Tag Archives: faith

Wild Wednesday: Conspicuous Christianity

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OK, so I messed up. Miz Pink e-mails me yesterday with something along the lines of: “Uh, Deacon, I have a third kid. Could you maybe tell me what the Two-fer Tuesday topic is BEFORE Tuesday?”

So, yeah, I forgot about Two-fer Tuesday. All my fault. So, to make up for it, we’ll mash me and Miz Pink into one post (seriously, Mrs. Blue, it’s purely platonic; more like playing Twister than anything sexually scandalous). We’ll call it Wild Wednesday (stupid, I know) and we’ll take turns on the topic of:

Conspicuous Christianity

Deacon Blue says…

christian-bumper-stickersThere is, sometimes, a fine line between proclaiming Jesus and wearing one’s Christianity proudly, on the one hand, and being a complete douchebag on the other hand.

I live in a town that is large enough to technically be a city (I guess) but small enough that I see the same folks over and over. And the same cars over and over. There are some notable ones that are festooned with bumper stickers and windshield stickers and sometimes big painted signs that proclaim that driver’s devotion to Jesus.

These visible reminders of the person’s piety remind us to follow the ten commandments, keep God as the co-pilot, to revile Charles Darwin as a godless heathen bastard who pissed in our collective Christian Cheerios, value life, honk if we love Jesus and so many other things.

God help me, I just want to smack many of these people.

It’s not that I’m against letting people know you’re Christian. By all means, we should be proud to follow Jesus Christ. It’s not that I’m against sharing your feelings. I have a bumper sticker that supports the value of unions and another one that proclaims the mistreatment of farm workers.

But moderation and tact are useful here. I think two bumper stickers is plenty. Three tops. But I see vehicles that sport five, six, eight, ten stickers. One car I see nearly every day has so many sticker about pro-life stuff and some very Catholic sentiments that the driver might just as well have one bumper sticker that says: “Follow the way of the Roman Catholic Church or ye shall suffer eternally!”

There is a truck I see every few weeks in the grocery store parking lot near my house that has so many signs protesting the practice of abortion, most of them huge wooden signs with big painted diatribes that are attached to the sides of his vehicle, that he might just as well have a couple that say what he really wants to say: “I hope all of you bitches who’ve ever had abortions burn in hell!”

It’s not just Chrisitians who do this. There are some obnoxious pagan-oriented bumper-sticker crazed drivers and a few “guns are great and we should raze the forests to the ground” oriented cars. But I’m talking about the conspicuous Christians today, so those other folks don’t matter.

I guess what I’m saying is that we need to determine if we are really lifting up Jesus, or if we are screeching so loud that we turn people away from him. Bumper stickers can be cool, but only in small amounts, and they are highly unlikely to make anyone consider becoming born again.

Miz Pink says…

pink-crossIf I am doing my job right as a Christian…as someone who’s supposed to spread the gospel…I shouldn’t have to tell you I’m Christian. You should be able to see in my actions that there is a peace and a strong center in my life and see the “light of Christ” shining from me. If I’m doing what I should be doing.

And when you see that light, you should be able to notice some little thing, like a simple little gold cross around my neck or some small religious oriented trinket on my desk…or whatever…and be able to know that I follow Jesus.

Or, if you are having troubles in life…something that faith and being born again might begin to fix, you should be able to see that I get through nasty things in life with some sense of peace and humility and be able to ask me what keep me going…so that I can tell you who and what it is that does keep me going.

If I have to shout from the rooftops that I am a Christian or if I have to wave my faith in front of your face, I probably haven’t done my job right.

Instead, I’m probably like those priests in Jesus’s time that had the long robes and phylactries on their arms and said loud prayers so that people could see how devout they are.

That’s so wrong. That’s not doing the job God set out for us.

The Unpatriotic GOP Faithful?

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I just read a comment at Monroe Anderson’s blog, and I’ll just post a little snippet here to give you a taste.

I find it to be somewhat perplexing for those who profess to adhere to the Judeo-Christian values on which this country was founded to condemn the concept of “sharing the wealth.” I also find it somewhat puzzling for those who are seeking the highest elective offices in the land to view paying taxes as a punitive practice and not a patriotic privilege.

