old is wrong.

I do however, think that if the earlier civilizations who had access to the Bible read that the world was over four billion years old and that they came to be from bacteria, they probably would have thrown the book out, just as many people now throw the book out because it doesn't say that.

The difference is, if they had thrown it out, we wouldn't have it at all...

But there are some things that make sense in a metaphorical view. Adam was alone, and then came Eve. It's true. Originally, there was no sex. Originally, there was a random exchange of DNA and RNA between bacteria that sometimes resulted in favorable changes to the genetic make up of the offspring that would result from DNA replication and division, and other times, detrimental changes to the genetic make up would cause the bacteria to become disadvantaged and perish. Rather than a survival of the fittest, it was more of a lottery. And then came sex. Some bacteria would develop mechanisms whereby one type would be the donor of genetic material and the other would be the recipient. Reproduction became more orderly with evolution and specific pairings meant there was a possibility for the fittest couples to produce more viable offspring, thereby starting survival of the fittest.

I'm just doing this all from my rusty memory (after not having done much biology since I graduated in spring 2006...), so correct me if I'm wrong about anything...

Anyway, so there we have the sexes being created after life is created, which suits evolution just fine.

As for the rest of evolution, in the order they are discussed in Genesis Ch 1:
1. verse 11: plants: first seed plants, then fruit trees;
2. verse 21: sea animals and birds;
3. verse 24: livestock, creeping things, beasts;
4. verse 26: humans.

The only thing I have trouble with in that order is the "creeping things". But on the other hand, if birds are genetically the closest to dinosaurs, it would make sense that between the creation of birds and the next step, the dinosaurs would go extinct and everything would sort of start over, putting the creeping things later, if that is when they would flourish... It's a stretch though. Or maybe what we know as creeping things might be different than the original intention of the name. The last possibility I can think of is that verse 24 is just basically mammals and the order within the verse is unimportant... maybe. Afterall, they all were created in a blink of God's eye...

Not too long ago, as I debated with a fellow blogger, his position being that evolution disproves creation and my position being that both can be true simultaneously, I brought up that it was too bad that God didn't throw fungi in there. Fairly recently, it was proven through genetic research that fungi were actually evolutionarily closer to animals than plants as was originally thought. If God had thrown fungi in there, we'd probably know for sure whether science and Genesis were compatible.

But He didn't.

Go figure.

The other thing I realized this past week that I hadn't really realized while I was studying biology is that we're the only one of our kind. You can't really say there's another animal very similar to humans. Apes? If you saw an ape in the woods, it's highly unlikely that you'd mistake it for a human. But look at squirrels. How many species of squirrel are there? How many species of dog? And after Australia broke off, a bunch of animals developed that filled similar niches to animals in the rest of the world, albeit with slightly different developmental characteristics, but still really similar in the grand scheme of things nonetheless. But what about humans? There's no species of human that any other human is inherently incompatible with. There are no reproductive blocks there, meaning we're all basically identical.

Why are we alone?

As another example, how many different kind of flies are there? Why can't they mate and produce some sort of superspecies when so many different kinds live side by side? Obviously, there are tons of genetic blocks there, and within each type of animal, there seems to be a strong diversity, except in humans.

We've got races, but races are just phenotypes, for the most part (i.e. what we look like reflecting out of our specific genetic composition) rather than complete differences in genetic composition.

So did God really create one species apart from all of the others?

Can you think of any others that might stand alone?

Platypus? :D

Or is that more of a combination of species? hehe.

One thing that used to bother me about Christianity before I started studying it was the whole superiority of man concept. That's what got us into this global warming slash species extinction vortex problem in the first place. We thought we were invincible and the world was ours. I thought that was a consequence of religion preaching that we were superior, until I sat in my first university biology course, and there, in chapter one, the author of one of the most widely used biology textbooks in Canada said it was obvious that humans had developed characteristics that made us superior to the rest of the species on Earth. However, he didn't give any proof to back up that claim...

I'm sort of agnostic when it comes to whether or not we're "better" than animals and other beings on Earth. I don't believe we can truly know we're better simply because the other animals don't speak our language. Our methods and processes for learning and developing cognitive abilities are different than other animals. Without getting inside their brain to somehow witness the thought processes they go through, we can't know that ours are better.

How do we know that trees don't think? Is it just because they don't have some semblance of an animal brain? What if their thought processes are carried out by a combination of cells that we haven't identified as a brain yet?

