The love of God

Anger, fear, sadness, and uncertainty at times are working through people’s thoughts, creating worry, despair, and doubt. Effecting this process as well, thoughts are being organized and arranged through our thinking forming into various perspectives. There are other emotions too effecting other perspectives. There are no doubt many thoughts in many forms that are complicating the perspective that human judgment arrives at. Dare I guess at how many combinations of negative emotions and negative thought processes there are. I wouldn’t know the answer to that.

 

Suppose that this negative emotion: anger, fear, sadness, combines with an unaided reasoning producing through a downward spiral of thoughts views which eventually delve into dark places. The negative emotion then must be effecting people poorly combined with this random thought that we generate.  Naively our mistaken behaviors then come about from misjudgments brought on by errors we don’t recognize. We are therefore mislead in our frame of mind caused by things like the impact of negative roll modeling, ugly aspects of culture effecting us, an imagination acting under its own volition void of guidance, and evil itself attacking our thoughts. Can it be that we really aren’t in possession of a will free or a will strong enough to choose wisely the path in front of us. Well it seems obvious that we don’t always recognize where are own judgment is leading us to at all.

 

Alternatively I would suggest that what can be found and discovered for us, if we look in the right place, is a realization that in life there is a power of love and it really does exist. This love is as real a thing to some of us as are the negative states we can also find ourselves in. When we look for peace and then discover that we can even find real clues of peace's potential size, then this too, we may discover, is part of many of people’s lived experiences.

 

When we realize that ultimately what could be waiting for us in our future, beyond the cemetery, could really be a place of peace this curiously is also a part of things as they are and for good reasons. To those who have insight into this peace it is reached experientially eventually in a total fulfillment of ecstasy and unending joy. This is the peace that is not death itself but a better state of existence beyond death.

 

When we pursue hope and discover it is here to be found too it is eye opening. When we pursue meaning in life and find through that search for meaning a resulting awareness that there might really be purpose to our lives it is inspiring. The meaning of life we can discover is discovered through a friendship with God.

 

When we experience the call to forgive,  being deeply challenged by this struggle, and we are able to finally let go of our pride and conquer hatred we realize an important lesson in life. Despite the former determination of our mind to repay insult for insult we are freed to be able to let go of our contempt and bitterness. This too is a real experience many of us have.

 

Maybe If we became wise enough to know and realize that these struggles we face are real and important we may then reconsider how we need to respond to them. As we see this struggle then as part of our true state of existence then we might even want to win the struggle we’re now living through. We might want to understand how to live better and to figure things out right. All of these struggles are human with every one of us struggling through them. No one in this world goes through this life without experiencing stages of experiencing such challenges. The only problem is is that evil is obsessed with ruining your life and mine. Right now evil is at work ruining many lives. Many of these individuals are completely unaware of evils influence on them and they are both naïve and defiant about making a personal change.

 

Can we even rid ourselves of fear, uncertainty, and anger and replace them with peace, hope and confidence in the future. Can it even be done this change. Can we rid ourselves once and for all of fear, from moments of uncertainty, from feelings of anger. I don’t think we can overcome our human emotional limitations entirely while here no. I may be wrong but unfortunately I’ve been unable to do it. I have been able to reach a great deal of peace, find hope in life and know an unshakable confidence in the future while struggling with mental illness. 

 

I think faith and reliance on God’s friendship does accomplish a lot in life. I trust that with faith we really do get assistance from a good God. The assistance may simply be a redirecting of a negative thought unto a loving passage of scripture. The help may be a huge idea that figures out better personal circumstances giving them a healthier perspective. The help may come in a peaceful solution through a sudden epiphany. Who knows maybe God will even give a miracle we won’t even recognize as a miracle.

 

The war for good ideas can be fought on other fronts I’m sure. I’ve seen people of conscience with ethics and commonsense that exhibited a strong nonreligious love that exceeded many religious people’s capacity to think with kindness and compassion.

 

Could what we’re a part of here in life be a titanic struggle for what are important reasons we don’t adequately recognize. Are we meant by God to meaningfully confront and to struggle through these challenges even when many people around us fail to recognize the battle. Are there good reasons for this struggle that we haven’t recognized yet.

 

As we struggle through life people are living and dying unexpectedly, often prematurely. As people die, sometimes, some of us, they die in cruel, accidental or violent ways. As we struggle as people, despite living and dying in the ways we do, will God cause what appears not to make sense in our lives to then ultimately develop into a plan of love that He will inevitably finally reveal to us.

 

For instance consider a life of hardship and calamity relieved from it’s trials by an untimely end. When looked at from this side of life the grief is looked at as being the greatest kind of meaningless tragedy. The death of a child of starvation, for instance, examined by us is a loss we can’t make sense of as people. If an all loving, all knowing force does govern the universe and beyond  then will these lives that are so cut short so cruelly reach new places now, see greener pastures, live free by gentler sun lit shores. The hundreds of millions who have died through history by the most unfortunate ends will they now know a gentler experience in eternity. Will they live now in a place where they have been truly welcomed and where is fairness is permanent. Will we get to see them again and see them smile and laugh I truly believe we will. They also will be the greeter every friend and relative of their own generation who enter Heaven. We will all pass soon enough life is short.

 

It won’t take as long as we fear to see the people we love again. Are they living now under immeasurably better circumstances or is that a fairytale? I personally don’t believe in fairytales. I’m here. I’m alive. I’m thinking. I’m wondering, and that’s not by accident. I have questions. I am looking at the greater unknown. I am looking honestly at life and death. I am writing feeling love through faith and I have a friend who speaks through me. 

