My Extreme Makeover

Beloved, now we are children of God, and it is not yet revealed what we will be. But we know that, when he is revealed, we will be like him; for we will see him just as he is. (1 John 3:2)

Every so often, I catch a glimpse of the great gulf that separates who I am from who I long to be, and I can hardly describe the feeling it inspires. More bitter than the appallment is the heartbreaking disappointment that strikes as I admit that I miss my own mark by miles. There is nowhere to run; I am trapped within myself. There is nowhere to hide: experience lays bare all it touches.

I content with what God has given me. I have more and better than I have dreamed, and I can truly say that his gifts are good, as he is Good. But I look with deep longing for the day when I will become more than I am; when I will be free and beautiful as the Lord Jesus. I am so very tired of my weak, shallow, sickly soul.

With what relief I remember that I am not only hidden in Jesus Christ, but that I will be changed by him - set free to be what he already is. I wait for the day...

Do Not Go Gentle: Searching For Truth

Exrelayman, this post is for you. It is the story of my journey towards truth and knowing. I have not completed the journey, but I have found the source of all that I am looking for.

For I am confident that given a choice between a warm and comfortable delusion and a cold and harsh reality, we want reality...

There is a bliss in ignorance - but that ignorance walks with innocence, and it belongs to children. A willful ignorance knows no such bliss. To those of us who speak of knowing, and who have tasted the rich delight there is in understanding, there comes a longing only Truth itself can satisfy. All other bliss is wrecked on reason's encircling rocks.

So truth is the principal thing. Furthermore, we can each see in the human experience evidence that, while truth is not without beauty, it is rarely comfortable - at least to begin with. Thus the seeker of comfort rarely finds truth.

My education is average, and my knowledge of all things scientific, philosophical, historical, and theological, must be called a "smattering"; and while I don't know what is my IQ, I know that I am no genius. I have no great apologetic that will convince the atheist that God does, in fact, exist. That said, I will attempt to tell how I, an unremarkable person (except perhaps in laziness!), am coming to know One who is called Truth.

People speak of faith, and by that they often mean the belief that God exists. Why there should be particular merit in believing that a God exists is incomprehensible to me, especially since the ideas of most of the "faithful" about who that God is are so widely varied as to be hardly the same thing at all, save for two qualities: of those who believe in a God, most agree that he is all-powerful, and that he is invisible. The invisible part is understandable, since if God were visible, then their faith would hardly be warranted. The all-powerful part becomes problematic when other qualities, such as goodness, are added to the mix: all sorts of troublesome questions arise, like "Why does a God who is both all-powerful and good allow the evil we can clearly see around us?" It is at this point that such "faith" again becomes necessary. The real question is, can this be called faith, or is it simply a very human cowardice and a willful gullibility?

I was taught from before I could speak about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He wasn't the warm, cuddly God in circulation today, but he was both all-powerful and invisible. I was taught to fear not his power, but his holiness - clear and blinding and unassailable and impossibly pure. My mother read me stories from the Bible, and I knew that its stories about people encountering angels didn't have them shivering in warm delight, but falling on their faces and shaking with fear. And so behind my sense of God was a fear of his holiness - but it was his holiness that could be trusted, too. He wouldn't lose his temper, or change his mind, or fail to keep his promises, as my parents, being human, sometimes did. I also knew that to my grandfather, (who spent long hours reading while we played, but always had time to tell a story or teach my sisters and me to fly paper airplanes; whose beliefs about God were rarely spoken but often evident) God was both father and ever-present friend. Later, when my grandfather's mind was ravaged by Alzheimer's disease and he couldn't recognize my grandmother or remember how many children he had, his sense of God remained unblurred. On the subject of God alone he was lucid and sure; unchildish; reasonable. Near the end, he had a series of heart attacks, and I spent long hours with him in the hospital. He was often confused, but there was no confusion when he prayed aloud or spoke of the Bible.

So as I child, with my child's thinking, I didn't question God's existence, or my need for God to rescue me, even though I hardly knew what from. I accepted easily the truth that I was a sinner - not that sin made me something to be loathed, but that I, made to be more, was trapped by some evil that separated me from the good I could imagine but failed to do and become. I hardly understood what sin was, but I didn't have any trouble understanding that I wasn't exactly heaven-material. From age five until about age nine, I tried to "have faith" in a God whose existence I had never questioned. At the last, I was running out of hope and patience. I pleaded with God, asking him to tell me how to "have faith"; how to do what he wanted me to do. I can't quite explain how the answer came - whether I heard something in my mind, or if it was an comprehension as sudden as if someone had spoken, but in my mind was this understanding, at once clear and relevant: "You don't have to do anything. It's all been done."

That settled my restless searching and pleading for some years. I had asked, and had received. I was content that Jesus' death and resurrection meant that nothing more was required to make me acceptable before a holy God. Though I had struggled and failed, he had satisfied his own terms on my behalf.

But then came university, and my introduction to philosophy. I felt a new urge and a responsibility to examine my knowledge, to understand as well as know. I was shaken by Descartes' questioning of the basis for knowledge, and oddly, both comforted and disturbed by Anselm's seemingly circular answers. Looking back, it wasn't really God's existence that seemed so shadowy, but my own ability to know an invisible, un-prove-able God. In any case, a great cavern of questions unasked opened up in my mind.

I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. My grandfather was dead. I appealed to my parents. They had encouraged my siblings and me to think and to ask questions as we grew older, so I felt that I could trust them - but they didn't offer me the answers I wanted. They advised me to read the Bible and ask God whatever questions I had. I am thankful they didn't ask me to stop reading philosophy, because it was from Plato that I came to understand that empirical knowledge is not the only, or necessarily the best, kind of knowledge. From then on, I began, half-subconsciously, to put my knowledge of God to the test. I wasn't looking for miracles or empirical proofs - instead I wanted anwers to all the 'why's. I asked and waited for him to answer. One by one, the answers came. Sometimes the 'why' became clear with a new piece of knowledge or a fresh perspective; other times I realized that the question had been based on a flawed understanding in the first place. I gained confidence in God. The realization at nine years old that my relationship with him wasn't based on my own ability to have "faith" but on his own provision, made me less afraid to ask questions, and bit by bit, I was coming to understand that there were answers. Even the ones that were beyond my intellectual grasp were not unreasonable. (For example, I spent a long time trying to wrap my head around infinity and mostly failed, but I had no trouble accepting infinity as a rational concept.)

It was not until after university that my world came crashing down. It wasn't one thing, but many things that converged at a single junction in my life. I had moved far away from my family and friends. I took on a job that was too big for me and that stripped my confidence in myself and in humanity. I stepped out with big dreams of making the world a better place, and was shocked to find myself full of selfishness and other flaws, and with nothing worthwhile to oontribute - certainly nothing that would offset what I found myself greedily wanting to take. I was hit hard by depression and the seemingly impossible struggles of everyday life. I had no friends, and neither energy nor motivation to maintain relationships or build new ones. I felt that there was no one who could understand. Desperate, I went running to God, but he, too, had withdrawn.

It is hard for me to explain the terror and extreme loneliness I felt. It lasted for over a year, and ebbed but didn't entirely lift for almost three years after that. During that time, almost every relationship I had was strained to breaking. I was a deadweight. Most days, I was struggling just to get through the day. I felt unloved and unloving and unloveable and abandoned. My thinking became negative. I gained weight. I was out of control. These things sent me spiralling into self-loathing and a deep hopelessness.

Worst of all was the absence of God. I read my Bible, but its words went flapping and cawing like flock of crows through my head. I prayed, and I could almost hear the clang as my pleas bounced off the ceiling and fell clattering back down to mock me. I had no reassurance that anyone was speaking to me; no sense that a living God could hear my calls or take pity on my hurt and bewilderment. I longed for a way to die without hurting my family. In my darkest night, God was nowhere to be found.