And another simpler example, we think we're smarter than animals because we created guns. We think we're better than, say, a bear because we can go into the woods and shoot our prey without having to run it down or catch it. But what if it was just never in the best interest of the bear to have that kind of tool? The bear catches enough to sustain itself without it and if he doesn't, he's not fit and won't eat and won't leave unfit offspring behind. Whereas we humans who have never killed anything, never even so much as pulling a carrot out of the ground, eat our fill until we are so fat we wouldn't be able to walk to the grocery store if our survival came down to that. Does it really benefit us as individuals to have all these tools at our disposal? Or does it just make us so reliant on them that we've become useless otherwise?

We also have this collective that animals don't have. We have this ability to pass down and therefore, build onto the knowledge those before us have acquired and built on. People five thousand years ago discovered gun powder and people today own guns without ever knowing how the process works.

That, I'll admit, is pretty unique to humans and probably does better us in some ways...

But to claim we're superior?

Somebody I know posted a video on facebook of circus animals, elephants and tigers, being whipped and clubbed during training and before performances. These animals have the capacity to pummel and destroy humans. Why don't they? Is it because we're smart and subdue them with whips and clubs? Is it because they've been trained since they were young? Or is there a potential that these animals, in growing with humans, have developed compassion for them even though they are the source of so much pain? Is it possible that they feel sorry for us?

Like that internet video that circulated a few months ago of the two men being reunited with their lion in Africa a year or so after it was released into the wild. Admit it, when the lion appears, part of you thought those men were done for. They are predators first, deemed that way probably out of our fear of them, regardless of our education. Yes, they are fierce predators, but they are just doing what God created them to do. And if you take them out of that role, if you remove them from their place of worship (if worship is doing what God intended through creation), is it not expected that they'd behave unpredictably and differently than they would in their natural circumstances?

Just like us.

We are so removed from what we were originally created for that we debate whether or not we were created. Whether or not we were created in a flash or through billions of years of genetic exchanges, we are creations. Nobody can deny that, can they? But who is the Creator?

Can science be the Creator?

Does science create or does it explore and make use of what is already there?

Why you? Why do you exist? Why were you born now, and why were you born human? Why were you born as whatever kind of human you are, wherever you are? Why did the genetic composition of your body yield your conscience and soul? Why did that specific pairing of gametes create the person you life within? Why does that person hear your inner thoughts? Why is your soul looking out from these particular eyes? Why is your soul feeling and experiencing life from this body?

And why are you conscious of it?

Is it all luck of the draw? What caused the draw?

Genesis 2:6 says there "a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground"... So it didn't exactly rain in Eden. I guess we'll never know because we weren't there.

For some reason, we're here instead...

For some reason.

It's still my birthday.

Last February, I was listening to a sermon from a church in the deep south and at one point, the pastor, in front of about seven hundred or so people (I don't know the exact number because I've never been there in person), started basically bashing gay people. I spent four hours that night writing an email explaining why it wasn't Biblical or Christian to bash gay people. A couple of my friends read the email and said it was well-written and well thought out. Without sounding too prideful, I really did argue it in a way that made it hard to not realize that this kind of hate, even if it's socially acceptable in some areas (or many areas) down there, is not Jesusy at all.

After that email, to which I never received a reply, the church stopped updating their sermons online. For weeks, the site sat unmaintained and unchanged. Eventually, I gave up checking it, deciding it wasn't worth the effort especially since the guy I was seeing who grew up in that church got rid of me in January. I felt that even though the pastor was relatively new, this particular church had helped shaped the guy I was seeing's heart into the cold, broken, selfish, hard heart it was, and by preaching hate, I worried that this small town church might somehow start to change my heart in bad way.

There is a fine line between a church community and a closed-minded clique and the small town churches I've listened to online cross that line sometimes.

My goal in listening to sermons online was to hear the Gospel. I already know of churches who mishandle it and twist it into religiosity for their own gain. Those kind of churches I can find right here, all over my city. That's not what I was looking for online. The thing is, after hearing so many Gospel-centered sermons online, I couldn't sit back and let a pastor spread hate unchallenged. I couldn't do it. That's why I emailed. I might not be able to change anything in the churches around me but maybe I could affect one pastor- the first pastor I had ever talked to without being forced.

Anyway, over the months since then, I've prayed for him so many times. I've prayed that God would open his heart. Over and over, I'd pray it. Please, God, open the pastor's heart. Help him teach the Gospel from the heart for Jesus.

Four months have passed, and I still pray for him. And tonight, for some reason, I decided to check the website. The homepage was exactly the same, so my hopes for the sermons page to be updated dropped. I clicked it and sure enough, there they were: all the sermons from the past four months, completely up to date.

