Quote of the Day

“If you want a religion that makes sense, I suggest something other than Christianity.  But if you want a religion that makes life, then, I think this is the one.”

Rich Mullins

1955-1997

I was going through my CD collection and found a bunch of CDs by Rich Mullins.  On the cover of one of the CDs I found that quote.  There used to be a lot more stuff about him on the internet, and I’m a little sad it’s gone, because he was a very interesting human being. 

I loved his lyrics, envied his talent for poetry, and had hoped to go see him in concert one day.  I was saddened the day I found out he had been killed in a car accident, because I felt like the world could have stood to have him around a while longer, but I was happy for him, because I knew he was finally where he’d always wanted to be.

How could I begrudge someone seeing Jesus face to face?  Well, I could, but I’d kinda be a selfish jerk, now wouldn’t I?  Anyway, I got all sentimental and stuff, remembering how much I loved his music and personality.  He kinda had this self-depricating sense of humor that always makes me like someone.

So anyway, I’m going to leave you with the lyrics of my all-time favorite Rich Mullins song [if you can find a download, listen to it, because it’s PRETTY!]

If I Stand

by Rich Mullins 

There’s more that rises in the morning
Than the sun
And more that shines in the night
Than just the moon
It’s more than just this fire here
That keeps me warm
In a shelter that is larger
Than this room

And there’s a loyalty that’s deeper
Than mere sentiments
And a music higher than the songs
That I can sing
The stuff of Earth competes
For the allegiance
I owe only to the Giver
Of all good things

So if I stand let me stand on the promise
That you will pull me through
And if I can’t, let me fall on the grace
That first brought me to You
And if I sing let me sing for the joy
That has born in me these songs
And if I weep let it be as a man
Who is longing for his home

There’s more that dances on the prairies
Than the wind
More that pulses in the ocean
Than the tide
There’s a love that is fiercer
Than the love between friends
More gentle than a mother’s
When her baby’s at her side

And there’s a loyalty that’s deeper
Than mere sentiments
And a music higher than the songs
That I can sing
The stuff of Earth competes
For the allegence
I owe only to the Giver
Of all good things

So if I stand let me stand on the promise
That you will pull me through
And if I can’t let me fall on the grace
That first brought me to You
And if I sing let me sing for the joy
That has born in me these songs
And if I weep let it be as a man
Who is longing for his home

And if I stand let me stand on the promise
That you will pull me through
And if I can’t let me fall on the grace
That first brought me to You

Heh. Still gives me goosebumps.

Wish I could do a sound bite [byte?]…

Michaela was running around just now singing, “Wow, Chicka Wow wow” like from those stupid commercials [is it Sonic?  Don’t remember… it’s some fast food chain, though].

Goofy kids.

Shaya tells me that it comes from Alvin and the Chipmunks. 

Still here, just tired

Stayed up too late.  Oh well, the kids don’t have school tomorrow, and we still have power [yay!] so I can handle a little fatigue since I get to sleep late anyway.

A lot of people don’t have power though, and it’s twenty six degrees outside.  I hope everybody stays warm.

Still have power…

So far.  A lot of people in my area have lost power, so it may be just a matter of time.  Steve went to work today, and I guess he’s been pretty busy.

Apparently, the big trucks aren’t slowing down, so every time he sees one in a ditch, he gives ’em a ticket.  Why is it that people who live here, and should know better, think they don’t have to slow down when it’s icy?

There’s probably a half inch or more covering everything outside.  The trees are gorgeous, but they’re falling apart and their pitiful broken branches are landing in inconvenient places.  The kids are home from school today [and loving it].

Steve and I were talking a little bit ago and we got cut off.  I just sent a page to his phone.  I’m going to give him a little bit of time to call me back before I call Troop to make sure he’s okay.  Right now, I’m not worried, but if the anxiety starts, I’ll be giving them a call.

Fun times.

Oh Dear.

Well, if you didn’t know by now, I live in Missouri, and the weather forecast is calling for a massive ice storm here, starting tonight and going into tomorrow.  That’s all fine and good, but they’re saying the accumulation could be over an inch of ice.

That could be bad for the power in town.  We have a gas stove and a gas water heater, so we’ll have food and hot water [hopefully] but the possibility of a power outage, if indeed we do end up with that much ice, is pretty good.

