Beginning again, again

So. It has been about 4 years since my last post here. I haven't gone back to read through the previous posts yet, I will soon, but right now I just want to make sure I actually write something. I don't want to risk reading and losing the impetus to write.

A lot has happened in those 4 years. Marriage, mortgage, job (can't think of an 'M' word for that). All good things, well not so sure about the mortgage, but having somewhere to live is good. But. Easy in it all to slip into just surviving instead of living. If you let it life will give you plenty to fill every moment that comes so important things, like really living get pushed out.

When we were at university in CU we were told plenty of times that the drop-off rate for actively-involved Christians after university was high, I can't remember the numbers now. But, at the time it sounded crazy-high. A few years out from university life and now, today, I don't think I would find those numbers as hard to believe. Standing there, then, surrounded by roomfulls of active, lifely, on-fire Christians often literally bouncing with life and love for God, for Jesus, it just didn't seem possible that a group of people like that could ever be anything other than active disciples of our God-Rabi.

But life here in the West has way of wearing that away. It is so subtle that it is invisible to anything but hindsight. It is the subtlest corruption of many good things. Things like, marriage, homes and jobs. It happens through the thousand new activities, worries and thought patterns these good things can bring with them. Ten thousand new things to think about, and less time to think at all. And it has worked on me.

Sure, I may still be active in my local church family, serving in the church, more than many, but what we do is not the heart of who we are. Within the confines of my own head, the thoughts, worries and habits of everyday life have pushed out thoughts of God, have become a wall of noise that stops me hearing the still, small voice, stops me from even listening most of the time.

Fortunately for me, marriage has also given me a solution to this. A more audible human voice to remind me who I really should be listening to.

And so I find myself here again. In need of a new start. There are many things to say. Much I have probably learned since I last wrote here. Things that I will perhaps talk through here. But tonight is about beginning again, again. I have needed a new beginning more times than I care to know. Thank God, that God found a way to give me as many as I need. Thank you Jesus.

I'm ready to listen.

True power

We love to see raw power. Volcanoes, h-bombs, explosions earthquakes, tsunami - we dedicate movies and shows to them. Our superheroes may be good and merciful but in the end they normally win through a show of raw power, righteous violence.

Our God doesn't work that way. He has power that will make the wildest imaginings of hollywood look like nothing. His words alone create reality, call universes into being. The tiniest showing of his presence undoes us completely. Evil is so weak in comparison to Him that in the end He will utterly crush it just by showing up. Yet that is not how he delights to show Himself.

When God showed himself to Elijah in Kings 19 he was not in the wind that shattered rocks or the earthquake or the fire but in the quiet whisper. Our fictional heroes use all their strength to win because their strength is limited, if they didn't they would lose. Our God is so powerful that He doesn't need to use His strength and does not delight in showing off his raw power, He feels no need to show off, even though I for one often wish He did a bit more.

Instead God loves to show His power in this - redeeming. Sin and Satan screw up life after life, throwing the crumpled remains in God's face, and shouting at us that we are worthless and beyond help or hope. Our God who could crush the enemy with no effort at all instead stoops and gently picks up the crumpled mess of another ruined life and says "I can use this."

And gently with love so great no poetry could even begin to describe it he transforms the mess into a new son or a new daughter, and not some crippled child forever marred by the assaults of their own sin and the sins of others, but a strong shining beacon of the love and mercy of God. Not a victim but a warrior. And so God takes the enemy's victories, the worst he can do and turns them into the very weapons that will dismantle the enemy's kingdom stone by stone.

God shows His power in turning the weak into His strength, because even his power is saturated with His core nature - love. We will not see the full truth of this in this world but one day we shall see that in the end God's greatest and final victory in the history of this universe will be this; not only did the enemy not win the war he never even won a battle.

Guess it is kind of my testimony in an abstract way

Another post from that discussion. The post I am replying to basically agrees that there is no absolute proof for or against God but that he finds the scientific theories can explain enough for him not to see the need for a god in the mix:

I respect your position, faced with only the options there is no way to categorically know which is correct. I didn't reach my decision by carefully considering the facts realising these things and then selecting. In truth I had chosen long before I had reached such conclusions or even thought seriously about this kind of thing.