 

There really can be reassurance for us that we are loved and that we have a friendship with God. The love I offer, or that most people offer others, is not emotionally mature or wise enough to understand how to love adequately enough to approach the heights love really can reach. Can we trust in this kind of transcending love that is consistent with it's concern for us and doesn’t pull the rug out from under our feet when we least expect it. Can we know a love that never wonders away, never fails, is always there, and that loves us despite anything we can do wrong. How can we find the peace and security of this kind of love, one that is unfailing, unending, infinite in it's reach, beyond what we'll ever fully comprehend no matter how long we have been traveling through the ages beyond us after this world is over.

 

Where is this kind of love then found if it truly does exist. Can love be who God really is? Can God be the one who really abides near all of us now whether we know He’s there or not? Does God travel with us through all of our entangled missteps and experiences lived in the world. Can He be the one who will never leave us? Personally I believe God is right here and now not an inch away from any of us. He will be fair and He will see us through everything and anything. We need to keep our eyes on love...

Life in a box

Suppose we were to imagine that presently, instead of being on Earth surrounded by space, that we are instead in a cardboard box. In that box we are consumed with examining knowledge but only knowledge of the boxes interior since we can’t penetrate it’s burrier. If therefore we have only spent time within the boxes interior and have been therefore unable to see past the cardboard surrounding us then how much might we trust in unseen things beyond and outside of where we currently are existing. 

 If we were to try and estimate beyond it's walls, only having cardboard to imagine now, we would be forced to reluctantly retreat within a belief that finding anything out outside of ourselves seemed impossible.  Yet outside the cardboard box, we people now know this because we live outside that particular kind of box, here there are trees, ponds, rivers, streams, flowers, architecture, rainbows, sunsets, while other thinking creatures wait to engage in dialogue. There are sights and sounds that would take many life times to experience here. A further unknown here too is that there is deep space all around us.  

Now think of where we really are ourselves therefore. We presently are in that same kind of cardboard box like existence here too then. Yet beyond us, beyond everything we can’t see now, there might be more then common sounds; there might be even greater sights more mind-bogglingly large; there may be strange and unusual sunsets; distinct unheard of worlds; truths hidden and found existing far out beyond us.

This is commonsense but what is it really like out there? What significant something else might there be? Should we trust that whatever we don’t know about out there that in that unknown place something does exist and is larger then our imaginations can presently grasp.

Alien life contacting earth

Outer space is defined as the area outside the atmosphere of earth. All of us here are somewhere deep in space as the earths lonely inhabitants. Being deep in space assumes that this deepness is far away from somewhere but what is it far away from. Here where we live in the deepness of space, while looking out from our distant perspective at the universe, are we far away from some greater spiritual or physically existent truth out there yet to be found.

 

Could there come a time where we were about to make a discovery of something grand. The deepness of space implies that we are somewhere isolated. We are in a desolate reality and conditioned here by surroundings of emptiness and remoteness. Out here we are on the farthest outer corridor of anywhere impossible to fathom perhaps. Perhaps we are even placed here in this quiet realm being observed here now by watchful but invisible eyes. Such eyes might exceed our intelligence and ethical qualities and maybe even transcend our physicality. Maybe we’re influenced by unseen hands moving our world, influencing the events here through those kind of forces, deciding our destiny, perhaps this is so, or perhaps it’s not. 

We are surrounded by a great gulf of emptiness that is most mysteries if we think about it. What a weird, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible, state of order this is. Yet despite the open-ended nature of the possible of this experience and those grand unknowns we nonetheless as thinking people seem conditioned by our own worldly narrative. Our responses to other possible worlds reveal a limitation of our outward ability for speculation and suggests that we fail to meet a true test of our capacity to stare reality honestly in the eyes. As it now stands we are already in the land of the impossible that’s honestly the case. We here and now are not in the impossible however but the possible itself and we can see plainly now that life does exist. When we look beyond us why is there this stubbornness to embrace the universal probability of this much greater reality out there.

We easily and gullibly trust prematurely in the worlds dabblers in ideas too, some hucksters, others merely proud people being men of too much certainty in their ideas. Natural conveyers of antidotal answers into life’s meaning men use sequences of ideas to explain our predicament to us according to religion or other theories that have gone too far too fast.

In our day to day lives we look out at the impenetrable curtain around us and then shrug our shoulders because it’s buriers seem unanswerable. We settle for the idea there is nothing more we can ascertain about any of the unknowns and then go about our lives. We acknowledge by our thinking that the outward going path of our eyes vision could approach somewhere new perhaps. We may fathom that potentially, possibly, (some may think it true, others would doubt it true) that out there somewhere in that distance, where inevitably distance must actually really go, there is perhaps a new reality, an undiscovered and eye opening clue shedding insight and novelty on everything we now know.

Perhaps appearing out there is somewhere new itself, somewhere very real. Possibly knowledge, by discovery and organization, shaped by a greater intelligence there is a kind of knowledge intensified in it’s scope. Larger maps of the universe have been drawn there, a more thorough telling of history cultivated. It all presenting a clue to truth  satisfying some men/women’s yearnings for answers while devastating others belief systems turning those beliefs on their heads. Maybe aliens believe in Jesus Christ that would be most interesting.

What we presently know is that life is possible. Is the potentiality of greater life impeded by our incapacity for reflection. Do the buriers created by our doubts unnecessarily impose on that ability to hope a shackled state of existence. Also does religion impede us from questioning the cosmos and what secrets it might hold when men of faith anticipate instead a spiritual reward and might therefore not want to hope for such discoveries.

If you ask people if they think there could be alien life many would say yes they think there could be alien life. Are we doubtful still the same ourselves.  Would we be willing and ready to meet the unknown head on as fearful as that may be if any of us were contacted from beyond. Would we prefer to remain unburdened by those challenges. What should one of us do if we were to start communicating with life far from our planet.