I highly recommend you click here and read Dr. Woods’ comment in its entirety.

And let me add my “Amen!” to the chorus.

Ace In the Hole

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Some days, all I have is Jesus.

Seriously. Sometimes, that’s all I have to get me through a day. The only thing that keeps me from blowing a gasket. My faith in a risen Lord and Messiah, my savior Jesus Christ, along with the knowledge that through becoming born again my soul is secure and that God is backing me—that is sometimes that only thing that make me able to keep going.

A lot of people like to pick on people for using Christianity as a crutch. OK. So what’s wrong with a crutch? If your leg is seriously sprained or broken, how the hell else are you going to get around?

So Christianity, or more specifically God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, are sometimes my crutch. Or the safety net under that high-wire I’m trying to walk. Or the flotation device that my seat becomes should my plane have to make a landing on water.

I won’t make any damn apologies for that. It’s a fool who doesn’t use his or her support system when things get rough. Right now, I don’t have much of a support system, and things are pretty crappy. So I’m calling on my spiritual lifelines.

That doesn’t make me weak. It means I have some common sense. Because truth be told, we all are weak at times. Hurt. Helpless. Struggling.

And I’m telling you that it’s God that grants me the strength sometimes—that little extra boost I don’t have in my anymore and I know I don’t have—to have gotten through some stuff, and to continue to get through, that other people have done things like put bullets in their head to solve. People in my extended circle who, by the way, didn’t lean on God. Ever.

Crutch? Sometimes.

I prefer to think of God as my ace in the hole.

Necessity of Faith

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We’ll consider this post a sort of follow-on to the previous one I posted in the wee hours of this morning.

Because, frankly, there were some other things from the Bill Maher-Jon Stewart interview on the on The Daily Show a few days back that have been rolling around in my mind.

And we’ll start with the question I posed at the end of the previous post, “Necessary Dogma?”

That question was: Why do we insist on looking to (and for) a higher power now that we no longer need to explain why the sun rises and sets, why the seasons change, why people get sick and die, etc.?

Bill Maher brought this up in his interview when he noted that it was understandable and forgivable for ancient cultures to create gods (or a single God) because they had no other way to explain what was happening in nature and in their bodies and so many other things. He also mentioned that when someone is hopeless and without any real resources like, say, a guy in prison, that he understands why a person like that might say “All I have is my faith”—and Maher was uncharacteristically sympathetic with that kind of plight, noting that he wouldn’t want to take that away from someone in that kind of situation.

But I think this misses the point a bit, and still paints religion in a bad and—in my opinion—highly inaccurate way.

It seems to me that critics of religion want to make like faith is a crutch for the weak-willed or hopeless. I agree that it is often used as such, but not to the extent they would like to think. I myself am far from a weak-willed follower. I’m not an easily lead automaton who is looking for someone else to tell me what to do. Also, while my life is crappy in a lot of ways right now, I don’t feel hopeless, and besides, I became born again at a time when life seemed pretty damn good, really.

I think it is a mistake to discount people like me, whom I am pretty sure represent a decent sized chunk of the faith populace (maybe not anywhere near a majority or even half, but a significant slice nonetheless). I am one of a number of people who are reasonably intelligent, educated, well-read and didn’t have some gaping void needing to be filled. And yet we came to Christ anyway (or to other faiths). What does this say? To me it says that religion and faith speak to something deeper than just need. They speak to something separate from the intellect.

I was raised Catholic and grew to loathe going to church. I didn’t, in fact, for most of my college years and several years thereafter. I was happy to sidestep the people handing out religious tracts on the street and preaching from soapboxes outside storefronts. I didn’t have any problem ignoring the Bible and I didn’t much think about God. And yet there came a point at which I was exposed to the Word, in going to church once again (for the sake of the woman I was dating, who was a churchgoer, and not for my own), and it finally clicked for me. It made sense. Now, if I wasn’t experiencing a void or loss of some sort, and I wasn’t seeking God, then why would it click? The only explanation I have is that the spirit does exist, the soul is real, and I connected with my spiritual side for probably the first time. And I still didn’t jump into things blindly. I read the Bible, I thought as well as prayed, and I considered things. And I didn’t find any good reasons to disbelieve. And when I had my born-again moment where I really knew, it wasn’t even in church. In fact, I was driving down the street, thinking about where I was going to go shop.