So if you don’t hear from me for a few days, either via the blog or e-mail, don’t take it personally, okay?  And let’s just pray that this storm has a lot less bite than the weather people think it will.

Interesting

Well, I think it is anyway.  Thanks for the link, Artem.

A link.

Here’s an interesting link to a chapter in a book that Artem Gr referenced on down in my comments [under the post called “Wow”].

I think it was written a while ago, because it references people I’ve never heard of, but I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, and I think most people can get the gist of it with a little bit of concentration.  It’s not something you can just scan and understand, though, so don’t follow the link if that’s all you’re going to do.

I’ll write more later, but I have a DVR calling out my name, and kids yammering to play the video game. 

See you later.

Ugh.

Fibromyalgia kinda sucks.  It’s not fatal or anything, but it makes your muscles hurt like hell, and it seems to get worse, for me at least, when it’s cold outside.  My muscles burn, I’m exhausted without doing anything, and I’m still coughing up phlegm from my bronchitis adventure, so I basically feel like shit today.

So for today, I’m going to struggle to stay awake until I can put the kids to bed, and then I’m going there as well.

I’m even too tired for my favorite free computer game site.  And that’s saying something, because I can waste hours there in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping.

Later, friends.

1 Corinthians 5: 9-13… and some other stuff.

9I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. 11But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.

12What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? 13God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked man from among you.”

Wowee.  I don’t know about anyone else, but this jumped out at me today when I was re-reading 1 Corinthians.

I think maybe Christians have used similar scripture to justify cutting themselves off from people outside Christianity completely, and Paul pretty strongly comes against that here.  If you’re a Christian, it’s kind of your duty to be friends with, and love unconditionally, people outside our faith.

That doesn’t mean beating them over the head with a Bible every time you see them, either.  It means taking an interest in their lives simply because they, too, are created in the image of God.  Don’t try to change them, just love ’em, you know?  It’s not your job to ‘convert’ anyone anyway.

That’s God’s job, and he’s way better able to do it than you or me.  Some saint from a long time ago [I think it was Francis of Assisi] who said, “Preach the Gospel every day.  If necessary, use words.”

Our job is to be a reflection of the joy and hope we have.  To live our lives in such a way that people see us and notice that there’s something different about us.  And I’m not really talking about appearances in what we wear, or how we fix our hair, or whether we have tattoos or piercings.  I’m talking about the kind of glow that Moses had after he came down from the mountain after being in the presence of God.

Doesn’t it make sense that Christians would have that same glow today?  Maybe not a literal, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” glow, but the glow of love and joy that can only come from God?

Actually, I know this happens because I’ve seen it in others.  Very few, but still.  There’s a lady at my church and you can just tell that woman spends a lot of time in God’s presence because she just oozes love all over the place.  She isn’t fake in it, either.  She completely blows my mind, too.

And it’s not like she’s had an easy life, either.  She takes care of her husband, who has MS and is confined to a wheelchair.  She helps take care of her mother-in-law, who is getting older and having health problems as well.  And she has impeccable ‘depression radar’ and any time she sees that cloud over someone’s head, she comes and shares about her own bout of depression.

So anyway, back to the scripture above.  It’s talking about squashing out hypocrisy within the church, and I don’t see how that could ever be a bad thing.  I think that if we’d been doing that all along, we wouldn’t have so many people who believe that all Christians are hypocrites… ya think?

Paul’s not talking about people who are genuinely struggling with addictions or other issues, either.  He’s talking about people who have the attitude, “Well, this is just the way I am, so deal with it!”  It’s talking about people who cheat on their spouses, people who are greedy, people who cheat others out of money, people who gossip, or never have anything nice to say about others, people who put something ahead of God in their lives, and people who are ‘drunkards.’

Anyway, I started this post a long, long time ago, and I still think it’s very interesting that Paul says so boldly that we are not to judge people outside Christianity.  It’s God’s job, and I know that, so I’m hoping that no one who comes here has felt judged by anything I’ve said.

One big thing that I’ve learned from the past couple of days is that it may be completely impossible to explain anything about my faith to people who aren’t actually looking into becoming a Christian.  And I’m guessing it would have to be someone who knows me well enough to trust me when I say that God is good.