The darkness of distant space is yet immeasurable and impenetrable though it holds our moon, which cascades its faint light on the ocean waters, and it also holds our earth, our home, as well as the great unknowns beyond us. Our capacity to anticipate something otherworldly and to imagine within it’s depths a kind of greater life meets a burier we can’t easily overcome but we should try to.

What is Heaven like?

Imagine in Heaven, finally, if the skeptical are wrong in distrusting this rumored future paradise, that discovery is now finally being made. Previously ordinary fear and ordinary doubt had dulled, dimmed, and caused only the second guessing of Heavens promise. Transparent now, finally at last, flawlessly visible, love, now, in an utter peace, showers us in a trust that offers this goodness in a triumphant, freeing, perfect joy.

 

Now there appears a future for us, secure, and not subject to change, a place that cares beyond the world which often hadn't cared or hadn’t cared enough. Mercy and beauty combine now as infinite knowledge and unlimited creativity merge in an ephemeral glow of a sight beyond and without comparison. In this grand design where natures genius is superseded by acts of immeasurable possibility here outward reality expands revealing before it now endless vistas and unstoppable goodness.

 

Here before us are the streams of the ages too, old, archaic, sublimely beautiful flowing waters amid the shores satisfying for our sight what we once had only suspected might actually be.

 

Once we had stared at our own world and when we had observed the world it sometimes  seemed like it had immeasurable potential and yet we were left doubting. In seeing the creativity and marveling reflectively on what we saw we tried to fathom natures observation's on those days. We had been left wondering however, sometimes for some of us too even glimpsing, what we felt was an unseen author, a master designer, a being who creates and loves His making.

 

Today however here in Heaven we stand in awe as we see destroyed forever now is death, gone finally is it’s decay. We jaunt rushing ahead enthusiastically leaving the world behind us now. We move joyfully into the bosom love of a more perfect friendship, to meet real companions, to love fully all who are there including all people, unreservedly, unconditionally. We step now into real compassion, where only real untainted peace prevails forever.

 

Now we reunite finally with the loved ones we miss so much. We realize a plan had always been in the works. We are freed from disease and hatred. We are freed from the contamination of our thoughts from their emotional distress and that resulting confusion. We stand now before the ages, before the eternal one Himself. We meet God and Christ on the sacred shores amid the Holy water streams of Heaven itself.

God's love

Would it be common for people to doubt seriously that there is any hope for the future beyond life in this world. It seems that the way life is that we go about only partially seeing any hope if we have any hope at all. Are we realists through what’s observed about our reality in this way or are we unnecessarily discouraged in our approach to a future.

 

Even people of belief in God and His plan and of eternal life are repetitively reminded by natures terms of ones mortality. Observing natures processes like death and the resulting grief the other ideas supposedly offering us a future come on very scary terms. Self-admittedly many acknowledge this fear that they have with these “scary ideas” offering for us the only foreseeable solution. One reason the answers appear scary it seems is because the religious story’s are very fantastical in nature. Old Testament myths, for instance, don’t appear valid as real actual history. People naturally therefore are distrustful and skeptical about them and because of this kind of natural logic they are fearful.

 

Life being a place of much fearfulness and uncertainty do many people surrender to religion as their only hope because they are desperate and other options of hope aren’t as persuasive or predominate in their community.

Are we merely fearful and desperate and so we conform to those old story’s.

 

The claims of the New Testament such as the raising of the dead by Jesus through His miracles. The implications of Jesus own resurrection after His execution on the cross are story’s that effect this desperation we have. Many of us trust and have faith Jesus exists and take it by faith the claims that He was resurrected from the dead. The gift of His Holy Spirit being given to us we think bares witness very personally and experientially to Him being present with us by supporting us through this life. Is a desperation  prevalent in all of us nonetheless in believers as well as nonbelievers.

 

It seems some of us must want desperately for Jesus to be real even if we have faith in a desperate way. Can it not be a faith we have that wavers and occasionally doubts, that worries, even fears it’s own conviction of what the truth is. For us who love God so much is dependent on Jesus story being actual history; of Jesus actually being who the story claims He is; of His miracles really happening as they did; of God really preparing a place for us in Heaven etc.  

 

This persuasiveness repeated to us might have the effect that diminishes and obscures doubt and skepticism. In this predicament we’re in in life are we not therefore compelled to try and drown out any doubts that occur if we want a hope in the future. This an atheist might argue is merely wishful thinking. To us who find great conviction and comfort it’s not merely a fairytail.

 

 Then there is the business that out of all the ideas in the world only one version of ideas can save, at least according to those who know that one particular set of ideas. The rest of humanity are on rout to Hell, if Hell exists, I personally don’t believe it does. According to this the narrow road to future happiness, for those in possession of the supposedly right way of thinking, will reluctantly then allow the  rest of humanity to fall out of focus as they say goodbye to them and greet each other in love in Heaven. By small outreaches attempting to convert others in the larger world in life this justifies Gods uneven plan for the fate of the earth’s total population.

 

I don’t think love or God can be obliterated from offering hope to anyone despite this way of accessing reality. In my opinion God must just have a love more far reaching then this. Jesus would speak to the world if He returned I’m sure. He would no doubt be more inclusive then these scary terms that offer hope on such severe terms. 

 

This isn’t the world of ancient Rome where ideas of God by an emperors conversion can reach the entire Roman world by decree. This is the larger more modern world where we understand diversity and the too numerous to count cultures and arguments beyond count. This is a world where truth and knowledge and reality are looked at coming at the claims of truth from many different perspectives. In such a world as this the authoritarian command of total acceptance of any perspective asks something totally unfair of every person in such an environment. We naturally because of this will therefore form different sets of arguments and it is natural, not unnatural, to do so.