So, getting back to Maher. What about the need to explain things, which is no longer necessary thanks to science?

I would argue that most major religions don’t try to explain anything about nature. Not anymore. They try to explain matters of spiritual connection. I mean, really, outside of a few stories in Genesis, does the Bible try to explain nature? The vast majority of the Bible is about the power of faith and the problems of disconnecting ourselves from God. That’s complex shit. We’re not talking about trying to explain why it rains or who moves the sun. The Bible simply tells us that God created it. It doesn’t even really make out like God has to do much to keep things moving. And considering that Judaism and Islam spring from the same Abrahamic and pre-Abrahamic origins as Christianity, I figure the same much be true of them. And are the Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto or any other major faiths trying to explain base reality much? I don’t think so. So to knock religions as mythology by comparing them to ancient faiths that were trying to explain nature instead of spirituality, is to already be starting off on the wrong foot.

One final thing about Maher’s comments. Jon Stewart was trying to swing things around to a “well, aren’t there valid issues about religion as a legitimate source of comfort” kind of tack. Maher shot back with a lines that went kind of like, “sure, aside from all that stuff like slavery and wars and oppression of woman and everything else.”

I know I’ve said before that it is unfair to knock religion as being the source of so much trouble when in fact religion was simply used as an excuse, and in the absence of religion folks wanting to do nasty things would have found some other way to justify their actions.

But more than that, something hit me when I heard Maher make that comment.

It’s a cop-out.

It’s just as bad as when someone says “The Devil made me do it.” We ridicule someone for saying such a thing, and it is, in fact, ridiculous because I don’t believe Satan can make anyone do anything that the person isn’t already quite willing to be convinced to do or already rip-roaring ready to do. But it’s equally silly to blame religion for crap that people do. Just like it would be silly to blame politics or economics in and of themselves for the world’s problems.

Because, when you get right down to it, what’s the difference between “the Devil made them do it” or “Religion makes them do it,” huh? Not much.

The Madness of the (Too) Faithful

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Any of y’all who have been around here for long probably know that I really like the blog Deus Ex Malcontent, being one of my top five blogs I visit, really. It’s pretty common over there for religion, particularly Christianity, to get some ribbing and, frankly, an ass-reaming at times. It has been happening pretty frequently, lately, thanks to folks like Sarah Palin and the Duggar family.

One of the problems, of course, are those believers who simply stoke the fires by being bald-ass ignorant.

I mean, here we are, already believing in a spiritual realm that cannot be proved by science. We believe in a being who demands faith and keeps Himself purposefully out of view, and that already makes us look a little odd to folks who are living totally in the realm of the intellectual and the visible world.

We don’t need to be ignoring the basic reality of the world on top of that.

You see, it’s OK to believe in things spiritual. And if you’re Christian and actually obeying the Word of God, you won’t be hurting anyone or causing any havoc with your beliefs. And frankly, looking at the other side, it’s silly for those who are purely rational to hold up religion to scientific standards because the spiritual realm is not something that can be examined and poked and prodded and analyzed with instruments.

But people, stop taking the Bible so damned literally that you ignore the realities of, well, reality.

The Earth is not 6,000 or 7,000 years old, OK? Dinosaurs and humans didn’t walk around at the same time at any point. Crude oil was created by millions of years of organic decomposition of animal and plant matter; it wasn’t just put there by God. Satan didn’t manufacture fossils and stick them in the ground to fool us.

Look, God gave us intellect to do some wonderful things (look at how far science has come in even just the past 20 years, with probably more amazing stuff than in the previous 100 years), and I just don’t see him allowing a bunch of imitation shit to be part of his created world (and universe) just so that we can be tripped up. God’s not trying to make it harder for us to find him. Jesus came along to make it easier. Sure, Satan deceives us in many ways, but he didn’t make a bunch of props and slip them in under God’s nose.

So, back up off the literal nature of the Bible for a moment. Because while it is literal in a sense, it also isn’t.

