What is Sure

“Come, let us return to the Lord;
for he has torn us, that he may heal us;
he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.

Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord;
his going out is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth.”

(Hosea 6:1,3)

God's Trademark

A year or so ago, I received as a gift a beautiful wallet - one that I would never have bought for myself. It was designed by one Louis Vuitton, and is probably worth more than any money I'll ever have in it at one time. People are often interested by this wallet, and the first question I am often asked is "Is it real?" Well, it came in a pretty fancy-looking box, with a tag inside that said "Made in France for Louis Vuitton, #801" (actually, I'm not sure if the number is really 801 and I'm too lazy to go and dig it out right now, but you get the picture...) One girl told me that there is a way to tell for sure if an item has truly been made by Louis Vuitton, and that is to check the pattern stamped onto the leather. Since each genuine article is stamped witht he LV symbol after being cut, the symbol should never extend past the edge of the wallet. That's how you know you have the real deal.

My recent reading in Daniel has reminded me that God, too, places a mark on those who belong to him. His trademark is humility, and it has been indelibly stamped onto the lives of those who have come to know him.

Take Daniel, for instance. This is a young man who has been dragged out of his own country and carted off, a captive, to Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar in the beginning of the book of Daniel is about ready to do in the whole lot of his advisors and magicians, because none of them could tell him what his strange dream means. (Apparently, what these crafty gentlemen had been doing was getting together and agreeing on what they would tell the king, so that it would appear that their stories matched - but Nebuchadnezzar was no slouch, and had found a way to test the validity of their 'interpretations'.) When he hears why he is to be killed, Daniel offers quietly to tell the King is dream. To make a long story short, he is able to tell the dream and its meaning and is made very rich and powerful in short order. Human nature says that it's time to make the most of such a promotion, but here's what Daniel says:
"No wise man, enchanter, magician or diviner can explain to the king the mystery he has asked about, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries...But as for me, this secret is not revealed to me for any wisdom that I have more than any living, but to the intent that the interpretation may be made known to the king, and that you may know the thoughts of your heart."
Can you believe this guy? Everyone thinks he's a superstar, but he wants them to know he has no special powers. He doesn't hold a big Judaism rally with long robes and mood music. There are no big promises, no fantastic claims. There's no capitalising on King Nebuchadnezzar's change of heart. This is clearly a man with God's mark.

Anyone who has ever come face-to-face with the God of Eternity has first had to have a good look at the destruction in their own heart. And it's not easy to be the "big man on campus" when it's not just your accountability partner you are accountable to, but a Holy God.

In this age of mass-mediated everything, including Christianity, there are so many confusing messages. Everyone claims to speak for God. The Bible gives a good picture of the genuine article, so we don't get fooled by all the big claims.

There are some good fakes out there. Keep an eye out for God's mark.

Faith Like a Mustard Seed - Or a Lab Rat

I spent Saturday with my grandmother, participating in a Hallmark channel movie marathon from the comfort of her couch. One of the movies' heroines had dealt with the loss of her husband by renouncing her faith in God and was being counseled by a wise old missionary who advised her earnestly that "God's ways can't be understood."

I was immediately struck with the dichotomy the movie offered. It's the same one we are offered everywhere. On one hand is the person who seeks to understand, portrayed alternately as the truth-loving scientist and the hard-headed empiricist; on the other hand is the person who accepts without understanding, depicted either as a noble idealist or as a pie-in-the-sky dream-chaser. The options are only two. Either we can utterly relinquish all claim to that which cannot be held in the hands and counted like peas, or we are forced to shut ourselves into the walled gardens of our fantasies and reach for our ideals by wishing upon stars. Perhaps it is this divide that has left 'faith' romanticized almost beyond repair. It has come to mean a idealistic clinging to what I want to believe at the expense of all that I know. By contrast, to insist upon reason is to reject out of hand all that is not see-able and smell-able.

Hallmark's gentle missionary was presented more as a noble idealist than a brainless fool... but her words made me feel tired. Is this all we really have to tell people? You don't need to understand - just accept it? Must faith be a blind leap into the dark?

But no! God's ways CAN be understood - more and more, as I come to know him. He doesn't ask for blind belief, but action that is based on what I DO know.

It is true that God asks me to trust him when I don't like or understand what he is doing - but he doesn't leave me there. He does let me see some of his plan. I do eventually come to understand the 'why's, as I come to know God himself.

He doesn't explain it all up-front. I do have to trust him - for a little while. The difference is this: I know who I am trusting. He asked for a little trust in the beginning, when I knew him a little; now that I know him better, he asks for more. But it's only a little while that I have to wait without understanding. God is not the enemy of the intellect - he created it. He does ask that we subject our understanding to him, but only for a while, and only to the degree that we know him.

God is not fully encompassed by reason, but he is never unreasonable. Every life winds through dim wastes, and when I find myself in its dark corners, I am driven to reach for his hand. But when I emerge into the sunlight again, understanding casts its rays backward onto the way that I have come and illuminates the reason why. And then, too, with every experience I know more surely the One who has chosen it, and that I can trust the hand that has led me. As I come to know God, his choices for me seem less and less incomprehensible, and more and more I can appreciate the Good he offers, though its wrappings frustrate and sadden me.