 

Can’t Gods mercy reach us where a certainty has not reached the human condition. The need for ideological certainty and for us to know absolutely “the only way of looking at things as being our only hope” is an outdated, ancient, arbitrary demand on people. I love God and I believe God inclusively and fairly loves humanity and will eventually show it more completely.

"The Old Parson" A Short Story

I set out on a drive one evening after dinner, it was early September. I had no idea where I was planning to drive to that evening. I traveled under the overpass and down past the Pleasant Valley hillside taking note of where my father told me that my Grandfather had once had his farmstead when he was a child. I continued on from there traveling further along down the old rural country road.  

Rounding a turn near the Lafarge Cement Plant, which was next to the nearby Shorts Lake, I kept following the twisty road.  I soon had left my home village behind, which was an unpopulated little community. Soon I was driving into South Maitland, an even more remote place. 

South Maitland was a  community in the Municipal District of East Hants, Hants County, a place here in the province of Nova Scotia. I had heard that the area had been the site of a number of nineteenth century shipyards. Now the village was best known for an historic bridge built over the challenging tidal waters that crossed the Shubenacadie River. 

As I crossed over the large bridge I looked down and off into the distance waters with their distinctive mud color as I admired the distant views. I was leaving most signs of civilization behind me now the further I drove. 

I thought I knew that by continuing on now I’d be crossing into the interior spaces of the province. I noticed how I was surrounded by mostly rural farmland beside me. The interconnecting lonely roads interlacing the provinces interior were isolated roads traveling beside places that offered occasionally beautiful scenery and views. I traveled past farms, pasturelands and an occasional house dotting this lonely countryside around me.

Windsor and The Annapolis Valley lay on the rout ahead of me while other alternative routs connected to other roads and places with names like: The Rawdon Hills, Maitland and Elmsdale. The gentle warm breeze that evening came through the windows that were wide open in the car.   

Suddenly and very impulsively I decided to go off the beaten trail with a turn of the steering wheel. The lane I turned unto was paved but weather-beaten with ruts and warps in the aged pavement ahead. After a picturesque few miles driving then appearing there on my right, on the quiet road, I came upon an old abandoned Church sitting beside the road. I slowed down now out of curiosity to appreciate the old building. The grounds before the church were strewn with sticks and an overgrowth of entangled grass and weeds.  

I decided for an unknown reason to pull the car over there and shut off the engine. Sitting there in the silence I listened as birds sounded around me. The only  sound I heard other then bird song was the gentle wind coming in breezes that periodically picked up intensity with occasional gusts. I decided after a few minutes sitting in the quiet that I should get out and walk over toward the front of the old Church building.  

When I approached the church I could see that the woodwork of the building was old and rotting and that the doors were left to bang open and shut in the wind.  I marveled at the sight of this old place. I was in some almost nameless and unheard of place, well away from civilization, and here was this wonderful old church that I was able to picture as being a once vibrant place full of people.

 

I looked upward now as I pictured in my mind what once had been there. I noticed that the old bell tower was cracking in the old building while the rusty old bell had no rope. There was no way to call the flock to church now I guess I considered reflecting on history. I looked inside through the doors past the cobwebs strung between the doorjamb casing. The seats inside the Church were broken and splintered. The floorboards were soggy, sunken and rotten looking. The timber inside was all mildewed. With holes in the seats you couldn’t sit down or you’d fall through them.

 

Impulsively I walked inside through the front doors. Solemnly and very slowly I passed the bench seating while looking around the interior of the old church. A back door was also open to the elements leading to the grounds behind the building. Walking slowly across the room I stood and looked through the back door out unto a church graveyard. The old cemetery there was overgrown and perhaps long ago deserted from use. Beyond the graves was a river with clear blue water cascading over polished riverbed stones with the water gently moving downstream.

 

It occurred to me that the minister of the church himself may be sleeping there in that yard. Putting it more bluntly to myself I thought again that he may be dead and laying in one of those burial plots rotting.  The thought passed through my mind again several times as I stood there contemplating what might have been that old churches history.

 

As I looked about the church and wondered what to do next I noticed a beam of sunlight that shone through a window where it’s pane was jaggedly broken off with the splintered glass laying around the window ledge. My thinking was quiet now, not busy, as I stood there in the silence watching the sunlight fade.  I thought, while contemplating my life reflectively, that God had been kind to me as I considered my life before now standing there in the old church.

 

Then looking once again through the back door, I saw again the rivers almost tranquil waters rippling further down stream over some green moss covered stones.  I decided to step out the back door of the dusty old Church stepping now into the graveyard. While standing there the sound of the wind came gently blowing through the trees around me. I felt the warm wind meet my face pleasantly.  This was a place for peace and reflection I considered now looking at the gravestones. A leaf went by moving downstream on a journey down the river, floating, moving, down it went, across green mossy rocks. I thought to myself now that nature can be a great place to watch the world go by.

 

A strange thought occurred to me now which I thought was due probably to too much television watching. The inappropriate thought was that wild shrieks have never before issued from any of this worlds hallowed tombs. I thought to myself imaginatively that dead men have never come back again and walked about in the history of the world. Instead, I thought, the great bell had never tolled for them again, it had went unrung and untouched by men who can’t talk or can’t think anymore. The livings curfew was up signaling the end of our parting days.

 

I noticed now a local farmer and ploughman headed homeward nearby the churchyard plodding his way wearily home on a distant hill. Here in the cemetery, I thought seeing him in the distance and glancing at a few tombstones, buried here are several other farmers. They had already left the world to join the darkness and take their chances on the other side. Yet the living barely came here now to this place I accepted. Few ever tread over the grass to visit and read these almost ancient gravestones now with their long forgotten names. Today was different, today the graveyard drew me I thought, a member of the living. Yet still the graveyard never again drew anymore of the dead I considered again as I asked the question why.