I couldn't understand what had happened; why he had disappeared. I had trusted him and tried to please him. I had asked him for answers - wherever they had come from, they were meaningless to me in the bleak dim fog that had wrapped itself coldly about me. Had I been naive, believing I knew God? After all, wasn't it kind of arrogant to think that I, among so few, could know and be known by God? Suddenly, I could see myself and my motives clearly. I had hoped to help people, thinking that was love - but really, I was seeking approval and appreciation. I was terribly disappointed in myself and in other people. Was it possible that we had been wrong about God, too?

Deep down, I wanted to know the truth. If there was nothing more. Since I felt myself powerless to do what I wanted - either simply cease to exist or find a way to make my life enjoyable - I wanted to know what was so that I could begin to deal with it. How quickly the things that had comforted the young me became empty platitudes that highlighted my emptiness. In my mind, I heard the reproaches of Job's friends: 'If you had tried harder to please God, this wouldn't have happened.' 'You must have done something wrong, and this is your punishment.' But despite my fear and self-hatred and the newly-discovered selfishness within me, I knew that I had sought God and followed him. I had tried my best to please him. It seemed that he simply wasn't there.

I began re-thinking what was there. I considered the possibilities. Christianity as it is generally presented in our world seemed not implausible so much as irrelevant, empty. It sounded nice, but faded away to nothing in the face of the vast, howling wilderness that gaped at me. I was falling. I could throw it all away, but one thing remained: the God my grandfather knew. He was the One I both feared and longed for. I had seen him in my grandfather's eyes, suddenly sure in the midst of his confusion. I knew simply and surely that if there was anything worth having in life, it was what my grandfather had found. It had given him peace when his own mind became an enemy. He had had joy when his life was stripped of all its meaning. He had known love when every human relationship had been forgotten. Whether it was God or something else, that was what I wanted more than anything. I determined to find it, or to die searching. If I failed, my life wasn't worth much to me anyway.

After more than a year of jarring loneliness and bewilderment, I picked up my Bible again to read and something - or Someone - spoke softly from a small verse in the book of Psalms:

You will make known to me the path of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy... (Psalm 16:11)

That was what I needed: a purpose and a path for my life, a kind of joy that wasn't related to my situation, and a living truth that was more than a maxim - something I could trust no matter how I felt. I didn't want any empty religious rags, or the equally irrelevant measurements of things I found in reason without God. I needed a truth that could reach to the very bottom of life and remain meaningful.

I sought that truth in the Bible because that was where my grandfather had found it. I couldn't pray as I had before, but I went outside and looked up into grey skies and spoke to the One I longed to know. I begged him to speak to me. I no longer knew who he was; sometimes I was simply speaking to that great energy evident in living things, the Goodness I could vaguely sense in trees and sky and sea. I asked him to reach through my expectations and my preconceptions and let me know him. (I use the masculine article here not because I looked for something masculine - but I was looking for something personal, so "it" doesn't suffice.) It wasn't God I was looking for. I wanted to know what was Real - I only called him God because my grandfather had called him that.

How can I describe that way he came to me? Shall I tell you my feelings, my thoughts? Shall I tell you what sorts of things I was doing when I knew him present? It all seems trivial and immaterial. The real difference was that my concept of God had been blasted out of the little corner I called my "spiritual" self. He cared about me, but my comfort was a small thing to him compared to my knowing, growing, being. He was concerned with the dusty details I would never have expected him to bother about, but he was far bigger than I had imagined, and his priorities rolled right over mine like a train over a penny placed on the track. He wasn't contained to Sundays and hymns and my evening prayers. He was secular. He was warm earth and wild wind and deep, restless sea. He was Love and Light and Life and Truth. The majesty of trees, the austerity of mountains, the bleakness and the purity and the silence of snow were all his. He had revealed himself to human intellect in the measured meter of words and history, but he could never be comprehended by those things. The Living God is not a comfortable truth, nor easily understood - but comfort was paltry and my understanding meagre when I placed them next to truth.

To my surprise, it isn't answers, smooth and pat and carefully arranged, that come with knowing God. There are answers, to be sure, but it was the questions that came springing that shocked me. If God is really-real, not what we think of as spirit-real, then things have to make sense. And if things have to make sense, then the Bible is a book full of questions to be understood rather than divine incomprehensibilities.

I had asked to know God, but I hadn't understood the foolishness of wanting to know Love or Truth with my intellect alone. I had opened my mind and asked him to come in, but I had left him room only in a box marked "religious". Why had he deserted me? To show me that the God I had allowed him to be was too small, too unreasonable, too inadequate; that what I needed wasn't a spiritual mascot, but Truth; Love; a Father; a Mother; a Friend. It was when I came to understand my own need that he came rushing in to fill that void.

And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” Jesus answered them, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted. “For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him. “Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. “In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says,
‘YOU WILL KEEP ON HEARING, BUT WILL NOT UNDERSTAND;
YOU WILL KEEP ON SEEING, BUT WILL NOT PERCEIVE;
FOR THE HEART OF THIS PEOPLE HAS BECOME DULL,
WITH THEIR EARS THEY SCARCELY HEAR,
AND THEY HAVE CLOSED THEIR EYES,
OTHERWISE THEY WOULD SEE WITH THEIR EYES,
HEAR WITH THEIR EARS,
AND UNDERSTAND WITH THEIR HEART AND RETURN,
AND I WOULD HEAL THEM.’
(Matthew 13:10-15)

Like the Jewish people, I had decided what the truth was, what it had to be. I gave more credence to the things I "figured out" than to the knowledge that imposed itself on me without being courted by my intellect. Let me give you an example of the difference. I knew, as we all know, that careful study leads to learning. Somehow, though, when I entered university, I thought I was smart enough to beat the system. I thought I could get by on my ability to understand rather than on gathered knowledge. I put my trust in my intellectual ability rather than in my knowledge of the way things are. For a while, I did beat the system, but eventually my poor study habits caught up with me. I was in a strict program: I failed a course, and was dismissed from the program. That shook my thinking and humbled me, but it didn't completely change me.

My concept of truth had a lot to do with my concept of myself. Without knowing it, I was full of arrogance. God had to show me that truth before I could ever see him. He didn't want me to keep trusting him just because he answered the questions my intellect asked. He wanted me to learn who he was, and he stopped answering so that I could understand what I really needed.

Does truth require faith? Knowing it does not. It stands on its own. Finding it does, but not faith of the sort that ignores questions, trampling on reason and denying the observable. It is not the kind of faith that decides what the end ought to be and then sets about making it so. Rather, the sort of faith that is required is a refusal to deny what we know, no matter how uncomfortable it is. It is this sort of faith that spurs people to throw off their "hope-so, maybe-so, think-so" beliefs. It sometimes leaves us without something to call "God", but it is the way to knowing Truth.

I wouldn't dare tell someone else why they have searched but haven't found God, but I know why I didn't find him right away. First of all, I was searching for my idea of God, which didn't exist. Such a search, though it be for something called "God", ends nowhere, because it is usually a search for something else entirely - intellectual satisfaction, comfort, tradition. I wanted the truth, but in the beginning I was unwilling to accept the truth that made me uncomfortable. When I was desperate enough to search for Truth, whatever it was, rather than my too-small conception of God, I found Truth - and it was God.

Do I have bullet-proof evidence to lay before the skeptic and show him where he is wrong? No. Neither truth nor God is a precept to be pounded in. Moreover, my own understanding of those things that offer evidence even of material truths is far too lacking to offer anything to the educated person.

What can I offer, then? Only hope for the one who seeks truth, refusing to deny that truth is worth all that must be sacrificed of comfort or pride. I can only tell that I have found what satisfies not merely my senses, or my intellect, or my spirit - but my whole being. I don't ask that you believe that it is God, but that you believe it is what you need, too.

God: My Father and My Friend

There are so many people out there who want to tell you about how pure and high God is, and still more who want to tell you about how loving God is. You know, the thing I really appreciate about God is not that he is holy, nor that he is dear - but that he is holy AND dear. He is high and pure and all that a God should be, yet he's never too stuffy to come near and hold out a warm hand when I'm fed up or lonely.