A lot of the events of the Old Testament, particularly the first several books of it, are not to be taken precisely as they are written. Those words were put down for the benefit of a bunch of people who were not scientifically savvy. I mean, get real. Is God going to have prophets write down shit about relativity and physics at a time when people don’t even know what the hell gravity really is, except for the fact that things fall down? Is God going to talk about the Earth being formed and developed over millions—nay, billions—of years for a people who wouldn’t have any conception of numbers that large?

The answer is no.

We are expected by God to have the intelligence to realize that the Bible was written for a certain group at a certain time. The spiritual things hold true age to age to age. But the explanations and descriptions were dumbed down, people.

A lot of the nit-picky laws the early Hebrews had to follow were an example of this, I think. Why all the dietary laws? Well, part of it was probably just to give them some silly rules as part of the overall plan of letting them know they they’re human and needed divine intervention, because they wouldn’t follow even simple instructions from an almighty God. But the other part was to protect their health. No refrigeration, folks. Cross-contamination. Microbes. But they couldn’t possibly conceive of microbes in that day and age. So, it’s easier, for the sake of preserving the Chosen People, for God to say, “Don’t eat this shit.” Some of the other hygienic laws, too, probably came from a similar place.

I already feel weird enough trying to make sure people know I didn’t stick my head up my anal sphincter when I hang out at places where agnostic and atheistics intellectual folks go. I take the ribbing (and even the hostility, most of the time) with good humor. I comment on the ridiculousness of some of my Christian brethren too.

But damn it, there are a lot of you out there who are ignorant and don’t think, and you act like science textbooks are anti-God, and I’m sick to fucking death of it. Use those brains that God gave you. Realize that the Bible is essentially true but that doesn’t mean you have to believe the world was created in six days and that Adam and Eve had a pet stegosaurus.

Trying to bridge the spiritual and intellectual and providing some thoughts as to how things really might have happened in early creation and early human history is part of why I started this blog. But it disheartens me that so many people who share my faith won’t use their heads to see that there are deeper and more complex theories and possibilities to explain why the world looks one way when the Bible says something else.

But there are too many ignorant folks out there who won’t think and, frankly, you are making it harder for those of us who do try to be more than just “sheeple.” You make it hard for us to be taken seriously by non-believers. More than that, by making us all look like fools, you reduce the chances that we will lead non-believers to Jesus. So, in short, you wallow in ignorance by saying “Well, the pastor says” or “Evolution is bunk” and you inhibit your ability to do the one thing Jesus told you to do: Spread the gospel.

Trying to spread the gospel in 2,000-year-old to 7,000-year-old terms to a modern world is foolishness.

The sad thing though, is this: Everything I just said is probably not even worth saying, because the people who are truly wallowing in ignorance and hiding behind the Bible like this are highly unlikely to be reading my stuff to begin with.

*Sigh*

Two-fer Tuesday: Spiritual Healing by Deacon Blue

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As Miz Pink pointed out a few days ago, I had a small issue with some comments some folks were making at Deus Ex Malcontent. No flame war or anything like that. Not much brawling. No hard feelings (at least not that I’ve noticed so far, though I think there is some lightly gnawing irritation among certain parties); in fact, I think the discussion that was sparked was a good one on both sides of the issue. But as I thought about the whole affair and the comments back and forth about whether religious folks just “haven’t grown up and joined the 21st century,” I started to realize where there is a major gap between the atheists and the theists.

I mean, other than that God guy…which of course is the primary gap between us.

Now, I’m going to confine myself to atheism vs. Christianity specifically, partly because Christianity is predicated on God’s plan to save souls from damnation, and because this ties into today’s topic on spiritual healing, at least for my take on the topic. (No, as much as you might have thought otherwise from the title, I won’t be posting on faith healing or anything like that.) And I realize that some folks, like Votar, who has been vocal in the discussion I noted above at Deus Ex Malcontent, don’t necessarily think of themselves as atheist. Humor me. I’m already about to use a metaphor, so let me deal in extremes, too. And don’t jostle me. This is volatile stuff and I don’t want it blowing my head off.

Basically, I see a large part of the atheism vs. Christianity debate like this: We see the problem of making people (and the world at large) healthier a lot differently.

Being Christian doesn’t necessarily make you a good person. There are some real losers, assholes and arrogant folks within the Christian ranks. But what gets Christians knocked by atheists almost as much as the hyprocrisy we often show as a group is our desire to “save” other people spiritually and to keep focusing on spiritual right and wrong.