 

“Are we the only members of the living who ever bother to visit here?” Came an unexpected voice abruptly sounding behind me. It was an aged voice spoken to me from behind where I stood. The voice startled me causing me great alarm at first. I jumped, very startled, and turned around to see an elderly figure dressed in black, with a grey beard, a big hat, and large spectacles.

 

“We’ve both come to read the stones for now and then we’ll go away when it comes our turn.” The old man said now solemnly. “Tomorrow or the day after that it will come when we’re both dead. Perhaps we'll both come here to stay? Well our time will come soon enough my friend even for you too, though you’re younger. Time has a way slipping by however!”

 

“How is it that no one dead ever seems to come to us from the grave and say hello.” I asked the old man.

 

“Speak for yourself friend! I’ve talked to people from my memories on many a lonely night and received reassurances from them and God about the fate of those loved ones and friends.” He said this and then said in a more friendly voice. “What is it that we are shrinking from anyway when it comes to dying? Don’t you think It would be clever of us if we told the gravestones that men now hate to die and have decided to stop dying forever. I think the gravestones would believe the lie don’t you?”

 

The old man told me now he had been a Parson. He walked over and shook my hand and then he walked to an old bench beside the Church where he sat down. I walked over and sat down on the other end of the bench where we sat with our backs to the old wooden church. Me and the old religious man then engaged in a discussion. At first we discussed only light subjects.

 

We were there for quite some time talking with the evenings darkness closing in on us fast. To look at the old man he appeared almost ghost like, like a figure from some bygone age, from another century even, with his solemn looks, and with his old grey beard. This parson and I sat there by this dilapidated old church with him talking to me like a long lost relative.

 

The longer we talked there the more detailed his views became. Gradually our interest level increased and our  engagement intensified. Because we had this mutual interest in what one another had to say there developed now a competition for good ideas leading into a spirited debate. Looking across the moss covered gravestones we talked like this enthusiastically for an hour. The later part of the day passed as the twilight set in.

 

The  parson decided to quote to me a scripture verse impulsively amidst a debate we were having.  Looking over at me, his wild eyes peering at mine through his big awful looking spectacles, he lowered his eyes and looked downward to the open page of a Bible that he had produced from his coat pocket. He read to me from the ancient Book.

 

“Let every soul be subject to the higher powers...the powers that be are ordained by God.”

 

The parson read me this passage in an almost thunderous preachers voice. The intensity of his deep voice seemed to be almost hallowed by it’s use. He seemed to be trying to convert the wild flowers or the croaking frogs chirping in the long marsh grasses on the opposite bank of the river, if indeed they needed converting which I seriously doubted. Then looking up at me from the page the parson set down his old Bible.

 

“What do you think about this verse?” He asked me now curiously.

 

I thought there about the passage he had read thinking to myself in the quiet. The passage from scripture he quoted I knew was from St Paul. I thought about it for quite some time. I understood the verse, it was a familiar doctrine asking that every soul be subject to the higher powers because they were chosen, or put in place, or justified, by God.  I knew from the words “Let every soul be subject to the higher powers” that the idea of the verse was meant to mean by it’s context that whatever power rules over you that it is supposed to be obeyed because it is “ordained by God.” The Bible verse therefore demanded that all Christians subject themselves willingly to earthly authority whoever it happens to be ruling over them.

 

The parson had given me some time to comment and I hadn’t as yet found an answer to give him. The absence of my voice left only the silence of the evening with the sound of nature around us. As I thought there further in silence, with the faded half hidden moon visible in the darkening blue sky, the old parson decided to continue on with what he had been saying.

 

“I will tell you the truth my friend.” He said wanting to discuss his theological views with me. “I have a problem with absolute instructions like this one. Scripture or no scripture I will explain why I am leery of absolutes. Several hundred years ago, before our time, an underground current of thought existed in England. This thought was millenarian, anarchistic, and utopian and it was advocating for something different then Paul's text. The thought called instead for anarchy in the overthrowing of the state itself. This thought was radical and was calling for a return to what these radicals called ‘A sinless Eden.’”

 

I asked the old parson curiously “What was a sinless Eden Mr. Parson?”

 

“You must understand first before I tell you the answer”  the old parson continued with enthusiasm. “The idea of a sinless Eden was an idea born during the aftermath of a vicious Civil War during the Commonwealth in England. In these times such radical ideas had broken to the surface. A sinless Eden was an idea that was seen to be  half-religious, and half-secular as an aspiration. A sinless Eden, to those who wanted it, would be instantly attainable in the act of rejecting ones own government and rejecting all religious authority and it’s doctrines.”

 

I listened to the history and nodded that I understood now.

 

“The radicals believed” he continued on “that the guilt of sin was constructed only as a way to control the people. They saw religion, and also government, as something that was being imposed on them from above and they wanted to be free from it. The Church and secular power were seen to be oppressive forces keeping people in subjection by guilt and power. This sinless Eden that they envisioned would offer a new found freedom liberating them after the government and the Church and the doctrine of sin was removed.”

 

I thought about the belief there and said. “They predicted that what would develop afterward would be a perfect functioning society?” I asked him.

 

“Yes and I must say that the idea that religious doctrine was something invented to control the masses was an idea that I found worthy of serious consideration for many years.” The parson admitted this reluctantly to me now looking at my reaction.

 

I considered the the possibility of A Sinless Eden developing but I was dubious about the idea of it working and I asked the parson now.

 

“With no way of managing the ideas of the people and no way of deciding judgments in affairs that effected change and order in society then wouldn’t these people and their communities then slip into a kind of chaos by this anarchy?” I asked him.