What would I do in this howling wilderness of a world without such a Friend?

I don't care whether it can be explained or not. He is every bit of the beauty that I know. He is all the richness, all the deep, mysterious wonder, all the warm, thrumming energy, all the loveliness that I know. Only in him my weary, bone-tired, self-seeking, self-berating soul finds rest from its endless trying to be; only in him I find fluttering warmth and spreading peace.

His name - God - has been mustied and muffled and garishly painted over: but He remains. What are the theses I have been offered in that Dear One's place? Beside Him, the vast sweep of philosophy and the measured step of science and the unfurled banners of ancient history and the colored skein of modernity are but mutterings and platitudes, after all. All their promised textures; treasures; sapience, drawn out, are paper and shadows. In all that I have sought and seen, there is nothing that compares with Him.

You may have the visions and the miracles, the blessings and the wonders and the signs. Keep the great cathedrals and the stirring hymns and the flowing robes. Take the inspirational poems and the well-expounded sermons and the bullet-proof apologetics. Call me naive and deluded. Call me a reactionary and a romantic. Call me a fool, a fanatic, a Jesus-freak.

How I love him - my Father and My Friend.

Expectation and Experience and India, and God

I didn't really want to go to India. I had never actually been there, of course, but I'd read books and seen bits in movies and heard stories. I knew about as much about it as I cared to, and it just didn't seem all that interesting. For one thing, everyone said it was dirty. And crowded. The music sounded whiny, and wasn't there a rather inhumane caste system still to be dealt with? What else was there to know?

But I was going. I had been roped in with a group and India was the chosen destination. So I went.

And oh, how I long to return to India. The colors and the casual grandeur were breathtaking. The rich, deep, age-old culture that lay, multi-faceted and palpable, draped over and under and interwoven with everything, and the people - warm and smiling and open-hearted, and the life-energy running through and around it all, humming and vibrant... I fell in love with India and all that she is. The dirt and the crowds were there, but they didn't seem tedious and annoying as I had imagined. Even the fine dust that blew through the air and ruined my clothes and wouldn't be scrubbed from my skin bespoke a simplicity, and seemed a subtle reminder of the humble origins of humanity and our vital connection with the earth. The vaulting of the sky seemed much higher and grander than I remembered it being in Canada. The jostling commotion of the crowds wasn't all pleasantness, but it made me feel a part of something great and vital. The very air thrummed with life and living and a kind of drumbeat, felt rather than heard. Color and sound and rhythm streamed like long banners overhead. India wasn't comfortable - it was hot and old and dusty and dirty and noisy and even unkempt - but somehow, comfort didn't seem to be all that I had felt it was back home in Canada.

This is a little how it is when one really comes to know God for the first time. Oh, you may have seen 'The Jesus Movie', or maybe you've been brought up in the church and listened to a million sermon-stories. Maybe you've even read the guidebook. But God is nothing like you've imagined. Like India, he is deep and rich and warm and dear and living, and filled with a wide freedom and a captivating sweetness. Like India, he is not comfortable - but he shows comfort for the meagre, pitiful thing it is. Like India, God can be ignored and shoved onto the shelf in your mind marked "religion", and you might go your whole life with your assumptions, never really knowing what you're missing...

Earth, Idealism, and God

I think I might be a bit of an idealist. I don't like that. I mostly like to think of myself as realistic, but from time to time, I sense the idealist shoe fitting pretty snugly about my little foot. This might be one of the reasons that I so often find myself disappointed. I don't realize, most of the time, that my expectations are anything more than modest. That is, until I come smack up against reality. -Pop- goes my shiny bubble, and I'm left wiping soap scum off the computer screen.

The boys in the reading club I teach are in the middle of a book about an alien who comes to earth. He writes back home about his experiences, and one of his observations is this: "Earth is a tough neighbourhood." I liked this statement. He's right. We humans are always trying to build trust, and always letting each other down. We talk about brotherhood and peace, but deep down, we only want those things if we can have them and all the other things we want, too. At our very best, we are broken.

There is only one thing in my life that has been better than I expected, not less; that hasn't left me feeling flat or disappointed: only God. Only He has been more warm, more kind, more lovely, more rich, and more trustworthy than I dreamed he would be. Only He has kept every promise. Only He satisfies, surprises, and delights the idealist in me with her high-flown expectations. What a sweet relief after I have got a look at the disappointing weakness of the human heart, and the failure that dogs the most noble of us.

And this is the message which we have heard from him, and declare to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (I John 1:5)

Oh, here I can rest my weary heart...

Waiting to Be Free

This is what the Lord says-- Israel's King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God. Isaiah 44:6

Perhaps the hardest thing a human being can do is bow herself before the God of Eternity, to recognize his awful authority and right. There is something deep and dark and long-clawed within us, that lays hold on the heart and will not let us go without blood.

I am waiting for the day when I will be free of that squealing, squirming self that reaches always for supremacy and rages in bitter disappointment against the God who refuses to give up his place.

Why This Waste?

I'm tired. Tired of waiting. Tired of hurting. Tired of leaving myself bare, tired of feeling foolish, tired of pushing down my wounded, squirming pride, tired of hurting for what seems like no reason, tired of waiting for God to replace my withered love with His strong one. I try to remember - well, half-remember, half-imagine - what it's like to love and hurt and still not need.

I sit outside a tightly closed door and wait. The door was once open to me, and I went in and out of it at will. I begin to forget, just now, precisely why I wait, but Love, that charming child, is somewhere about me, and for what seems like a long time, his presence has been enough.

Pride comes stalking about from time to time, making indignant thrusts and reminding me of the privilege from which I have fallen, and drawing my eyes to a plentitude of other doors open to me which I might more independently go in at. But Love rises up and silences his angry talk with a bold look.

Then Loneliness has a turn at me. He comes smoothly and coldly, laying with chill hands a thin blanket of melancholy about my shoulders as I wait. His pleading suggestion is a whine in the wind, but it matches the rising complaint in my cold heart: If you can't bear it, no need to stay. There are other doors open wide and warm. But again, Love arises in my defence and quells him with a word or two.

Last comes Reason, unsanctified. I hear the ordered measure of his footfall as he comes and it seems reassuring to my ear. He is neither angry nor pleading, but all matter-of-fact, and he seems not even to see me, but addresses Love directly: "Think carefully, my friend. Long have you sat outside this door, to what end? Are you not simply a bother to those inside? When they think of you at all, doesn't your stubborn waiting seem a burden rather than a gift? What can you give if the door is shut?" His unimpassioned charge is swift and strong, and even Love seems to stagger, his childlike trust suddenly made foolish.

Then softly, through the damp and gloom, comes One whose brow is wrapped in thorns, whose hands and feet are pierced and bleeding. He neither looks nor speaks harshly, but before him, Reason knows his place and becomes the humble penitent. Love runs to him as to a father and looks boldly out from amongst the soft, warm robes of the Man of Sorrows.

I, too, am compelled to take my place at his feet, and I remember why and for Whom I sit waiting. It is not for the ones on the other side of the door, but for Him who also waits with broken heart.

Like those frugal-minded souls who watched with only their eyes the glory of One for whom an alabaster box was broken and its ointment poured forth, I have questioned in my heart, "Why this waste?"

And then - a glimpse of Him before whom all is at once broken and made whole; Him before whom there is no waste, though I pour out the whole treasure of my deep heart on his dear feet; Him whose broken heart precedes every other breaking, and whose precious ointment lavished on me is the full of my own heart's store.

I am ashamed that I have forgotten for whom I wait and watch; that I have been deceived by that rogue trio into counting again the cost of the alabaster, into making measure of my precious ointment. Surely there can be no waste for the One whose own blood poured forth is of matchless worth.

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. (Ecclesiastes 6:8)

My Scary, Surprising God

How can we be sure that our God is not a product of our own minds? How can we know that the God we believe in is not a projection of ourselves and our wishes and hopes?