I can’t prove God’s goodness any more than I can prove my own.  Even if you’re my next door neighbor and you see me doing good deeds all over the place, you still can’t know what my motive in those good deeds is, because my motive is in my heart, and no human can see another man’s heart.

The only way to know if God is good or not is to get to know Him for yourself.  You can’t get that by studying the Bible as an arbitrary text to be scientifically looked at and historically verified [or disproved].  The key is to open yourself up to God and ask him to show you.

I did that a few months ago.  I was so angry at God because I’d been mentally abused by a pastor, and I was at a point where I hated most Christians, and especially pastors.  I got into a heated argument and someone finally called me out and said that just because he wasn’t giving me the answers I wanted didn’t mean that his answers weren’t true.  So I went to God and asked Him.

I wasn’t nice about it, but I was sincere.  I was broken-hearted and in agony that day, but I was open to His voice. I point blank asked God if He was as big a jerk as that pastor from years ago had portrayed Him to be.  I told him that if he was as big of an asshole as that pastor had been, then I couldn’t be his follower anymore. 

That’s when I caught a glimpse of the despair that would come if I really walked away, and yeah, I was scared.  But after I saw what that looked like, I knew that never, in the ten years I’d been struggling with the Christian faith and trying other religions to find another way to Him, had He left me.

And then the love came.  It overwhelmed me and even now brings me to tears.  I knew that his arms were around me there on the bedroom floor, and he comforted me.  He healed the damage that I’d carried around for ten years in an instant, and I was in awe.

Different things started coming to my mind, stuff that had happened and things I’d learned from the pastor, and all of a sudden, the lies he’d told became clear, and the truth and love that he’d taught me about stood out and I knew that it hadn’t all been a lie.  God had used that misguided human to teach me about Him, and when the time was right, when I was ready, He burned away all the lies.

So when I tell you that God is good, it’s because I’ve caught a glimpse of his mercy, grace, and love, up close and personal.  When I read the Bible, I ‘read God’ as the incredible, loving being that I’ve experienced him to be, and when a person reads God as someone who is good, they can see things that are invisible to someone who wants to see him as bad, immoral, or evil. 

My main point is that you can’t really know or understand God with your mind.  You have to be willing to open your heart to him first, and then your mind will begin to understand.  It’s all about the heart. 

Wow.

Wow.  What a day!

I got a call that Steve was in a pursuit, and it freaked me out a little.  He’s fine, the bad guy is in custody, and nobody got hurt, but it’s always a little surreal to hear about these things, and know that your husband was involved.

Anyway. 

I’ve been a part of an interesting conversation today, but I must admit, it leaves me bemused and a little sad.  I can definitely understand being confused about God and the Bible and how they relate to me.  I’ve been there.  I’ve even written about it [the major entries about my struggle with my faith start about June 17, 2007].

I’ve spent quite a bit of time being frustrated with God, angry with God, even hating God part of the time.  And the anger just seemed to lead me in never ending circles.  I wanted to understand, but I couldn’t make it make sense, so I’d get angry and try something else [a different religious philosophy or school of thought within Christianity], hoping maybe that would make more sense than the other did. 

And the whole time, I was trying to make something make sense that simply can’t be put into human terms.  There’s just too much, and a lot of it is understood at a level where there aren’t even any words, let alone a way to put those feelings into them.

So that last day, the day where I came to the crossroads between putting away faith forever and denying what my heart told me was true, or coming back to Jesus, even though I was never going to be able to learn it all, or understand it all, there was only one choice for me to make.

See, I’ve experienced something that I can only describe as a relationship with my creator.  I’ve felt his love, and known his presence, and I can’t leave that behind.  It’s too precious to me.  When I looked at what my life would be like without my faith, without that relationship with God, it scared the living shit out of me.  There was a bleakness and despair so much deeper than any depression I’ve ever struggled with, it was indescribable.

Maybe it isn’t the same for people who have never experienced a relationship with God.  Maybe for them it’s no big deal to look at Christianity from the outside, see that there are some serious problems with some of the people who follow this religion, and draw the conclusion that because some of our people are bad, our God is bad. 

Maybe it’s easy to look at some of the hard stories in the Bible, and instead of seriously studying and trying to figure out what it means, deciding that it’s all just stupid, wrong, and evil, and screaming that opinion from the rooftops.