 

“Of course It would not have become any better for them after anarchy and yes we know it would have lead only to chaos. We know that in our privileged time now. My point is that these people believed by such ideas that life would get better by using anarchy as the path to achieve results. They envisioned the action of rebellion as bringing about a perfect form of order.”

 

There was quiet now for a minute as we both sat in the dusk thinking about Paul’s teaching and the anarchists of England. Then the parson continued.

 

“The people were weary about anarchy returning after England had recently struggled through a bloody civil war. The civil war had ravaged the countryside. The last thing citizens wanted was more unrest and more horrific bloodshed. The citizen's of England wanted stability so instead of anarchy they chose to cling to the rule of the state. Preachers used eloquence to support this cause of course giving justification by scripture to the rulers authority.  The justification for power came from  both the divine right of Kings and Paul’s scripture.”

 

“The Bible was used  to  justify and strengthen the kings claim to legitimate rule?” I asked.

 

“Yes it was and the apostle Paul’s words were used to reinforce absolute obedience to the king. The scripture has been continually used like this everywhere throughout history to justify whoever has the power. What do you suppose life might have been like in Rome though my friend as Christianity was growing and being threatened by the continually changing emperors? These new Emperors would be constantly challenging and threatening the new religions right to exist.”

 

“Life for early Christians must have been full of great peril and uncertainty.” I said. As the parson asked me this question it occurred to me that he seemed like a thinking person deeply concerned with these kind of questions. I thought I was seeing in him now a man who had likely searched throughout his entire life for answers into these mysteries. He was a man with a mind, it now seemed to me, that had wrestled with the truth of God amid a life path that involved a serious study of history too. He obviously knew that history without apologizing for any knowledge he discovered or believed. It seemed that he had followed that knowledge wherever it took him in the pursuit of histories most honest revelations. He had followed that inquiry wherever and however much that knowledge challenged his faith.

 

“Would Christianity's authors have been pressured in the introduction of what content they wrote down in creating the New Testament?” He asked and quickly continued. “Would those authors have feared those secular Roman emperors of the time that were clearly deciding the fate of all Christians? How would the faith have been allowed to grow and flourish under these secular powers if anarchy was part of the religious canons message?”He looked over at me with a grim expression as we thought upon these questions.

 

The parson then added solemnly. “Wouldn’t the severe hand of the state have wiped out the entire new faith if some kind of instruction wasn’t written into the scripture ensuring that Christians would not be a threat to the secular emperor?” The parson asked me this now with a curios look.

 

“Are you suggesting that the Bible was written by ordinary men? Are you saying it was written by a human strategy  so that it allowed for it to endure under the secular powers of the state?” I asked him this now curiously and in a slightly startled voice looking up at him as the sun was setting over the trees above us. Shadows were forming on the grave yard grasses around us now.

 

“I SUGGEST ONLY WHAT’S REASONABLE TO SUGGEST!” he shouted out now with great anger and defiance. “MAN OR GOD, SOMEONE KNEW WHAT HAD TO HAVE BEEN SAID AND WRITTEN DOWN! GOD OR MAN KNEW THE NEED TO ALLOW THE RELIGION TO SOMEHOW CONTINUE. SO YOU CHOOSE WHO CREATED WHAT AND WHY!” He snapped this at me in a raised voice. He spoke with such energy and passion spit gathered on the edge of the old parsons lips. He took a hanky out of his pocket and wiped the spit away now.

 

“Listen to me!” He continued now in a calm low voice just as a pack of nearby coyotes sounded eerily from the surrounding hills. ”A hundred years after the anarchists there was a very different revolution in France to consider. This revolution in France violently overturned the old regime and the monarchy. Now the same kind of loyal theologians that were obedient to the teaching of Paul back in England were now faced with a brand new obligation in France. They now had to take the revolutionary oath under the new dictator Napoleon.“

 

“But how can anyone be truly loyal to a dictator?” I asked him while considering the demands of obeying Paul’s scripture.

 

“Nonviolently, obediently, by praying for him, by following his directions dutifully, according to the clergy anyway!” As the old parson spoke these words he seemed to scoff at the idea. “But things got allot worse for obedient churchmen in France after the royal trappings of loyalty dropped away and the principle was then revealed for what it meant in it’s honestly!” The parson said now looking at the sky and then back to me frowning and then continuing. “Now the churchmen came to realize that a new oppressive government had to be obeyed and it was a bitter pill now to swallow for them!”

 

The old parson relaxed and smiled solemnly now and then reached over and patted my shoulder and then speaking quietly he said.

 

“How bitter it must have been for the German and Russian Christians to accept this text of Paul's with the call for obedience under the rule of Hitler and Stalin!”

 

“The Bible has been used then to justify obedience to these evil forms of government in power? The scripture was interpreted to even mean that Christians should support the Nazi regime?” I asked now in horror while thinking about the implications of the old parsons words.

 

“Many injustices have been justified in the name of our Lord my friend in the interpretation of scripture. Have you heard of how men used the Bible to justify slavery?”

 

The parson said this to me and then stood up and walked to the third headstone away from where I sat. He reached out now and ran his hand lovingly over an inscription there. Finally he said in a choked up voice.

 

“Can you believe that I’m ninety-six years of age?” I looked at him with understanding as he continued to speak. “God has been good to me my friend. Will you stay here a while longer and we’ll look up at the stars together?” He asked me this now with hopeful eyes.

 

“Sure.” I said. “I have nowhere to be.”

 

The parson asked me now.

 

“What do you think when you look up at the Heavens above friend?”

 

“When I look up at the Heavens I believe” I started to say but hesitated. I then finally responded to him after some time spent thinking there. “ I believe that here on this ancient object.”

 

“The Earth.” The parson interjected. 