At first, I thought, "Do I start with the February ones?" and then I wondered if hearing his voice again, and hearing his strong southern accent might stir up unwanted memories from an era that has long since past.

As I scrolled down the page, I saw it... My birthday sermon. So I opened it.

The beginning was completely different than the sermons he used to give. He was throwing Bible verses out so quickly, I had to keep pausing it to have enough time to look them up. His sermon had far more substance and Bible teaching than before. And then towards the end, he was talking about the leaders God chooses to spread His word and the responsibility and sacrifice that comes with being chosen and he just broke down. I won't go into detail because without the context, it would lose it's power, but his heart juices were just spilling out everywhere. He preached from the heart so movingly that it made me cry. He just took his heart right out in front of all those people and left it there.

But after months and months of praying for it, to hear it happen in my birthday sermon is a little overwhelming.

Of course, I had to email him again and spill my own goosh all over the place. He may not be a perfect pastor, but he was the first one to help me and to answer my questions at the very beginning. He told me where to start in my Bible study and the basics of how to start. And if I could reciprocate what he did for me through prayer that God would answer, I think that's an awesome thing.

God does the most awesome things.

On beauty and survival of the fittest.

How does the perception of beauty, apart from the beauty we seek in a mate, benefit us through natural selection?

If I go to Banff and am in awe of the mountains and the beauty of it all stimulates my soul, what benefit is that to my survival?

Logically, one could argue that maybe the beauty we perceive in our surroundings is meant to point us towards a food source. Say we're in awe standing at the foot of a giant tree. Obviously, for that tree to sustain such incredible growth, not only does there have to be an abundance of nutrients available, but also the climate and weather have to be favorable and somewhat relatively peaceful to allow long term growth without impediments due to weather damage or breakage of limbs, and so on. So in being in the area near that tree, theoretically, we'd have food and perhaps a lessened exposure to potential elements.

But what about mountains? The higher the mountain, the greater it seems is the stimulation to our soul. But there's no food up there. The elements are wicked and unforgiving. Really, there is even barely any air up there. So what benefit does it serve us to see the beauty and be moved deep inside our soul by a mountain?

In a sermon I heard a while ago, the pastor (Tyler Jones) said that we are in awe of mountains and of natural wonders because they are doing what they were created to do. In doing what one is created for, it becomes worship and to witness true worship moves our soul.

What if God gave us the choice to seek Him or not, but knowing we aren't the most spiritually aware, He threw in some soul-stirring amazings just to get even the most oblivious among us wondering if there is something more than just us?

Another example is the desert. So many people take trips to the desert and take the most awesome pictures of the dunes (or whatever they're called), and the shapes and structures formed by the sand as the sunlight spills strategically over them. But the desert is no place to be if one's goal is survival.

Maybe by having our soul stirred by beauty we become happier people which therefore makes us more likely to survive.

I've had a rough few months and in driving down to North Carolina on a whim for my birthday, my soul was regenerated and my spirit was renewed. Yes, I realize that's redundant, but really, both happened. :D I came back home more motivated, more determined and significantly more content. Obviously, the combination is perfect for survival. The stimulation made me stronger and changed my attitude, so yes, in this context, beauty does lead to an increased survivability.

But if there is a God, is it not possible that He created both the beauty and the human ability to perceive it for just that purpose- for renewing us and giving us strength we otherwise would not have found?

While in North Carolina, I took my dogs on a hike to Crabtree Falls. There, I sat them in front of the falls, facing the falls directly while I took their picture. Did they grasp what was going on? Did they look at the falls and realize what they were witnessing?



I wonder whether my dogs believe in God or not. Sometimes, I think humans were given the choice and dogs weren't and therefore, dogs just innately believe. I have been with a few dogs as they died and none of them ever seemed scared of their imminent death. Without God, how can an animal, whom we see as not being particularly aware of the reasoning behind the goings on around them, not be afraid? How can they be ok with dying if they don't know what's going on nor do they know there is a God? How can they even know they're dying? How does an animal figure that out? It's not like they've died before and know the feeling... Right?

If dogs innately know there is a God who created them, do they need to feel beauty? Or do they just walk through life with that feeling constantly because they always know God? Is that why they can love us so unconditionally and why they're always ready for joy? Is it why they never complain about headaches and don't care about money or things? Do they know deep in their soul that there is something far more important than the selfishness of the human pursuit of happiness?

Sure, they may just be dogs, simple-minded and oblivious to the world. Or they may be God's creations to show us the choice we made in the Garden of Eden. We chose this life of independence and in consequence, chose our ups and downs. No doubt dogs and all other living beings around us have ups and downs, but the attitude with which they approach them seems so different than ours. For every up and every down we face, we are overwhelmed with choices, all of which point to our independence as an individual.