This post is in answer to a challenge presented by DagoodS: "How does your god Frighten you? How does your God surprise you? How does your God change your thinking?"

Power can be exciting and comforting at the same time. What child doesn't like to imagine superheroes with great powers? In the same way, our imaginations of God make him an all-powerful genie, and Jesus the ultimate Superman. We can love this kind of a God because his unlimited powers are, in a way, at our disposal. He is on our side. We just have to pray diligently enough, sprinkle a little faith-dust, and *poof* - our wishes are granted.

The God of the Bible bears no resemblance to such a magician. His purposes are vastly different from ours. He does not grant wishes to his favorites. The privileges I am offered if I follow him are himself, and the privilege of knowing him - though my choice allows God to use his power for my benefit, he doesn't use it for my comfort; nor is his power given into my control. Similarly, we experience this in nature. As we take our rightful place in the natural world, the benefits of nature come to us - but never is nature under our control. The universe laughs at a person or people who think they can through study or industry bend the natural forces.

I love the ocean whose salt waves cool my body in summer; whose unseen depths and ceaseless tides at the same time calm and intrigue me. But though I splash and play in the waves, they are no playthings. The ocean is relentless. It is set upon principles that will not be denied, though I cry and beg. It is a thing wholly outside of my control, and is therefore a thing to be feared as well as loved.

So is God. His principles go far deeper and higher than my wanting. He is not controlled by my pleading. He is not devoted to my comfort. He let Joseph be falsely accused and languish in prison for ten years. He let the Hebrews be made slaves to the Egyptians. He allowed John the Baptist to rot in Herod's dungeon until John questioned all that he had lived for - then he let them cut off his head. Who would imagine such a God?

But wait - there's more. The same God who seemingly ignored the pleas and tears of those who followed him the most closely all through history showed that he is merciful, not by granting them favours (as you and I would imagine) but by becoming a man. He became one of us, with all of the human weakness that we despise in ourselves (except sin). He was tired, hungry, dirty, lonely, weak. He had, like us, to seek even his spiritual strength and comfort from heaven. The power that allowed him to give to others offered him no pillow, no home, no dainty food, no freedom from pain or weariness.

Even if it were possible for me to conjure such a God in my own thoughts, if he is an illusion only, then he is a God for contemplation; for philosophizing. When I am cold, I want a blanket. When I am hungry, I want bread. When I am tired, I want a place to lay my head. When I am lonely, I want a friend. The mere thought of a God as the Bible describes him is awe-inspiring when I sit comfortably on my couch and meditate - but such thoughts are easily quenched by the realities of life: loneliness, disappointment, tiredness, hunger, pain. Only the experienced reality of a God who sees and knows - though he denies my request - is enough then.

This sort of a God is frightening. He's too complicated. He's too big, not in the good, "my-Dad-can-beat-up-your-Dad" way, but in the "do-you-even-know-I'm-here?" way. He can give me pain. He can leave me lonely. He can let me be confused. On top of it all, he expects far more from me than I want to give. He's disconcerting.

Then, too, he surprises me. He doesn't do what I expect him to do. He reveals himself as a person I didn't expect him to be.

God surprises me by not being the person I expect; by being subject to reality in a way that he is not in my imagination. In my mind, no one characteristic of God has to have a bearing on any other characteristic, because he doesn't have to make sense except in the way I think of him. In real life, he has to be what makes sense even before I've gone over the parameters and the consequences of his characteristics; even before it makes sense to me. I have to know what he is before I understand why it's necessary for him to be that way.

I used to think that God was completely unlimited; that he could do anything - just anything. Of course, that left me with a million problems that began in my own life and ended in places like Darfur and Indonesia. The God I imagined didn't have to make sense - he could be good AND unlimited AND thus have both the ability and the will to relieve the plight of millions of suffering people down through history... but in reality my little daydream broke down. The God I came face to face with in reality looked astonishingly different because he was limited in the way EVERYTHING is limited in reality. He can't be what he isn't. He can't serve opposing purposes. He can't make a rock so big that he can't lift it. There are reasons for what he does. And yet, the Bible tells me what he is like without my being able to understand how that fits with what I see. It corrects both my imagination and my reasoned deductions. I can see what he does BEFORE I understand why; and I can know (from the Bible) who he is BEFORE I can reconcile that with the evidence. Both of those things are baffling to the imagination. But the fact that I can know who God is before I can understand why it is necessary for him to be that way offers me evidence that my knowledge of God comes from outside my own thoughts.

I thought I could please God by being kind, by helping others, by doing my best to conform myself to the teachings of the Bible. I also thought that by pleasing God, I could expect some favours in return. Oh, not so simply as that. I wasn't thinking that God would ply me with sports cars and overseas flights because I traded in my time and money and tried to be kind to hurting people. But I did expect that there would be some kind of return on my investments. I thought there was some sort of perk to be had for those who follow Jesus. Not so, as it turns out. Well, not like I expected, anyway. No extra comforts, no signs that the King of Kings is my own father.

Just Him. He is the perk. There is deep peace in knowing him. There is joy and purpose, even in the midst of struggle, confusion, and depression.

The more I get to know him, the more he surprises me. He wakes me up early, just to talk. (Ask my mother how likely it is that I'd wake up early on my own!) He shows me the selfishness at the core of the sacrifices I make, and the pride that surrounds my most selfless acts. He bursts all my balloons, and replaces them with himself. Oh, he is lovely, but make no mistake - God is a party pooper. Just when I'm feeling great, patting myself on the back for a particularly selfless act, he sticks his foot out and I'm flat on my face. That's not just surprising, it's frustrating.

And just when I've got him in a nice, neat little box - the kind you can hand to someone like a present - I come smack up against a whole new side of him I've never seen before.

He tells me I'm wrong. In fact, sometimes he shows me that my whole perspective is wrong. I used to think that it was my job to point out sin - from my schoolfriend who lived a gay lifestyle to my sister who hurt my feelings with her carelessness. One day God showed me that judging is his job, not mine, and that being right is far from enough in his eyes. In fact, in trying to take his place, I am worse than those I judge! Do I like that? Nope. When somebody does what I know is wrong, I love the rush of knowing that I'm right and they are wrong, and I want them to understand exactly what the situation is. (There, now you know just what a little prig I am, though I usually try my best to hide it!)

Then, when I thought I was doing a pretty good job of showing what God's love is, He showed me that I don't know a thing about love. He pointed out how much of my "love" is emotionalism, neediness, and pride. He let me see how fast my brand of love turns to hatred and resentment when it is met with rejection, weakness, or apathy. But he didn't leave me there - this is the wonder and the loveliness of the God I worship! - he let me have a little of his love. I had to receive it myself before I could give it, and even then, it wasn't anything like I expected. As it turns out, God's love isn't a warm, smooshy feeling, but a heaviness. It isn't what makes me smile and hand out sandwiches to homeless people - it's what lets me come back for more when I've been kicked in the teeth; it's what lets me sincerely want good for someone who has rejected me; it's what makes me see the beauty of God himself in the kind of person whose sinfulness is all too evident to me; it's what allows me to want another's good at my cost. Don't get me wrong, I've experienced real love in trace amounts - but even the minutest grain of such a thing was enough to turn my whole thinking on its head.

Oh, I am smart enough to figure out what my weaknesses are - but God shows me the deep darkness and the flapping foolishness that entwine themselves about my strengths. The better I know him, the less I trust myself.

No, the God I worship is far more frightening, more complex, more deep, vast, and breath-takingly beautiful than I could ever dream up. I know myself more free as I am changed by him, but I am not released from the chains of selfishness with smooth sighs - it is a bitter struggle with one who is stronger than I. His purpose cuts across mine. He offers me pains that I could not and would not choose for myself. Many in our world have pain, but the pain God gives is different in this - it results in love, joy, and peace. It sets free those who choose Him.