 

I gave him a nod. “Yes” I said then and continued. “ I believe on this Earth that when I look at the Heavens above that here we are completely surrounded by the unknown. We don’t know what’s below us or what’s above us in any direction. Mr.. Parson this makes the details of what is out there unspeakable. Nonetheless that something real and discoverable is actually out there is as real as I am or you are sir. The unknown we are yet unable to conceive of because those mysteries are not yet encountered by any of us but that they are out there we should not doubt for a second. Nor should we doubt that those wonders transcend our imaginations in the creativity they entail!”

 

I considered my words now with care and said very passionately to him. “We live haunted by the unknown everywhere around us in the sky. We’re also haunted with the uncertainty of what happened before us behind our own times.  I believe we only have a partial understanding of the history that proceeded us and as of yet no real solid understanding as to the size and details of life’s larger mysteries around us.”

 

I realized now in answering the old man that I had called the preacher Mr. Parson several times and it occurred to me now that I didn’t know his real name although he knew mine. He didn’t seem to mind but instead looked to be interested in my ideas and so I decided to continue.

 

“I am encouraged though Mr. Parson that we are willing to look about us at the empty abyss of the sky at night and that we want to try and fathom it nonetheless. We wonder about us looking out into that infinite intergalactic space with such big questions asked from here about where we are in our lonely coordinates. Wherever this really is amid everything else then somehow, some day, an intelligence itself will no doubt enable someone to map out for us our very location. Amid the vast unknown some intelligence will offer us some actual awareness of our surroundings and where we are. That intelligence will detail for us our mysteries existence by describing to us the grand picture in it’s completeness or will partially offer some enticing  piece of the unceasing and continues puzzle of our aliveness. The answer to existence itself exists however Mr. Parson and one day it will explain to us exactly what we’re apart of here in the immense and mind-bogglingly large experience of  existence.“

 

The old parson looked over at me as the last signs of daylight evaporated. With the ending of day gone it left now only the bright moon on our face and more then a handful of evening stars lighting up the darkness enveloping about us.

 

“You see where that star above us shines almost cold and dispassionate almost with a smile?” The parson asked me now in the darkness. “If in a flash, my friend, I could travel there then how many, many miles I’d go!” He elaborated now. “If  only I could travel with my soul now!” The old parson beat his chest now feverishly almost with violence.”When my soul is unprisoned from this earthly bond then time will not be able to count my markless flight beyond those stars. BEYOND I SAY!” He shouted  out these last words very loudly now.

 

The Parson said this to me in a voice so deep that it seemed to go sweeping invisibly in the darkness across the hills. Quietly now he added very calmly.

 

“A bit of poetry I picked up somewhere along the way.”

 

Me and the parson sat quietly in the darkness looking at the brilliant universe around us. After a while he said to me  interrupting the quiet..

 

“When I am really weary, and I am really old now so that kind of weariness is approaching fast, and a day comes friend where I am unable to find any delight at all. When I am totally spent from this life. If then, like a bird that tries to use its wings too long,  I can’t use those wings anymore. I like that bird then will nest awhile instead of taking flight. I will rest amid the grasses and instead of flying I’ll sing there.  I will drop right down in that grass entirely at last leaving any wonderment that I had if it all must be.  I will find there rest In the timelessness and space of the earth amid the soil, where the wind, and the sunshine, and the planets motion continues moving on around me. I will stay there with the little things that are the grass and the flowers.”

 

“However Donald!” Said the Parson now with great seriousness and unflinching conviction. “If I’m instead with my God, which Is where I know myself to be going. If I’m in flight with Him then my wings will  beat until I’ve gone so far,  far from the kind grass, even that grass which is so cool and deep. I will be poised instead among the winds on high. From there I will sing to God as I move from star to star and as I pierce the sunshine itself. I will keep a song always as I meet Jesus amid the farthest sky of HEAVEN ITSELF!”

He thundered out these last words with his voice almost echoing into the night air.

We sat awhile longer together there. Not long after our discussion had ended we began making our way through the darkness to the car. I then drove the old parson to his house nearby and helped him find his way into his kitchen after finding him an outdoor light switch. After a few directions from him and a heartfelt handshake we said our goodbyes me and the old parson for now. I then drove out of his yard and met the Rawdon hills. Soon I was in Milford and turning unto the 102 highway and I was making my way back home to Brookfield.

Whisky, God, prayer, philosophizing

I was on the gulf shore with family recently standing on the third sandbar out on a hot early September day. I had a bottle of Royal Reserve whisky, a two liter bottle of diet Pepsi, a glass, and a folding chair. Between sips of whisky (like I’m doing right now which is why this blog entry might sound like gibberish no matter how much editing I do) I walked out into the offshore shallow water there. Standing in the water,  I laid back in the salt water floating and praying like I do when I’m in or by the ocean.

 

I looked across the waters surface off to the horizon toward PEI and there in silence God reminded me of a verse of scripture I didn’t fully remember the words to. I knew it was God speaking to me however and that the scripture was related to something said related to Gods Spirit moving across the waters. I was with my friend, maybe my only friend, and He was reminding me of His eternal presence with me and in creation.

 

Here now, while having a few drinks, I’ve decided to philosophize like I currently don’t understand things about God or understand Him like I do as a friend. My faith really does remind me of His existence but I figure people are in different mindsets and the truth is uncertain and filled with so many legitimate arguments.  I therefore don’t want to preach but try to reason and speculate about the unknown.

 

Was there previously before the present time that we now know a power of love. Was then this force of love In some prehistoric place and existing amid a preexistence before us in our time. Did love proceed us before this world we now know was here or before any of us fought for the truth of things we may now search for. Was love there, and is love still here the big questions.