Without that independence, would we only have the one choice? Would we only have God?

What does it say about us that that's not enough?

If you think about it, I'm not just talking about Adam and Eve here. Every day, we choose hundreds of things over God. We idolize things, we destroy things, we hurt people. We allow our worst and most selfish faculties to reign over our decisions constantly.

So really, what does it say about us that God is never enough?

Would you give up your ability to perceive beauty if it meant you would always know God?

On the confinements of free will.

[It's a bit of a rant... I don't quote any scripture, but if you go here and click on the audio for the session called "Does God have two wills?" which as of this writing was second to last on the page, then you can hear the abundance of scripture that brought about this post... Of course, all the thoughts are my own (not the church's or the pastor's) and I'm just a nobody learning about religion. :D]

I have no idea where in the Bible it says we have free will. Adam and Eve roamed freely and chose to not choose God. That's about the extent I see of free will so far: we can choose whether or not we let God into our lives.

But then I posted a question I heard in a sermon about how prayer is expecting God to impede other people's free will and after I'd posted that, I tried to figure out the answer on my own. The only thing I came up with was there is no free will.

Another question raised was sort of the opposite. If you do have free will and God can't affect it, then was giving humans free will giving the all-sovereign God something He could not be sovereign over? Did He give us a sort of power above His own?

How is that possible?

I emailed the Village Church for help in figuring it out. They can't very well bring it up and then leave us all wondering, right? They kindly and quickly replied, referring me to a study session posted online about that topic.

Maybe I understood it wrong, but my perception resulting from the session is that we do have free will, within the confines of God's plan. If we so blatantly step out of the path God intended for us, He'll intervene. He's got a greater picture of what is to happen and if we aim towards affecting that in a negative way, I don't doubt He'll redirect us.

Of course, we won't know it. We probably will think we either changed our mind or changed our path because of a fixed set of determining factors. We'll never really know in this lifetime how much was us and how much was God.

But are we puppets then?

Even in a Godless world, we're puppets. We go through life accumulating baggage and making rules for ourselves to the point where every decision we make is no longer spontaneous and free but weighted down by factors we've become mostly unaware of. For example, up until now, I've been choosing men who state very clearly really early on that they don't intend on ever letting themselves love me. Maybe it's a string of bad luck or bad choices, or maybe it's because my mom left when I was two and deep in my heart, that fact makes me fundamentally unlovable and I subconsciously choose people who are bound to prove me right. And so they have and after twenty-nine years around here, I still haven't found a man who makes me feel lovable. I might say that I choose these guys by free will. All of my actions and choices are decisions I've made, but in reality, the broken past that haunts my soul probably made those broken decisions for me.

So what is free will? And why is it so important anyway?

Is it something we've created to blame cancer and all the other bad things on? We have free will, and we're terrible sinners who have used that free will to warp the world in such a way that our DNA is affected and altered and grows tumors and badness within our bodies. Free will somehow puts the burden of all sufferings on us rather than on God. The problem with that idea is the contradictory idea that God allows us to suffer to bring us closer to Him. God will do whatever it takes for you to grow the strongest bond you are capable of with Him.

That was another point in the study session thingy- if Calvinism is true and God chooses who He will show Himself to, then why be missional? I love the way Matt Chandler explained it as God saying, "I'm going to move in this guy's life. Want to be a part of it?" And really, I applied that to all of it- the entire free will argument. If God's got a plan, maybe He has asked me to be a part of it. Maybe I'm free to play and enjoy and live in His world while He uses me to get stuff done.

But that idea brings up another. If we truly give ourselves to God and allow God to work in our lives and through us for His kingdom, then why are we so stuck on free will? In theory, giving your will to God will fulfill you far, far more than anything free will can accomplish for you.

Letting God move you, letting God use you, letting God be the puppeteer to your puppet may sound restricting and confining and controlling, but if the Bible is true at all, there is nothing we can strive for that will make us feel more satisfied, more valuable, more fulfilled and more free than living a life in worship of God.

God intervening in our free will also makes sense of the notion that He chooses whose heart He will change and who He will draw closer to him. Like me. I do believe that God chose me. I definitely wasn't looking for God before I started this journey. I had made it twenty-eight years without worrying about religion or my place in the universe. I was content knowing I didn't know the answers. I really was ok with that. And then all of a sudden, God popped into my life, affected me and then metaphorically beat me until I submitted. :D I didn't really choose it. I chose to pursue it with passion, but the seed had somehow already been heart suddenly. And I do mean suddenly. It wasn't something I'd built up to at all. It wasn't something my life was generally leading towards. It came out of nowhere.