The idea that I could imagine a God so wise, so pure, so full of the kind of love that doesn't even make sense to a human being, is not only laughable but indeed, if it were possible, it would make me - the dreamer of such a dream - myself worthy of worship. That I am patently unworthy is a fact beyond dispute.

Testing the Hypothesis

Research has always interested me, while the logistics of carrying out solid research have always repelled me. However, it is clear to those of us who study the unquantifiable that, despite the paucity of answers available through even the most painstaking and principled of research, without it there are no answers that may be communicated. I may hold any beliefs I choose about "the way things are", but without an appeal to primary research, I have no basis on which to offer my beliefs to others.

My life's thesis, that God is Love, must too be tested and subjected to experiment under varying conditions if it is to be communicated. It seems that Paul had the same idea about the responsibility of the apostles:

"For it seems to me that God has put us the Apostles last of all, as men whose fate is death: for we are put on view to the world, and to angels, and to men." I Corinthians 4:9

He saw the apostles' lives as a spectacle, a display - living, breathing experiments of their great hypothesis, Jesus Christ the Savior of the world.

If I live true to my own hypothesis, it will be tested. My life will become an experiment in which the reality of God may be tried and the results displayed to anyone interested enough to watch.

One of the great medieval biology experiments on the effects of rest and exercise on digestion was one ordered by a cruel emperor. He had two of his servants fed well for a month. After each meal, one was forced to rest; the other was forced to exercise. At the end of the month, the servants were brought before the king and disembowelled to determine which lifestyle was better suited to healthy digestion. Obviously, the knowledge gained in this case hardly warranted the brutality it involved. But the results were clearly more to be trusted than reams of arguments on the matter.

Whatever it cost me, may I subject to the necessary tests my life's hypothesis. Let me prove amid the rigours of life's inevitable weariness and bewildering unfairness and absorbing variety and strange, surprising happiness, who is that One who is more dear than solace and more beautiful than joy. Let me not speak with smooth, swollen words of such deep, darling, powerful, and pure things as God and love. Rather, let me eat them. Let the bowels of my self be ripped apart, that the precious results may be displayed to those who wonder.

Aha! Moments...

Why didn't anybody ever explain to me the vast difference between the things in life that make me feel good and the things that make me happy?

Or maybe they did, but it didn't feel good, so I didn't listen...

Faith: How Much is Enough?

ex·pe·ri·ence (ĭk-spîr'ē-əns)
n.
The apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind: a child's first experience of snow.
Active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill: a lesson taught by experience; a carpenter with experience in roof repair.
The knowledge or skill so derived.
An event or a series of events participated in or lived through.
The totality of such events in the past of an individual or group.
tr.v., -enced, -enc·ing, -enc·es.
To participate in personally; undergo: experience a great adventure; experienced loneliness.
[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin experientia, from experiēns, experient-, present participle of experīrī, to try.]

'For which reason, because we have righteousness through faith, let us be at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; Through whom, in the same way, we have been able by faith to come to this grace in which we now are; and let us have joy in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but let us have joy in our troubles: in the knowledge that trouble gives us the power of waiting; And waiting gives experience; and experience, hope: And hope does not put to shame; because our hearts are full of the love of God through the Holy Spirit which is given to us.' (Romans 5:1-5, Bible in Basic English)

'I think you ought to know, dear brothers, about the hard time that we went through in Asia. We were really crushed and overwhelmed, and feared we would never live through it. We felt we were doomed to die and saw how powerless we were to help ourselves; but that was good, for then we put everything into the hands of God, who alone could save us, for he can even raise the dead. And he did help us, and he saved us from a terrible death; yes, and we expect him to do it again and again.' (2 Cor 1:8-10 Living Bible)

'A big wind storm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so much that the boat was already filled. He himself was in the stern, asleep on the cushion, and they woke him up, and told him, "Teacher, don't you care that we are dying?" '(Mark 4:37-38 World English Bible)

Sometimes I can really relate to those disciples in the boat, crying, "God, don't you CARE? Don't you SEE?" It's always amazing to me that God is not weakened by his love for me. His pity doesn't soften his resolve to give me the experiences I need. I've been in the boat with him before. I am beginning to realize that he never planned to keep the storms from touching me. I'm beginning to learn that with a little patience, I'll have an experience that will allow me to trust him further.

I can sympathise with those who find themselves unable to span the chasm that lies between their present knowledge and a knowledge of God with a great leap of faith. We who ask others to do such a thing ought to first ask ourselves if this is what we have done. I have not.

On reflection and careful consideration, however, it has taken a little faith. Enough to make me begin, and to keep me searching for what I had only sensed, and that rather dully. There was no single leap, for me, from doubt to faith. I carried both all along the way. I took little steps with the hope that there would be Something There, and my "faith" was replaced by experience.

Just as there is no way to quickly know or trust a person, or even a methodology, so knowledge of God is rarely sudden and undeniable. Rather, it is a cumulation of experiences that, looked at individually, may amount to little, but as a whole offers a body of knowledge that satisfies the questions we ask.

How much faith does it take to know God? A little. Enough to give me a little patience so that I can see the end of a thing. Enough to take a single step forward in the search for what God is - not a super genie offering wishes; not a white-robed grandfather-in-the-sky, but Light, Love, Truth. We need not take a second step until our faith be replaced with knowledge.

To all of you who have tried to make the leap and failed, many have done as you have done. But God does not require a leap into the dark. I hope that I can shine enough light on the trail to convince you only to take a tiny step toward whatever you may sense of Him who is Light. You don't have to take off your "atheist" sticker. You don't have to change your religion. You don't have to begin attending church. Just take a little step. Put yourself in a place where you could experience a God who who is Light, Love, Truth; the kind of God who makes stars and suns and trees and oceans and lions and puppies and people; the kind of God who is what he is no matter how much it hurts you OR him.

Faith doesn't mean deciding what God should do and believing sincerely that he will do it. It means knowing God well enough to be sure that what God does do is good, no matter how rotten it feels. There is a huge difference. Faith requires experience.

What I Could Not Say - Oswald Chambers on "Sin"

We Christians love to think of ourselves as brave "soldiers of the cross" - until we mess up big-time. It's then that we realize that God hasn't called us soldiers - he's called us sheep. Stubborn and easily distracted, but sought after and loved by the Good Shepherd, we are asked not to fight, not to defend - but to follow. I've been discouraged lately, in discussing a number of things (including sin and its heredity), by my inability to explain what I know and understand in a way that is not completely incomprehensible to another. Why am I so unable to bridge the gap of thought when I do understand both perspectives? Why must I play so handily into the "narrow-minded Christian" stereotype?

Then that darling of a sister of mine, who sees things so differently from me, came out of the blue with an explanation by Oswald Chambers that is everything I wanted to say, only with pith and restraint. It satisfies my longing to bridge perspective with rational communication. I've included it below. It no longer matters whether or not anyone else sees what I see, because Chambers, at least, understands and has explained, and has done it well. Oh, I know that God will not be sorted and explained by mere words, because he is not known by the intellect alone. But how lovely to have my intellect satisfied, too - and in far less wordy an attempt than mine!

When I am filled with my own inadequacy, God reminds me that I am not all that important, after all, and I am comforted. What does it matter how I appear? In my very best talents and abilities, the flaws begin to show themselves, and I go running again with sweet, rushing relief, to the Christ - who alone is flawless.

The Nature of Degeneration (from "My Utmost for His Highest", by Oswald Chambers)

" Just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned . . ."
—Romans 5:12

The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for one man’s sin, but that the nature of sin, namely, my claim to my right to myself, entered into the human race through one man. But it also says that another Man took upon Himself the sin of the human race and put it away— an infinitely more profound revelation (see Hebrews 9:26 ). The nature of sin is not immorality and wrongdoing, but the nature of self-realization which leads us to say, "I am my own god." This nature may exhibit itself in proper morality or in improper immorality, but it always has a common basis— my claim to my right to myself. When our Lord faced either people with all the forces of evil in them, or people who were clean-living, moral, and upright, He paid no attention to the moral degradation of one, nor any attention to the moral attainment of the other. He looked at something we do not see, namely, the nature of man (see John 2:25 ).