My confidence is not based upon the fact that God will give me what is comfortable. It is based upon the fact that God will give me what is Good. How do I know that? Trial and error. I understand how, contrary to appearances, the things that he has already given me have been Good. The things I have chosen for myself have not always been, but His choices have - every time.

A lab rat can exercise that much faith.

Heard in Passing

"Love can be measured only by what it gives." (M. Radcliffe)

For God so loved the world that He gave...
His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him will never perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

What Love Is

Love: (Verb) to will the good of another at my own expense.

View From a Small Window on a Weary Day

Eternal God, unchanging
Mysterious and unknown
Your boundless love,unfailing
In grace and mercy shown

Bright seraphim in endless flight
Around your glorious throne
They raise their voices day and night
In praise to you alone

Chorus:
Hallelujah
Glory be to Our great God
Hallelujah
Glory be to Our great God

Let every creature in the sea and every flying bird
Let every mountain, every field and valley of the earth
Let all the moons and all the stars in all the universe
Sing praises to the living God who rules them by his word
(Fernando Ortega and Mac Powell)

And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands;
Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.
And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.
(Revelation 4:11-13)

I have struggled for several days to bow myself before the only worthy One. At last, I can can confess that His right is over all - even the pride that sends its roots deeply and quietly into my heart, and tears me all apart when it must be uprooted. How I long for the day when all within me will bow willingly, without raging and tears! I will take my place in a universe resounding with one song, and I will cry with an undivided heart that the God who is Love is greater than all.

Sunset, Seen On My Way Home

Great, heavy drapes of sky were flung wide tonight,
Laying bare a broad canvas, swept
With tangerine fire
And a thousand half-attempts at flame-soaked cloud
In strokes that swirled and dabbed and scratched and bubbled and scudded.
Smoke-blue mountains
With snowy caps
Rose pale and clear in the light,
Suddenly visible;
A stretch of urban grey
Became a blazing panorama beyond the windows of the Skytrain,
In whose vinyl seats
Slumped hundreds of dull-eyed commuters in home-bound stupor,
Oblivious -
Too weary to wonder;
Used to the grey.

Putting Off Childish Things: On Reason and Responsibility

Is it enough to have an epiphany, an experience, a vision? Are we then excused from the heavy work of thinking, comparing, reasoning?

A thousand times, no.

The human mind is a flighty, deceptive thing. It lights on one line of thought, then another, as it pleases. Given rein, it is prone to all sorts of dreams, hallucinations, illusions, and delusions. It is easily overcome by stress, strain, shock,fear, great emotion. It wavers, projecting ideas backward onto memory, and at other times blocking out entire chunks of memory.

For each of us there are two sentinels posted just outside the shadowy, billowing curtains of the mind, and we esteem them lightly at our peril: they are conscience and reason. Both are fallible, and know little of what is, but they are quick to identify what is not. Conscience raises a ruckus over all that is not right; Reason is quick to point out all that is not true. Both may be silenced, but in their silence we are forced to submit to the tyranny of whim and whimsy.

Every adult with an adult's mind bears responsibility to her own conscience and her own ability to reason. The mind that knows light and chooses darkness pronounces its own judgement and damns itself.

Epiphany
an appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity.
a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

If an epiphany be no more than an appearance or manifestation, then what can it give, more than a kind of comfort? What good is the appearance of a deity that has no relevance to the real, that makes no sense, after he has again disappeared into his pale and hazy realm? Only if we mean, by "epiphany", something that rearranges the thinking; that offers some insight into reality, can it bear any weight. Even then, that insight must be guarded by reason until its trustworthiness has been firmly established.

When I say that I am coming to know the Living God, himself the very source of all Truth, what does that mean unless I submit it to the thrashing of reason? Shall I tell that I know God, who made me a rational creature, and lie to say that he bids me discard reason to know him?

An epiphany can never be the climax of knowing, but the introduction. If my thinking is changed to take a whole new direction, then I must not discard reason, but cling the more tightly to it. If it stands under reason's measured blows, and can be reconciled, too, with conscience, only then can I begin to trust it with the weight of my own thinking.

Reason is a weak guide, but we have no better gatekeeper. It never produces its own material, and works instead on the material of conscience and the senses. It compares, analyses, reconstructs; but it never introduces new things - only new combinations of things. That is why it can never, on its own, lead us into what stands outside of us: Truth. But let reason not be undervalued, for it protects us from any number of apparitions pretending to be Truth; they fall under its flashing blade. And once Truth, however dimly, has been perceived, reason will go all about it, marking its foundations, and broadening its reach. Reason allowed to do its work will not rest until Truth has been fully stripped of paint and facade and revealed in all its rich lustre.

Be sure that the comfortable, harmless Gods of epiphanies allowed entrance without reason will all turn tyrant. The only God worth knowing is that One who is called Truth; who fully reconciles and perfects the knowledge and the work of body, mind, and spirit: he is the One who makes meaning out of the gathered questions and answers of sense, reason, and being. If I may not know Him, then call me atheist. Any other God is a lie.

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.

Ancient Wisdom (Part II)

Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.
- Lao-Tzu