Sometimes, the opposite happens. We see that in the Bible. Jesus knows Judas will betray Him. He knows Judas will hang himself and set himself up for hell. And nowhere in the Bible does it say He tried to change Judas' heart. Nowhere does he make it His life mission to save Judas. He didn't choose Judas. He probably doesn't choose a lot of people for a multitude of reasons.

That's not to say that if He chooses you, you become some sort of prophet. I'm just talking about salvation here. Some people, like me, are thrust into an environment where salvation is next to impossible to find, and yet, somehow, those people, like me, find it anyway. How does that happen? How can that happen without an intervention from God?

Either way, I'm here now. The idea of free will hasn't been fundamental to me, nor did I grow up in a church that enforced it into me until it became truth and that probably makes it easier for me to let it go entirely. I don't mind not having free will. If God uses me for whatever and in whichever way He pleases at the expense of my free will, so be it. I wouldn't be here at all if it wasn't for Him, and nothing I have or love would exist without Him. I wouldn't even be able to love without Him. So why stick a free will clause on everything? Why make Him owe me something? Has He not given me enough?

How's Jesus working for you?

While discussing faith with my sister-in-law (who is not a believer) last night, she asked me, "What do you get from it? What does reading the Bible do for you?" My reply was probably about a half hour long. It's a very difficult question to answer. I'll try to re-explain it here.

For one, it's a great book. I've always been a weirdo who liked Shakespeare and since most people around have had a taste or two of Shakespeare in some way and have a sense of the difficulty we all have in interpreting it, it's a great example for comparison. In the opening scene of one play (I'm too lazy to look it up or try to remember which at the moment...), a man bites his thumb and it causes a kerfuffle. To us, that makes no sense, but venturing into the context within which it was written, we find out biting the thumb was kind of the old version of giving the finger (i.e. offensive). Reading and studying the Bible requires that sort of contextualization, but it's beyond that.

You can master Shakespeare to a certain extent. You can take a passage, rip it to shreds and own it. You can know it inside and out. I believe you can't do that with the Bible for a number of reasons.

First, the translation. The Bible is written in languages wherein the words have multiple meanings. Add all those meanings together and you have the potential for never fully grasping what the author (or God) fully intended.

Second, the context. Sure, some Bible scholars who study it forever can get an idea of the context of all of it, but the rest of us have to rely on the knowledge of others to get an idea what was going on back then. And even then, as we see in our every day lives, times change quickly and societal behavior is pretty complex. Different larger areas have different customs and within those areas there are different customs and so on. Groups within groups within groups make it hard to point out one behavior and say, "Back then, this is what people did." Luckily, I guess, the Bible focuses on one main group, right? Even though it seems to span a vast piece of land...

Third, the Bible moves the spirit. I believe that every time you crack open the Bible, the words reflect your mood and your place within your soul. You could probably read the same passage every day and every day, see something different in it. The Bible's just like that somehow.

... which brings me to another reason I love the Bible: trying to study the Bible teaches you a new way of learning.

The idea that the Bible changes with the heart with which you read it is what made it so hard for me to read it in the beginning. I started reading it with no intention on believing it. I just wanted to learn what it was all about. The problem with that idea is that the Bible is partly textbook, partly poetic, partly a self-help manual, partly... well, everything and every genre. There's even music in there. So to learn it, you have to learn it through each genre. Like my aunt told my little cousin a long time ago, "Watermelon is like cereal. You have to drink and eat at the same time," so is the Bible only on an infinitely more important scale.

While I finished my biology degree, I learned how to learn biology. In the process, I took English courses, journalism courses and political science courses (along with others) and each one of those areas taught me a different way of learning. While biology requires great attention to detail and to slight changes, political science focuses on the big picture and major changes. And while English classes focus on symbolism, choice of words and so on, journalism applies a sort of cynicism and manipulation to the concepts. Everything you learn comes with learning how to learn it.

Learning the Bible was so difficult for me in the beginning. On top of the three things I mentioned above (translation, context and the complexity and spirit of God's message), I had to overcome the heart part. You cannot read the Bible and truly understand it without opening your heart to it. That's probably true of any book, any novel- you can't empathize with the characters or even fall in love with the characters without entering into the words with an open heart, ready and willing to be affected. For some reason, the Bible is different that way. I expected to read it as a textbook only and learn without having my soul affected in any way. I expected to learn it without letting the words change me.