This is, I think, part of why atheists often want to write off Christians as being stuck in a 2,000-year old program of supersition. The atheists don’t like the idea that Christians think they need saving. They feel (or so I think) that we are labelling them as deficient. And so the reflex is to label us as deficient for believing in the “invisible man in the sky.” And it works the same way in reverse: Christians don’t like being made to feel like fairy-tale-believing rubes, so they often label atheists as inherently arrogant, mean and tunnel-visioned.

As I see it, though, we’re both often missing the big picture. When trying to make people healthy, there are two major things a truly great physician will do: Relieve the symptoms and locate and treat the main underlying problem that lead to the ill health to begin with. (See, finally I get to my spiritual healing theme and my metaphor)

Problem is, atheists and Chrisitians don’t see the disease state the same way when it comes to human nature and human dealings.

To atheists, we Christians are ignoring the problems of this world. They think that we are only focused on souls and praying for deliverance to the exclusion of trying to fix economic, social and geopolitical problems (and many of us really do behave this way, frankly, so they aren’t all wrong in their belief).

To Christians, atheists are ignoring their souls and their eternal salvation by being so focused on believing only what can be proven that they don’t even consider the possibility that there is a spiritual realm as well.

The truth is (coming from the Christian perspective which is, of course, my own) that the real disease is sin. The basic underlying problem is our sin nature and our rejection of God’s way. And the result of that disease is some nasty consequences in the afterlife and some here on Earth too. So what Christians try to do is to get people to realize their sin nature and deal with it so that they are set for eternity.

Problem is that we sometimes forget that there are very real wordly problems that also need to be dealt with. We forget that we need to be good stewards of the planet. We look toward the bye-and-bye and the fact that all our problems will be solved when we leave the planet and kind of fuck around too much while we’re still in the flesh.

And so, in focusing only on the core disease, too many of us Christians forget to alleviate the symptoms and just go for trying to administer the painful cure. We also forget to treat the “co-morbid” conditions that were either created by the sin nature or that were exacerabated by it. In trying to get to the heart of the problem, we leave the patients still suffering a host of other ailments that we refuse to acknolwedge and we give them no pain relief. In other words, we may save the patient, but at what cost? Certainly, it puts our bed-side manner in question, if not our basic human decency.

Atheists, on the other hand (again, in my humble opinion) are so focused on the most obvious and visible diseases and in relieving the painful symptoms that they ignore and fail to recognize the core problem (sin) and leave the biggest disease untreated. And so the biggest threat is left unresolved, but the physician and patient think they’ve dealt with all the problems. Folks feel better, but are still sick.

Metaphors are always an inexact science of course, and leave out many subtleties. So this post is hardly going to put any nails in the atheism vs. Christianity debate. Just some thoughts, though, in terms of ways to view our respective persectives, by using the medical model, with which I am well acquainted as a healthcare and medical journalist for a number of years.

Of course, I also thought my post on atheism as a religion was harmless, and look what trouble that got me into…Lord only knows what this one might spawn.

(Miz Pink’s post on today’s topic is here.)

Two-fer Tuesday: Walking on Water by Miz Pink

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A friend of mine once told me “Don’t wear high heels in a waterbed and then complain when you get wet.”

Okay that’s not true. I’ve never had a friend tell me that. In fact out of idle curiosity whether anyone ever had, the only references I could find online were a warning on not wearing high heels or other pointy obejcts if you’re going to have sex on a waterbed and a reference to Lucille Ball running across a waterbed in high heels and puncturing it in the movie “Happy Anniversary and Goodbye” from the 1970’s. If anyone wants to coin the phrase though just cough up some money and I’ll give you all the copyright rights.

But Deke saddled me with this topic for Twofer Tuesday and I don’t have any pictures of someone walking on water while wearing pink so I needed some kind of lead in based on the photo pick.

But my made up little advise quote maybe fits anyway with today’s point from my side of the isle. There are certain things you don’t do (or don’t wear) if you want certain results.

Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight for example.

Don’t drink and drive unless you want to kill someone or get a DUI arrest.