Sin is something I am born with and cannot touch— only God touches sin through redemption. It is through the Cross of Christ that God redeemed the entire human race from the possibility of damnation through the heredity of sin. God nowhere holds a person responsible for having the heredity of sin, and does not condemn anyone because of it. Condemnation comes when I realize that Jesus Christ came to deliver me from this heredity of sin, and yet I refuse to let Him do so. From that moment I begin to get the seal of damnation. "This is the condemnation [and the critical moment], that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light . . . " ( John 3:19 ).

Warning: This Post is Based on My Subjective Experience and May Be Rambling and Boring!

This post is in response to another question asked by that relentless question-asker, Slapdash. I'll warn you before you go skipping blithely onward, that it's rambling and more vague than I like to be. Moreover, it concerns my own experience of things, which may in this case be quite beside-the-point for most of you. Nevertheless, I must attempt, though my powers of self-analysis be strained to the breaking-point. Please keep in mind that my purpose here is not to convince but to explain.

Slapdash's question:

**Can you define what you mean by “know” and describe what you think the door [to knowing God] is? (Slapdash)

I'm not sure that I can communicate this, but I will die in the attempt. By knowing, I mean being sure with sense, mind and spirit.

Of course, we may not truly know a person through the senses, but the evidence our senses are able to gather about a person must either match the other knowledge we have of that person, or the mind must be able to postulate a reason why the sensory evidence does not match.

In order for the mind to know, reason (in as much as we possess it) must be satisfied. I don't say that reason must understand fully, but certainly it must not be ignored; its questions must not be brushed away. If I know my sister, I don't necessarily understand all that she is, nor do I necessarily have a good grasp of the biochemical processes that function in her body and brain. Rather, my understanding of who she is and that she is, is accounted for by reason and does not oppose my logical powers.

The testimony of my senses attests to her existence as an individual. Though I have had greater sensory evidence of her existence than I have had of yours, Slapdash, reason allows for both of you.

But knowing that someone exists and understanding what kind of a person exists is not knowing a person. Knowing a person involves shared experience; feedback; an exchange of views and perspectives; ultimately, a changed understanding because my understanding has been acted upon by the force of another's. When my understanding alters on its own, the alteration is clean and complete. We like to illustrate this in our culture as a light turning on. While this kind of realization may, in a more complex way, happen in conversation with another person, it is usually through a rather more complicated process that I am "convinced" or brought to an understanding and/or espousal of another person's point of view.

I am rationally convinced that I know God based on two theoretical evidences which are convincing to me as an individual. The first is that he offers arguments and opens my understanding to other things that neither appeal to me nor appear in any way to be an extension or progression of my own views. The second is that I am coming to understand who he is and why. The fact that I know WHAT before I know WHY signifies non-progression and offers me evidence that this sort of knowledge is not my own imagination or wishful thinking.

These evidences have been reflected in experience for me by God's fulfillment of the promises he has made to me. There have been times when I haven't understood what he was doing. There have been times when I've believed he wasn't fulfilling his promises. In the end, he has fulfilled every one. In doing so, he has brought me to understand on a rational level the reasons he had for allowing me to misunderstand him or for appearing to fail me. He has also, in different ways and different times, given me satisfying answers to every question I have asked him, with the exception of one. (The exception is a question I asked him recently, and it has been partially answered but not completely.)

As I put into practice the things that God teaches me, I am coming to trust him as well as my knowledge of him. I see evidence that the things he has asked me to do which seemed ridiculous to me have results that are not ridiculous at all.

Finally, I may compare my understanding of God with all of my other hopes or imaginations. While all else that I dream up on my own claims that I am brilliant and under-appreciated, God alone reveals my foolishness, even to me, and attests to the destructiveness of my pride.

I cannot say much on a rational level about the knowledge I have on a spiritual level, but I will try to describe the results. When I am overwhelmed and weakened, there is a strength and a comfort within me that I am aware is not of me. This grows as I share experience with, and come to know God. I am also aware of a growing freedom from myself - from my own wants and wishes and feelings. My self does not dull nor grow less, but my freedom grows greater, and I have a heightened ability to will what I do not want or feel. I have increased joy in things despite the hurt or difficulty they bring me, as I come to know God.

What is the door through which we may know God? The Bible says that door is Jesus Christ. He is the beginning of knowing God as a person because he puts us in a position to approach God and to allow God's Spirit to enter us.

"I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved..." (John 10:9)

Then how is Jesus to be known?

Through exercise of the will. He calls himself the Truth. Thus all who honestly will to know the Truth will to know him.

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13)

Please don't assume that my meandering attempt here is the real answer to this question. The truth is, I am trying to share what is really a very individual experience. My sister, who shares my knowledge of God despite our vastly different personalities, priorities, and approaches to knowledge, would describe it differently. And yet the God we know is the very same person.

Eve's choice and mine

I asked the kids in my Korean/English Bible class last Friday night who the first person was. As always, Grace put up her hand, leaning my way and panting earnestly. I knew what her answer would be – what it always is. I looked her way and she strained harder, wiggling her fingers and whispering, “Teacher! Teacher!”
I nodded at her.
“Jesus!”
She smiled broadly and contentedly. I had to laugh. Grace has taught me an important lesson. She knows that no matter what the question, Jesus is always the answer!

Annie, another little girl in the same class, has taught me another important lesson. For her, the answers aren’t nearly as important as the questions – and the most important question is always “why?” That’s why she was the first to put up her hand when I was telling the group what the book of Genesis tells us about Adam and Eve and the beginning of trouble in the world.
“Why did God make such a terrible tree?”
“It wasn’t the tree that was terrible, Annie. It was Adam and Eve’s choice to disobey God that was terrible.”
“Why did God put it there if He didn’t want them to eat the fruit?”

Have you ever dared ask God such a question?

For a split second, I panicked. I had twenty-four kids listening intently – which alone was a miracle of proportions sizeable enough to drive all reason from my head – and I didn’t know what to say. I prayed, well, kind of prayed – it was more like an “Aaagh!” in God’s direction – and he told me what to say. (Don’t ask me how he told me so fast, I just know that the lights were turning on in my brain a nanosecond before the words were coming out of my mouth. This was God’s answer, in my words:
Annie, nice question. Keep thinking like that and you’ll know me someday. I put that tree there in the garden on purpose. I did that not because I wanted Adam or Eve to sin –ever! I did it because I gave Adam and Eve a gift I didn’t give to any other creatures, and that tree would let them use it.
The gift I gave Adam and Eve is the same one I gave you and every human being. You are all very, very special, because you are like me in a way no other creature can be. I have given you the gift of CHOICE. Choice involves having two things: a will, and the ability to supercede your own will. Sometimes people think that doing what you want is the same as having a choice – it isn’t! The animals do what they want, but they can never overcome their own wants.
Remember when Noah built that great ark? I told the animals to go to Noah and get on the ark. He didn’t have to trap them or lure them on – they just obeyed me. They obeyed me because they are my creatures, and I am God. Ah, obedience is a beautiful thing, and it resulted in a beautiful variety of animals being saved through the flood. The animals did what I made them to do. But how many people obeyed me? Only eight. Only eight people in the world got on that ark. The others made a choice. I gave them that choice and I can never take it back.
I suppose your next question is another “why?”, like “Why is choice so important?” Annie, only humans can love as I love. If I made Adam and Eve without the ability to sin, they would have obeyed me, followed me – but they could never love me or each other. Because I made them like me, they (and you!) are part of the deepest, most beautiful thing in the universe – love. I have shown you what love is in the way I created the trees, the mountains, the oceans, the stars…but none of my other creations can join me in loving.
Love hurts. It does! It hurts me, too! In fact, love means choosing to accept hurt in order to give good to someone else. If it doesn’t cost anything, it isn’t really love.
Eve didn’t want to give up the fruit I told her not to eat. She chose her own will instead of choosing me. Adam did, too. This was the beginning of trouble in the world. When they chose sin, they became sinners. It was a great tragedy. My beautiful creation – ruined because I gave choice! Was it a mistake? Never. I hate the sin that Adam and Eve allowed in, because it destroys all that is beautiful and clean and unselfish. But the choice – that is the door for love.
Now all human beings have become sinners. They are sinners because their parents are sinners. Just as dogs have baby dogs and cats have baby cats, sinners always have baby sinners! You didn’t make a choice to be one, you were just born that way. So what about YOUR choice? Yes, yes. Adam and Eve made a choice, but what about you? Just as their choice landed my whole creation in trouble, my Son, Jesus, has made a choice that will rescue it. Adam took away your choice, but Jesus gave it back. Now, you can choose your way – or me. This is the same choice that Adam had.
When I chose to love you, I had to choose against myself. I had to choose to punish my own, dear, innocent son. It wasn’t easy, but it was love. When you choose me, against yourself, you will finally be free from the slavery of sin. You will be able to do what my other creatures can’t do; you will be like me, able to give even what costs… You will love as I love!
Yes, Annie, that tree I put in the garden was a door. It was a door that let sin and death enter my perfect creation. But if I didn’t put it there, there would be no love. You have a great gift, because you can love, like God. But remember that a great gift comes with a great responsibility. With your choice you can go against me.
But choosing me, you have love and life.