The problem with that kind of learning is that when you hit my #3, you hit a roadblock. Without sounding too religiony, I believe that if your heart is closed to what you are reading in the Bible, God won't push it in. God will only let you learn what He feels you are ready to learn. He knew my heart was hard, broken and impenetrable in the beginning and He didn't force his way in. He didn't alter His words to affect me because I wasn't ready nor willing to be affected. Only after I prayed for clarity in His words, wisdom and meaning, did I start to feel affected.

That kind of prayer opens the heart. In the process of asking God to show me what He meant, I was opening my heart to being shown. And that's when the words got in.

My SIL is deeply spiritual and is learning to be a yogi. She's learning about meditation and while I was explaining all this to her, I realized the connection between Jesus and meditation. Through prayer, for example, the heart finds a certain measure of peace simply by letting go of the control for a little while. Lately, finding enough money for food is a little hard sometimes, and I have to give it up to God. "God, please provide for me," I pray, but in doing so, while I want to ask for food and specific things that will make my life easier, if I truly trust God, I have to let go of those specific things. God will provide for me, but it might not be in the way I expect. It might not be food or by somehow lifting the burdens off of me. For all I know, maybe the best thing for me is to endure some more suffering. Maybe the best thing, the thing which shapes my puzzle piece into the precise shape it needs to be, seems painful and horrible in this moment or in my moment of most suffering.

But that's where the meditation comes in. If every facet of our lives directs us in such a way that we contribute our part (or piece of the puzzle) to God's plan, then we should find peace in the bigger picture, the picture outside ourselves, outside our tangible lives and outside what we believe is important and is our purpose.

Sure, we do our best to get ourselves out of pain and suffering. We don't wait for God to get us out of our rut. We're proactive in our own lives. But at a certain point, things become out of our control and that's when we turn to God. Ideally, we'd turn to God even when we feel we have things figured out, but we tend not to. When things are under control or are going our way, we tend to forget how many things God placed in our lives that contributed this picture of a life we have right now. I believe that's part of the reason God lets us suffer.

Jesus will do whatever it takes to solidify the bond we have with Him. If you don't fully grasp the love and the connection you have with Him, He'll make it so you do.

After I got betrayed, I started to question why God had brought this person into my life. Looking back on our relationship, he treated me so badly so often and the more I thought about it the more the badness outweighed the good. I met him by a sheer twist of fate, and for that reason, I immediately thought he was my "one". He broke my heart in one of the most terrible ways imaginable and left me shattered. What was this all for? Why did God introduce this character into my life story only to have him destroy me? Was it just to show me God, even though he was a terrible example of a Christian? This morning, while listening to a sermon on the way to work, I figured it out.

He was smart. He was a rocket scientist (kinda literally) who believed that the Bible was the word of God (even if I'd discover later on that he didn't really know it). He didn't even know why he was an aerospace engineer. He didn't even like planes. He didn't particularly care for them at all, but somehow, he was led into that program, finished it and got a job with a prestigious branch of the US government. That's when I found him. He had just started that job. Whether I chose to or not, the fact that he worked there probably did affect my opinion of him. Later on, I'd discover he was miserable there and told him to quit and move out of that city, even finding him jobs to apply to. But I digress.

Here, in this simple twist of fate, one of the smartest people I'd ever know came into my life and I fell hard. But there was some fine print. His "one" in his head was a Christian. Eventually, he gave me a Bible and everybody thought I cracked it open to please him. But in all honesty, because I was ready to marry this guy and he wanted kids (I hadn't wanted any up to that point), I did it for my kids. If they were going to be Christian, I was going to have to encourage them. I did want them to be Christian, simply because I wanted them to have something I didn't while I was growing up. I wanted them to know that they are loved all the time, and from what I knew at the time, that's what God does.

Once I cracked open that Bible though, I was on my own. That's why it was so hard for me to figure out what this guy's reason was in my life. He didn't help me be a Christian. If anything, he made me hide it and feel ashamed of it. The passion I developed for learning it threatened his lack of Christianity and so I stopped talking about it with him.

When he got rid of me, it was next to impossible for me to attribute my believing to him coming into my life because I'd worked so hard at it for so long without any support from him. Meanwhile, he was betraying me and hurting me every chance he got in the most unBiblical ways.

But my point is this: without his obviously scientific brain and the impression that he might actually be smarter than me, without that twist of fate, without falling for him, without preparing myself and my soul for his babies, I would never have gotten my heart to a place where I would pray for meaning from the words before reading the Bible. I needed that introduction to get me started. I needed this illusion of a man to open my eyes to the rationality of religion.