Don’t mix plaid and polka dot clothing unless you want to be on “What Not to Wear.”

Don’t drink milk and orange juice together (trust me on this).

But for today’s topic most importantly, don’t take your eyes off Jesus or God when you are trying to walk in faith.

When Peter asked Jesus to summon him out on the stormy sea to walk water with him, everything was fine as long as Peter kept focused on the Lord. But he didn’t. He started looking around at the waves and the listened to the howling wind and remembered: Oh no! People can’t walk on water!

And he sank.

Sure, Jesus saved him. God and Jesus do that for us all the time.

But if we didn’t take our eyes off them so darn often, we wouldn’t need to be pulled outta the drink, ya know?

(Stroll over here for Deke’s post on today’s topic)

Two-fer Tuesday: Extra Mustard by Deacon Blue

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So, I let Miz Pink pick the topic this Tuesday, and it’s my fault that I’m posting our Two-fer Tuesday stuff almost at the end of the day, mere minutes from midnight, meaning it’s almost Wednesday. Partly my day has been busy; partly I wanted to see what Miz Pink would say about her passages from Matthew before I spouted off on another mustard seed parable, the one with which probably more people are familiar:

“Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, ‘Why could we not cast it out?’ He said to them, ‘Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” Matthew chapter 17, verses 19-20

Or this one from the Gospel of Luke:

“The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ The Lord replied. ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.'” Luke chapter 17, verses 5-6

I’ve always believed mostly, and made my points about these passages, based on the idea that what Jesus was saying that we don’t really need much faith to do big things, but that even so, most of us are so rooted in the real world and our daily troubles and doubts that we cannot even muster up a mustard seed’s size worth of faith.

I still do believe that is part of what he meant, but I also now believe, after taking much of the day to digest Miz Pink’s post after she sent it to me, that there are other layers as well. Two of them, at least.

First, something I read here, which says that the mustard seed is “probably the most tightly packed seed of all. There is no place for air inside it. Later we shall see that air is the dominion of the devil. As a result it can withstand high pressures and high temperatures. Your faith may not be an all encompassing faith, that fills the totality of your personality, being and activity. Initially it is restricted to only a certain section of your being or personality or activity.”

Now, I’m not sure if Jesus really knew horticulture all that well. I know he is the only begotten son of God, and had access to all sorts of knowledge, but I’m not so sure he was pulling on such complex knowledge of the seed and expecting anyone to get that reference. But still, it’s an interesting point, so I thought I’d share it, and I think it is reasonable to think that Jesus might have hid something just this complex, deep and mostly incomprehensible to his audience in there for future generations to discover.

The second extra layer of this mustard seed parable is this: I don’t think it’s all about the size, but about where you go with your faith. Thinking of the fact that Miz Pink points out the mustard plant’s weed-like nature, and the fact that weeds grow like, ummm, weeds—I think that perhaps one of the bigger things Jesus might have been getting at in this parable is the potential for growth.

That is, the mustard seed starts small, but can grow much more abundantly and ambitiously than you might think such a small thing would be capable of doing. So, having faith the size of a mustard seed is to have a faith that might be small now, but has the potential and likelihood to grow much more. To grow to the point that you could make a mountain move with but a word from your mouth. But most of us don’t have the fortitude to generate that kind of growth. Most of us are seeds that produce, at most, a small flower or a blade of grass.

In any case, I have yet to produce the mustard-sized faith that Jesus talks about. Instead, I’m stuck with ketchup and relish, but as with all things, I will forge ahead with what I have and not be all “woe is me” about what I don’t have. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll find that mustard seed in me one day.

Two-fer Tuesday: Walking with God by Deacon Blue

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How do we walk with God, an individual we cannot see and who doesn’t speak to us with a physical voice? And how do we do it with a roadmap as confusing at the Bible can often be? We must open ourselves up and let go of our selfish desires. We must be willing to admit that we usually don’t know the right thing to do. We need to let the Holy Spirit do that hard work for us.

I should note that my gut feeling was that Miz Pink would cover today’s topic by going with the “path to destruction is wide” angle (and I was right), so I decided to go a completely different route, and pick one of my favorite passages in the Bible, and one that probably most of y’all have never heard of. But it’s one of the few in my King James Bible that I have memorized word for word.