From the outside, without sincerely asking God to help you understand what He’s all about, it’s impossible for anyone to get it.  

This is true for Christians, too. A lot of us see a piece of Him and think we’ve got it all sewn up, so we don’t have to study anymore, or keep asking him to reveal himself to us.  That’s a mistake, and many sincere Christians have gone to ruin because they thought they’d ‘arrived’ and were no longer able to sin. 

Some people watch Christians, and when they fall short or act selfishly, they crow and scream, “SEE!  I knew it was all a fake!”

But how can you seriously judge an entire group of people based on one member [or a small faction] of that group? 

And if we were seriously talking about a real and living God [and not just agreeing for the sake of argument] a God who created the universe, how can you seriously tell that creator that he’s been unfair to his creation?

Where did you get your yardstick to measure him by? 

If God created the world and everything in it, then he also created our brains.  We can’t have a thought without him first giving us the capacity to think, so who am I to judge God?

We’ve been talking about Christianity as though it’s one of many possible religions, and I’m guessing that the atheist position is that it’s one of many fictional ways for man to explain his existence and what happens after death.

If that is true, then Christianity is no more impressive or logical than any other religion on the planet, and we’re just talking about smoke and imagination, rendering this conversation moot and retarded.  But what if there is something to this religion?  What if this God is real? 

Sure, some Christians are batty and operate on hatred of everything non-christian, but then, a lot of the atheists I’ve seen online are just as militant and angry as the Muslims who are fighting jihad right now, or the people in Topeka who spew hatred in the name of Jesus, or any number of other members of militant fundamentalist groups who have completely lost their minds and hearts to rage.

Maybe it’s a battle of words instead of actual killing with guns and bombs, but it’s the exact same hatred that fuels both battles. 

I don’t hate anyone who doesn’t believe in Christianity.  I don’t hate anyone, period.  I get irritated and I shoot off at the mouth sometimes, but my intent is never to try to prove my superiority, or degrade anyone just because they don’t believe what I do.

I don’t have all the answers and I never claimed that I did.  My study of the Exodus has revealed to me a God who, in spite of what some people think, showed mercy, even to the Egyptians.  He could have killed them all, but he didn’t.  He could have given them one warning, or no warnings and taken the firstborn the first night, but he didn’t, he gave them ten, and over a period of several weeks [maybe months].

There are other places in the Bible [Jonah and the story of Ninevah is one example] where God told the people what would happen to them if they didn’t stop hurting each other, and the people listened and repented and were spared. He could have smote [smited?] them and started over, but he didn’t.  Why? 

So seriously, I can see how you could take the passover out of context and see a cruel hearted massacre, but when you read the rest of the story, the proof really isn’t there. 

And I get it that nothing I’ve said has swayed any opinions that were set in stone, but then, I wasn’t aiming for the stones anyway.

I was aiming for the people who are open-minded enough to entertain another perspective, try it on, and see if they can see through different eyes, even for a minute or two.

So why does my conversation today make me so sad? Maybe it’s because I know I’ve failed in a way.  It’s not really my responsibility to change anyone’s heart, but I still wish I could say something that would help ease the pain that I know is in there.  Anger generally either comes from hurt or fear, and since I know both of those emotions entirely too well, my heart aches to make it go away in others, too.

I don’t know if I can say this without sounding condescending, but please believe me when I say that’s not my intent.  I really do love the people I’ve been talking to today, including the people who’ve been reading the comments and rooting for the other guy.  I wish you all the best, and I pray that God will show you the incredible love and peace I’ve found in him, and help you to reach out and take it.  Anyone is always welcome here, and welcome to comment [although being mean just to be mean is, well, mean, so don’t be mean, okay?] 

My relationship with God has changed me in ways that I never knew was possible.  Made me a better person, and helped me to love people and forgive things that were done to me that it was beyond my capacity, as even a relatively good human, to do. 

I don’t understand everything about God, and I never will, but my most sincere prayer is that my life will be a reflection of his love.  I’m not too great at that, but that’s my fault, not God’s.  I’m definitely a work in progress, but still, I know that God is with me, he loves me, and he’ll never leave me. 

For today, that’s enough, you know?