The only explanation I have is that He introduced himself and since then he has always been there as a bedrock. At the worst of times when I have been so fed up with life and tempted to think He didn't exist and thinking about what that would mean, how I would change the way I live. He is just there, a rock-solid certainty when all I have in me is doubt, still there as a quiet solid thing that says "but I am".

Now anyone looking at me can always just blame it on childhood conditioning, my immediate family all claim to be Christians and (imperfectly of course) live as though God is real, of course that has a powerful psychological effect. But again there is no way to objectively prove my God to someone else there is always the choice to believe or not and it takes more than good arguments to make someone believe.

Without him making the first move I would not be a Christian and time and again I hear from people who have become Christians having lived for decades with other beliefs that there just came a time when they 'knew' it was true, not because of clever arguments or objective fact but because something within them had been changed and they knew they had to make a choice in light of that to either accept this news or reject it.

The nature of Christian Belief

This wasn't intended as a blog entry, but came out of a debate on evolution on a discussion page, but ended up being so long and helping me to clarify my thoughts on why I believe as a Christian so I thought I would keep a record of it here. Besides, i haven't exactly been great at coming up with content so I gotta start somehow :)


The start of the post is in answer to a question about how awful a god would be to allow things like children starving in Africa:

The child in africa starving is doing so firstly because humans have decided to allow it to happen, there is no world food shortage or money shortage, just us holding onto more of both than we could possibly need. I don't pretend to understand how God thinks anything like fully or why he allows some suffering to continue but directly intervenes in other cases. I know people who should be dead but were healed and I know of people who weren't and I don't understand what the difference was.

You could say that part of why I can still believe in Him is because part of that belief is that this life isn't everything, its just a prelude to a reality so real it will make this seem like a dream, and that means He has time to make it all right. I don't believe that anyone will get away with injustice or cruelty in the end, they might avoid consequences from other humans now, might even make it so noone even knows what they have done, but in the end we will be called to account for everything. I believe that in the end noone will be able to say he wasn't just.

But all such reasons aren't the real reason I believe. Nor do I believe because I have seen Him work in my life, not just every now and again but constantly. Often I don't see the pattern until later and am surprised by the way He has led me through what at the time felt random. I have known him to speak through other people giving them knowledge they couldn't humanly have and I have seen him heal and many answers to prayer.

But even that isn't the reason, because if you choose then any number of coincidences can be still be explained as coincidences and objectively neither view can be proven.

I believe because he enabled me to, no matter what has come I have still believed because deep down I just know He is there, the personal evidences, the experences are good but they aren't why I believe. That is part of Christian belief - you can't be convinced intellectually to believe, oh you can show that to believe is as reasonable as to not believe and as intellectually defensible, but that just makes it a choice. The final step of being convinced we believe has to come from Him directly.

The way he does that is different for everyone and happens at different stages of life sometimes quick sometimes gradual, and even then always optional. He created freewill knowing the full consequences of that choice so He isn't going to suddenly revoke it.

I don't argue on these issues like the ones discussed here to talk anyone into Christianity, to be honest until I got drawn into this group I had got very sick of and stopped having these debates with people. Because neither side can objectively prove their case. Even if every single step of evolution from us all the way back to the first cell could be demonstrated in a lab, it would still not prove that it happened, just that it is possible for it to have happened, without witnesses conclusive proof of what actually happened in the past is not possible. There are only surviving clues and how you choose to interpret them, evolution may be a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the evidence (though I clearly have my doubts on that) but that doesn't mean it is true.

It is like a detective story, you have a bunch of clues and you can come up with any number of stories that would account for the appearance of the crime scene, but that doesn't mean any of them is actually what happened.

The only choice to make is whether something or someone has always existed and the only way to know for sure is if they introduce themselves.

I have a blog...now all I need are some thoughts

This could be the start of a profound thought journey questioning the very nature of reality, or a short lived but above averagly creative (for me) new way of avoiding work. Right now the latter seems more likely but only time can tell...and God. Am thinking he will be a running theme on here; I am hoping this may be a way of capturing what I learn about him, which should be useful for myself at least.

And if so it should at worst be amusing to some and hey noone is forcing you to read on :)

I guess the next step will be to describe who I am and more interestingly who I believe He is, but that will have to wait as this work avoidance thing has been far too effective already.