O LORD, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. (Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 10, Verse 23)

To me, this statement encapsulates the very core of how we are supposed to view our walk with God. It not only evokes the walking imagery but hits home that point about how we must let God guide us because, frankly, we don’t know crap most of the time.

So what does that mean for our free will?

It doesn’t hurt it one bit. For one thing, if we are walking with God, we should freely choose to follow the path he wants for us. That’s not slavery; that’s good judgment. Moreover, choosing the path God wants for us doesn’t mean all our choices are made for us. It simply means we put ourselves on the right road. Whether we run down it or walk or skip is often up to us. Whether we stop to smell some roses or head to the end of the road as fast as feasible is typically up to us. We just need to be open to the Holy Spirit and let it guide us.

This is something Mrs. Blue and I have found out the hard way on numerous occasions when we haven’t done what our spirits have nudged us to do. The most recent really painful life lesson in this regard was several years ago when my wife was considering grad schools and the Holy Spirit was prodding her in certain directions that were oriented toward helping people directly. Well, we panicked about how long it might take for such degrees to become something that would pay off financially, and money was heavy on our minds. And jointly, we decided that she should go for something a bit more “business minded.” It was a huge mistake, and God left us to deal with the fallout of that bad decision. Now, He’s been sending some blessings that are making the decision less unbearable, but we are still frequently reminded that we purposefully rejected His guidance based on our fears and preconceptions and impatience. Now as Mrs. Blue feels some new proddings toward another degree, we are not so quick to want to ignore God again. We’ll see if we can keep the faith and stay on the walking path God is setting up for us, though.

Also, taking God’s path and asking him to show us what path He wants us to take isn’t always a dramatic thing involving a grad school or other major life choice. We need to listen to God and invite his navigational skills in smaller things as well. For example, generally when I crack open my Bible just for general edification, I recite that passage from Jeremiah above and then I open my Bible with my eyes closed. I’d say that roughly a third of the time, I find on one of the two pages before me a passage that directly relates to some critical issue with which I am wrestling that day. Another third of the time, it’s something that indirectly relates to the issue at hand or that opens my eyes to something I’ve been neglecting lately. The rest of the time, it’s just a useful passage to give me some new learning.

Point is, given how often I end up with truly relevant passages, from a book that is pretty freakin’ big and has an awful lot of subject matter that it covers, says a lot to me about how important it is not only to remember Jeremiah’s words but to speak them to God with a truly open heart. It never hurts to have a guide when we walk into unfamiliar territory, which is mostly what life is. And what better guide than an omniscient one?

(By the way, as long as we’re on the topic of walking with God, check out my “sequel” to the classic [or, some would say, trite] story “Footprints in the Sand,” a little story I call “A New Record in the Sand.”

Two-fer Tuesday: Walking with God by Miz Pink

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“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it.”

That’s some age-old advice from Matthew 7:13 and its good stuff to remember as we think about our “walk with God”. It’s a passage that also brings to mind that old saying about “the path to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Really they are separate sentiments. Matthew is telling us that choosing the right path is hard and means we have to do more work. We have to be careful not to stray too far one way or the other and we have to watch where we go. But taking the easy path, while it means less thought and worry and work also means we are more likely to get ourselves into trouble. Think about it. How much temptation to do have to eat crappy food or spend lots of money if you’re on some old narrow highway? But if you take the interstate, you’ve got rest stops and outlet malls and who knows what else, all readily available. you may end up at the same destination and maybe get there quicker but you may pay a price for that in the end. May not mean you end up in hell but it might mean a bit of hell in your life if you don’t take the narrow road when God offers it to ya.

The other quote (which I can’t figure out if anyone ever said officially or if it’s just a variation of some official quotes from saints, thinkers and others along similar lines) tells us that our good deed won’t get us into heaven. We need Jesus for that and its faith, not works, that lead us to salvation. But still it’s a reminder of how important it is to pick the right path when we claim that we are walking with God.

(Deke’s post on this topic, if you haven’t seen it already above mine…or is it below mine…is here)

(The image I used is by Pastor David Hayward, who has a blog called “Naked Pastor” and an art-related site called HaywardART. Used with permission. He has prints available for sale.)