Communicating God

Today I am full of the futility of trying to explain God. I am so easily sidetracked, so easily led into justifying God's existence. Who am I to say that God is? My very choice of words and expressions seem to limit him, to conform him to my perspective, and reduce him to my understanding. His utter reasonableness is lovable to the human mind, but he is not fully comprehended in reason.
Can love be sorted and counted? Can the vast glories of nature be measured and regulated? Even the natural laws we have been thousands of years attempting to plot and graph through scientific study - magnificent study, that! But after all, we are forced to admit that the the complexities of nature, while full of logic and something even beyond logic, somehow transcend our grasp. No one who has studied astronomy or biology can say we live in a simple universe. Even that which we can confidently say that we "know" is with regularity interrupted by the "black holes" that appear in even the best organised of our understanding.
He is, that is all. But the "all" is the ground of morons unless the "is" - who and how such a God is - is somehow comprehended.
What brilliant mind dreamed up the God of the Bible - a God who is at once fierce and lovable, the one from whom earth and heavens flee, and the babe lying a manger, him whom to look at is to die, and the one who takes note of a sparrow's fall - ? What alliance of creative energy produced even the idea of this God - the one who speaks worlds into existence, laughs at those who waste themselves in opposing him, dwells in light inaccessible... and accepts responsibility for our choices, at the cost of his own pain?
The great thinkers of our history - Plato and da Vinci and Confucious and the Buddha and Einstein and Marx - those magnificent ones are flea brains by comparison to the authors of such a God! Tell me who they are -let me just bow at the feet of the being or beings who are wise and deep and noble enough to as much as imagine such a God - were he a fiction, I would worship even them!
And still, the great challenge of those who have seen him, heard him, touched him, is to communicate him - not that he is, but who he is, in the feebleness of words and lives. The Word, God and with God, was wrapped in swaddling bands at his birth. His story was written largely by uneducated laymen. If my life be one long struggle to know and communicate him, though I fail, I die satisfied.
Oh, he is - enough. What else ever can be?

On Faith

I hesitate to use this word, faith. It has been mangled and strangled and left, weak and whimpering, decidedly beyond the pale of respectable rationality. It is the last, desperate appeal for those who are too tired or too lazy to look any further. It is a smug euphemism for the self-satisfied who feel no need to substantiate the validity of their own thinking.
Let me tell you what faith as the Bible uses it most assuredly is not. It is not an excuse not to think, nor is it an exemption from the responsibility of drawing clear links between beliefs, knowledge, rationality, and experience, at least within our own minds. It is not the obstinate clinging to what I wish to be true despite all evidence to the contrary.
I will begin from the Bible, for the simple reason that I have found in it above all a consistent presentation of the reality I know, and of the person and claims of God, in relation to whom "faith" is traditionally understood. The "faith" I am interested in is the Biblical idea. I believe this idea of faith has been historically, routinely, and universally misused and misrepresented. The concept of faith as the Bible presents it is quite simply, "reason to expect" a certain thing.
Nowhere does the Bible encourage ignorance or disregard for rational evidence, either sensory or logical, in favour of fuzzy feelings or a certainty which is based on the strength and value of "my belief". Readers of the New Testament will note that the apostle Paul, when he was questioned about the veracity of Jesus rising again, never said, "Relax, guys. Just have faith." He told those asking the question to go talk to some of the hundreds of people who had seen Jesus after he rose from the dead. Sound like the popular version of faith? It sounds a lot more to me like he was suggesting they use their brains and their eyes.
The Bible clearly and reasonably defines the term, which is so central to its thesis, as "the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen." Nothing airy-fairy about that. It is substance; cold hard evidence. Let's think about this. What is the usual evidence for knowedge which is unseen? Umm, like the existence of DNA or electricity, for instance. I personally have never seen either one of them, but they make sense to me. The very same concepts may well have seemed like pie in the sky to someone in my situation about 500 years ago. What makes the difference? They didn't have certain other important pieces of information with which to form a rational body of knowledge. However, there is another evidence for "things not seen" - experience. Had it been possible for them to observe the working of a flashlight or a CD player, there are many things they might have been able to understand and perhaps infer about "electricity" even if they didn't know its name. For example, turn on the flashlight. Light! Turn of the flashlight. No light. Take out the batteries and turn on the flashlight. No light. Put the batteries in and turn on the flashlight. Light! A few repetitions of this demonstration would likely satisfy even a skeptic of the rationality of a concept like electricity. The results of DNA might also be readily evident to them were its viewable results linked with a unified explanation.
Rational, consistent explanation and experience are, in our world, the generally-accepted forms of evidence for things that are known but not seen. I expect that the flashlight will light up when I turn it on because I have a general understanding of the working of electricity AND because it has done it before, repeatedly. When it has failed to turn on, there have been reasonable explanations that have also been consistent with my experience of flashlights and batteries. I know a little how electricity operates, and it is reasonable. My knowledge, combined with my experience of flashlights, has given me "reason to expect." I have faith in electricity, although I don't understand it fully and I have never seen it.
By the Bible's definition, faith is no leap in the dark. It is something substantial - something that appeals to and requires the participation of the whole person, body and mind and spirit. It requires experience and it requires reasoned understanding. You cannot have faith of any quality in a God you do not know, whether that God exists or not. My faith in God depends on my understanding and experience of a God whose person is rational and consistent.
Believing that God exists is radically different from having faith in him. I have faith in my sister because I know her to be trustworthy, not because I believe that she exists. I believe that Tom Cruise and George Bush exist, but my faith in either one has definite limits! In the same way, whether he exists or not, I have no basis for faith that God will cure me of cancer, unless he has said that he will. Believing that he will is not faith. It is a lovely but unsubstantiated hope.
The Bible says "all things work together for good to them that love God". Since the Biblical concept of God includes truth, and my understanding and experience of that God affirms that he is, and that he is truthful, this allows me to expect that whatever God does do with me is ultimately good, by his definition of good. That is faith - matching up my reasoned understanding and my experience, and acting on my "reason to expect". Job, in the Old Testament, knew the God that I know. Sick and poor and in pain and alone, he was able to say about God, "Even if he kills me, I will trust in him". It wasn't because Job stupidly persisted in trusting a God who failed to bless him in the ways he hoped, it was because his understanding and experience had brought him into knowledge of a God who sees pain as a price to be paid; a God who gives pain when it is necessary - and when it is necessary, accepts pain himself.
What about people who don't believe in God? How then can we ever know a God who is not reachable through raw belief?
We must seek a reasonable and unified concept of "God". By this I mean a concept that is non-contradictory rather than one that is "natural". If the "God" is also creator he doesn't need to be wholly subject to the laws of nature, but his reflection in the creation must be either consistent with his person or another rational explanation must tell why it is not. The concept of God may be incomplete and imperfectly comprehended by us, but it is necessary that it be reasonable and consistent. When seeking scientific knowledge, we first offer a rational hypothesis, then we test it. If it fails, we adjust the hypothesis. However, if your hypothesis fails, that doesn't mean God himself doesn't exist - it just means the God you have imagined doesn't exist.
We can come to believe in God by beginning with reason and following with experience. This allows us to know God. It is only then that we will be reasonably able to put faith in God. Putting faith in someone you don't know is - excuse me - stupid. Religious people may expect it, but the God of the Bible doesn't expect it. He says, "You will know me when you search for me with all your heart." Notice it's not a reward for searching diligently. No, it's the searching, the reasoned thought, that is the way to know God - which necessarily comes before having faith in God. The "with all your heart" has tripped up many people. Their search has not been genuine. Neither was mine for a long time. I searched for "God", but I had already prepared a box that I expected him to fit into. This kind of narrow-mindedness is no different in the search for truth about God than it is in the search for scientific truth. Many discoveries have been delayed because people were unwilling to accept certain possibilities.
Some people do arrive at the right answer without understanding, but without understanding, we can't be sure it is the right answer. Just experience is powerful - lab rats depend on it all the time - but again, without understanding, we can't be sure the answer it gives us will continue to be the right answer. Then again, just understanding can be fatal if your understanding is even occasionally flawed. That's why student pilots have to log hundreds of hours of flight experience before they are certified - even if the theories are perfect, sometimes we aren't.
Lest I be misunderstood, I will assert that I am not trying to suggest that a knowledge of God is purely academic. What I want to say is that any real knowledge of truth must begin in the intellect. It is how we respond to our understanding of God that involves a moral choice, that deepest part of a person. Turning off the mind and trying to move straight to the moral decision has resulted in a gross ignorance, darkened understanding, and a terrible corruption of our world's concept of who God is.
For those of you who still cherish a small hope of finding truth, God, whatever it is that you call the thing that sometimes still fills you with longing from your deep heart's core; that greatness and dearness in oceans and mountains and trees and tigers and baby deer before which something inside you bows - let me offer the Bible, and the God of the Bible, as a beginning hypothesis. Read about him for yourself - you just may be surprised.