And I needed the fall- the betrayal, the anger and the shattering of my soul- to submit to God and let Him piece me back together.

I can kind of picture Him standing there, watching His plot unfold in the life of a girl who probably has never felt loved in her entire life. How else was He supposed to get in? My heart was a two way mirror. I emitted love, but I never let it in. And God shattered the crap out of it in such a terrible way to get at me.

God does provide, whether we like it or not.

So I prayed and I read my Bible and the characters started to affect me. First I read Matthew, then John and by the end of John, John's love for Jesus made me cry.

The problem with falling in love with Jesus, the character in the Bible, is that you end up... falling in love with Jesus. And as I've learned from reading and listening to Tim Keller, if Jesus is not God, then none of it matters, but if He is God, then I owe Him my life. The fact that I exist at all becomes Jesus. Jesus becomes everything.

And you know, it's really hard to fall in love with a character who has a kind spirit beyond our comprehension, and who opens your soul up in the most brutally amazing way and then close the book and go back to thinking you were ok the way you were.

At some points, even now, I wonder if the only reason I believe it is because I love it, not because I actually believe there is a God. I love learning it, I love what the story is about, I love the way it moves my soul, I love the way it opens my heart and challenges me to forgive and grow and love.

What it amounts to, in spite of my deep-seeded agnostic rebellion and pure rejection of religion, is that somehow, I love Jesus.

And that's what I get from the Bible. That's what it does for me.

Two questions...

1. Were Adam and Eve married? Who married them?

2. From a sermon Matt Chandler gave in his Luke series (#17, "Conviction of the Unseen"): "if man has free will and I ask God (through prayer) to do something and God listens to my prayer and responds and does something in the life of another, has He not violated free will?" ...so then do we have free will at all? Or is prayer useless?

Anyone?

On Faith.

I listened to a sermon about faith, and what faith is, and the pastor basically defined it (or my interpretation of how he defined it) as this feeling of being suddenly aware that in spite of not having all the answers to all the questions, you feel this sort of bond to God, wherein you realize He'll give you everything you need all while loving you more than you can imagine.

He started reading from Hebrews, chapter 11, which to be honest, in my head, was an Old Testament book (Hebrews? How is that not Old Testament?) which proved to me that I still don't have a clue about anything, even after more than a year of studying...

Verse 1:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

So basically, if I get it right, hope is baseless and kind of like blowing bubbles into the wind unless it's based in faith.

When I was a young teen and was really depressed, drank too much too often and didn't feel any reason to keep going, I'd often wonder about God. I'd never felt Him, and I came to the conclusion that if I decided to believe in God, it'd be just to have something to lean on, something to give me a sort of unearned, imaginary, false hope. I really didn't see God as anything but a crutch to ease the mind and being a girl who liked things difficult and liked the feeling of accomplishment that came with overcoming on my own whatever it was that knocked me over without help, I didn't need that crutch. I was strong enough, angry enough, and resentful enough to pick myself up and power through the pain alone.

And I really was alone. I'd distanced myself from everybody, ruined my relationship with my dad and my brothers, and annoyed my friends with my cynicism and negativity. I set myself up to have nobody.

Somehow, I overcame a lot of that, fell down a few more times and found myself in a place in my life where I was happy. I told the guy I was with that there was no way I'd ever find God but in the happy times. When I'd need Him the least, that's when I'd be open to seeing Him, I thought. That way, my relationship with Him would be based on a choice to love Him rather than an unhealthy dependence.

I decided to learn about Christianity, and then one night, after a friend of mine from blogland had given a kidney to her brother and text messaged me, "Pain pain pain" from her hospital bed, I felt helpless. I was an eleven hour drive away, and even if I had been close, there was nothing I could do. There was nothing I could do to relieve her pain. So I tried praying.

But praying when you don't believe in God is exactly what I feel that this verse is about. I would hope so hard that she'd be ok, that her pain wouldn't be so terrible, that the doctors and nurses who were supposed to be tending to her would wake up and help. But that hope was nothing. My words might have sent ripples of air out from me, but they stopped before even leaving the room. My hope was useless and baseless, and this was the first time in my life I'd ever felt the need for my hope to mean something.

As an agnostic growing up in a home that wasn't so perfect, I learned really early on that life is just not fair, you don't get what you wish for and that not too much in this world is under your control, so too bad. And when my grandmother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and was given three or so days to live, even though she was the only real mother figure I'd ever had, I was ok with the prognosis. This is life. Life ends. That's just the way it goes. It never occurred to me to pray for her or to hope for her. All I did was say goodbye.