On Knowing God

I sympathise with all you atheists. I too don't believe in the God you don't believe in. He's a tyrant and a teddy bear. He's stuffy and too desperate to remain fashionable. He's wishy-washy and bigoted. He's self-centred and falls in love with anybody. He's one thing on paper and wholly different in action. It seems like everyone's looking for him, and the only people who are finding him are the ones who have turned off their brains in favour of "faith" - more or less an excuse not to think, not to be all that we know ourselves to be.
Quite simply, I must agree with you wholeheartedly - to the extent that such a God exists, he is no God at all. We have proven it over and over again with the best of humanity's tools of understanding - science, logic, philosophy. We have wrapped up that ugly, inconsistent God in the stiff brown paper of reason, tied him into a tight, four-cornered package with the strings of conscience and consciousness, and tossed him bitterly into the wastebasket of thought. There he sits, covered over with crumpled bits of well-researched and defended resentment - resentment because he has failed to fulfill, and thereby stolen from us the dearest hope of the human heart. Deep down, don't we all long achingly for something? Something that might have been called "God"?
So some of you have sadly, bravely, or angrily chosen no answer rather than a cheap one that denies first what you know yourself to be. And yet there he sits still, the God who is no God, even in the term "atheist" calling out to you - mocking you for defining your thought in relation to him, and for having dared to hope for something more.
Could I offer you back your hope one more time? You've been disappointed so often - no, don't open your mental door and take it back just yet. Just let that faithful dog, Reason, outside to sniff carefully about one more time.
I am not going to give you any scientific or existential arguments for the existence of God. Let me just tell you a little, now and then, about who the God is who does exist. He'll never be proven through reason, but he never goes against it, either, so reason will protect you from what is not God. There are reasons for everything he does. He answers question asked sincerely. Everyone who searches for him finds him, even those who don't know that his name is "God". (Not everyone who searches for their idea of "God", but everyone who searches for HIM.) Indeed, no one ever knows him without searching. Let me just tell you who he is, so you'll know what to look for.
He is energy and force, but he is personal. He is as harsh and demanding and uncontrollable and beautiful as a snowstorm. He is as kind as a mother should be. He is as deep and strong and inexorable as the sea, as vast as a starry night, and warm and light and comforting as a curled-up cat. He is great and fine and dear. He is love. Not he loves, but he IS love, personified. It is he who created reason and understanding and a billion intricately interconnected natural laws. He is the one who thought up animals, with all their innocent ferocity. He dreamed up the rugged delicacy of the tree, the burning splendour of the sun. He, like the nature that reveals him, is both infinitely incomprehensible and undeniably reasonable. Look deep inside your heart. What is it, underneath the flotsam and jetsam of life, that you truly long for? This is God. This is the God who is.
I haven't always known him. Even after we met, after I knew that he was, I didn't know much about who he was. I spent a long time confusing Him with other things named "God". As a child, I was aware of God in nature and in my grandfather. I felt certain God was present in thunder and lightning storms, which I loved even while they terrified me. I also knew him as my grandfather's friend. If I couldn't see him, I was completely aware that my grandfather knew him even better than he knew me. As I grew older and realised the need and the responsibility of an adult to reconcile experience and thought, God seemed more and more distant. Analysis and measured understanding are the privelege and the duty of mature humanity. I couldn't always reconcile my understanding of "God" and my consciousness of the rest of the world. I almost gave up hope. Then I remembered my grandfather. I was sure he knew someone, whether or not that person's name was God.
I went in search of the God my grandfather knew. In case he could hear me, I asked him all the questions that sprang out of my philosophy classes and my rather imperfect knowledge of science, and the conundrums of humanity- the problem of pain, injustice, tragedy. I was groping desperately in the darkness, only given hope because I was convinced my grandfather had talked to someone real, someone who talked back. While I couldn't accept his experience, it gave me enough hope to keep looking. I started walking outside everyday alone, looking up into the sky and asking God, if he were there, to speak to me.
I met him. I found him in the Bible, as it turned out. I had read the Bible once before, but had failed to see him there. My mind was too busy trying to make what I read fit into the view I had already established about who God was and what the Bible was going to say. What a letdown, huh? You hoped I was going to give you some new information about a mystical experience with a fresh new deity, perfect for our modern world. Instead, just the same old dusty Bible and its dusty version of God. Not quite. Same Bible, different me. Turns out the dusty version of God was only in my head, because the one in the Bible is deep, dynamic, responsive, and absolutely trustworthy.
It was an incredibly painful experience, being forced to let go of my own "beliefs" about God and about myself, but it set me free in a way I never was before. I have never seen him with my eyes, just as I have never seen the wind. But I did become as lucidly aware of his evidence as I am of the wind. I have been in his presence. He has spoken to me as he did my grandfather. And he has answered every question I have dared ask him. I am not resting on some belief, some warm feeling of faith inside that allows me to believe in something without having to use my brain. I learned who he was by reading about him and engaging in linear thought. He has fully engaged both my reason and my experience. I didn't have to lower my expectations. I didn't "get religion".
I am convinced that the God who is meets people in their own way. After all, if he created so many varieties of personalities, cultures, and personalities, wouldn't it be inconsistent in him to insist on a "one size fits all" meeting? What is it that draws out your deep longing, your sense of something more? Science? Seek him in science. History? Seek him in history. Art? Seek him in art. A genuine search for truth will always lead a person to a God who is truth. He is more amazing than you ever imagined. He is knowable, on every level. He is.