Well, she ended up living a couple of years in misery after enduring round after round of fruitless chemo. And still, watching her suffer, I never thought to pray.

I loved my grandmother with all my heart, but this was a scientific thing. The HRT was probably responsible. The chemo didn't work. Her body was shutting down. It's all science. There's nothing you can do to fight science. That's just the way life is.

But here was my friend Megan, who had just finished the Ironman, who just gave her kidney to her brother and now was in an unimaginable amount of pain. Where's the science in that? If there is any, it's by far exceeded by the practical aspects of it being overwhelmingly confusing. Giving an organ away is painful? Aside from the surgery pain, apparently, it's unbelievable. How does that make any sense?

In my emotional state that night, it didn't. And my connection to God, after twenty-eight years of nothingness was still... nothing. My hope was hopeless. So I did what any girl in my position would do: I called a Christian.

"Can you pray for Megan? God doesn't hear me," and somehow, just by telling him that, I felt it'd actually mean something. Somehow, telling a person who I believed at the time had a connection to God made it so God could hear me. I still had no direct connection, but at the same time, I believed his God existed. I had to. It was the only way my hope would mean anything and it had to mean something because my good friend was in incredible pain.

That was the first time in my life where the only option was prayer. And I guess because it wasn't for me, I didn't see it as a crutch so much as a necessity. If it was me, I could suffer through it. But when it's somebody else, somebody you care about deeply, you just wish with all your being that you could take that from them.

But life's not fair. You can't take the pain from them. It just doesn't work that way.

After that night, I tried harder to actively look for God. A pastor had told me to read the Bible one book at a time, but to pray first, and I'd do it, but I didn't know what I was praying for or if I meant it. After that night though, I knew what I was praying for. I was praying for a direct connection. I didn't want a mediator. I wanted to be able to feel it myself. I wanted to make sure the message got there from my heart rather than by having to pass through somebody else's where the intensity and meaning would diminish.

Not long after that, after wholeheartedly fierce work in my Christianity studies, the traffic stopped on the bridge on my way home and I happened to look left. There, I saw God. I found Him. The sun set so amazingly on the water, slipping behind the rolling hills that they call "mountains" here. It was a sunset. I've seen hundreds of sunsets. But this one was perfect. Amongst the dirty, dingy smoggy air that surrounded the cars full of tired, crabby, zoned out commuters, here was this sudden slap of awesome. Every sunset has God in it. Everything has God in it. But it took this particular sunset on this particular day after a long while of working and praying for me to finally have faith.

It's a cheesy story, I know. They generally are. Maybe that's God's point. For those of us expecting some sort of huge exhibition of God simply because we're too rigid in our agnosticism or atheism to assume we'd "fall" for anything less, maybe God's somewhere or everywhere chuckling at how little it actually takes.

Verse 3:
By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

Maybe I'm tired, or maybe I'm just feeling it right, but that verse is awesomely poetic. When you stand at the foot of a mountain, or on the beach with massive waves crashing at your feet, is it about what you see? Is it about three dimensional inanimate objects? Or is it about the rush of sensory input and emotion and... life? The combination that occurs for us to feel awe really is supernatural in a way. It's a sort of sudden harmony between all these multifaceted creations. The mountain reflects the light in such a way that we see it. The rocks and trees and other things, living and non, come together in an awesome display that stimulates our senses from the outside in. The cellular processes in our bodies, which, whether you believe in evolution or not, are a miracle in themselves, become altered and stimulate our senses and our soul from the inside out. It really is beyond just the visible realm.

Maybe the amazing combination that leads to awe is a coincidence of evolution, erosion patterns, and all sorts of scientific processes all converging into your one person at one moment in time.

Or maybe, through that intense moment of peace, God is trying to stir up that moment of faith inside your soul, whether it's for the first time or it's to renew it once again.

And yeah, I don't have all the answers and most of the time, I don't even know which way is up. And honestly, a lot of the time, I doubt God and I doubt my faith, but what I don't doubt is that when I allow God to challenge my doubts, He'll always respond by making my faith stronger.

As I've already blogged, this year so far has been pretty difficult, and early on, I really thought my faith was not strong enough to withstand a fall so terrible, but I asked God for help. I asked God for faith. I didn't want Him to become a crutch in my worst times as I'd feared as a teenager. And in the end, He wasn't. Sure, He let me feel His love in my worst moments, but he also let me yell at Him in my worst moments, curse Him in my worst moments. And He didn't let me lose Him. I really don't know how that happened.

I guess He made my hope mean something.