 

I wonder about this, does that kind of absolute unending something good really exist. Does an intelligible thinking force transcending us then, for whatever reason, hide from us and only reveal itself, Himself, Herself, conditionally, based on experiences, our will, our sense of fairness, through our sorrows etc.. Are these illusions of a God’s beauty real. Are such transcending possibilities about the truth really how things ultimately are or merely how we estimate them to be sometimes.

 

I ask this wondering If a force of some kind of good transcends us. Are the ways of such a forces capacity really ways of love that are pleased with conditions of good. Can this force really be trusted to be compassionate and can it by it’s essence and character truly deliver us beyond the chaos we currently struggle amid. If this love is a thinking power is it by it’s nature then a power that naturally knows a loyal and dedicated love. Can this love be grounded on unalterable, non diminishable, truly compassionate terms.

 

With it’s voice maybe then this power knows and is able to speak life itself into existence. With a better and fairer vision then ours and of the infinite and eternal does such a creative capacity love beyond our inadequate limitations. Is there then a force beyond us that builds life through thought, through a word, creating the world as we know it to be.

 

I know that we arrive on the journey through the ages at a point on the timeline of history. We have limited, hindered, inaccurate self-awareness. Our ideas compete with each other by making claims of “the truth” as we move forward building upon these understandings as we continuously contribute to the world by thought through the generations. We hear rumors as we move through life of love written and translated and recycled. Yet our methods for acquiring “the truth”  are possibly flawed as too is our loyalty flawed to the old and new systems of thought that are giving us answers.

 

Our attitudes toward what the truth is becomes reckless, defiant and boldly resistant because of these systems of thought, myth, unbending theory,  etc..Truth isn’t just there or obvious on our journey despite claims of such.  Perfect love is seen by us only in a haze because as human beings we can only see through a glass that obstructs our capacity to see fully to know that kind of love. Our tribal associations puts limitations on our grasp of seeing the humanness of one another. We gather in a pact of people reminding ourselves, reinforcing ourselves, in our like-mindedness, that we supposedly know everything relevant because of these beliefs we have as a group. We are determined there in those places, by our irrationality, to blindly offer certainty claims to the others we accept and then to reject the alternative others who experience life differently. That false certainty is regularly fed and delivered into susceptible minds that are offering these people the supposed laws and certitudes of the fate of imperfect human beings. What ultimately lies beyond us and our own groups claims is blindly explained away in a contest of idea claims. We share the unquestioned laws and ideas of our own inheritance catering to interests entirely self justifying that usually leave out one another.

 

We in this way become at our worst the vulgar travelers across the world stage. We move through time spitting and punching and yelling and screaming and mocking and often shutting each other out. We conspire to do evil against one another at our very worst on ideological grounds. While at our best we humble ourselves conquering our pride, forgiving each other and finding ways to love our neighbor however far away or different the culture of our neighbor is or how awful that cultures influence is there where they live.

 

I wonder here now in Nova Scotia, do we have any reason now to see good in the grandiosity of life. We know we defy moral boundaries stepping from good into evil naively, often innocently enough, in Africa, in the Middle East, everywhere in this world where human beings are. The human person loses his or her way often. The world struggles on with ideas competing for the truth and often as a rule arriving at misunderstandings. It’s more common for a human being to arrive at a false judgment then at finding the truth.

 

Does our comprehension of love end in our death and in our loved ones deaths. This is the tragedy of life. We all fear or accept we may fade away with time. Some new band of wonderer then passes the roadside cemeteries where our bones lay under the topsoil and grass. Are we all together in death though. I hope we become better friends in death then in life. I speculate if our minds and capacity for understanding are opened in death then that we’re going to be set on a continuing journey to really know and care about each other.

 

Love might surpass this kind of hopeful speculation though. Love might be bigger then this and traverse all the boundaries of supposedly being realistic. The truth may transcend doubt, cynicism,  fear and despair. Love itself might really hold such a masterful grip on this life beyond anything a mortal being can appreciate. Ultimately then by this kind of optimism or faith we’re then by this power rescued from the depth of our seeming final undoing.

 

This world we’re on staggers forward in the unknown Universe with it’s outer unending multiverses or perhaps a different unconsidered law of infinity itself full of the potential boundless creative works in it’s nature. We are all somewhere here now we don’t know amid something larger, much larger, amidst the greatest of all possible unknowns. We live amid this unknown and before a frontier of infinite uncertainty. Our sights and hopes and struggles continue on as we go onward on this journey.

 

The question becomes how far are our sights. How deep is the awareness of our love for one another. How complete is our capacity to see the real dignity of the human person here in this life and after death itself. Can we love mankind universally wherever that person ends up and however misguided they were in reaching ultimately what’s beyond here in this world.

We the great judges of one another

How are we supposed to access where we presently are? With our general baring's in life how can we know with clarity where we really are in life? Where the earth is? that we’re thinking right about the truth? If we are a judgmental or ego driven person we might be self-assured enough in our personal behavior and baring's through life in the world to expect from all others a direct correlation to our own imperfect conclusions and behavior. We would expect everyone else’s life decisions and behaviors to be in line conveniently with our own personal beliefs. We might think we are close enough to perfection that we can naturally expect it then from all others as we judge the world. The others usually do ultimately fail to meet our judgment of acceptance and basically that’s how the human mind works in society. We are all judges and attackers of one other.

 

Do not judge. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give and it will be given to you.

 

The individual regardless where he or she lives, don’t you agree, that they seem to face invisible boundaries in their walk through the world. The boundaries we must delicately maneuver past we maneuver by hopefully not self-destructing or hurting others. With temperament, hurt feelings, our sensitivity to others behavior, pride, lust, anger etc. they all make our own instincts potentially dangerous. To live is like walking through a mine field as we navigate this life.  Often what is lacking in our experience is the available ideas to morally guide us and to shape our decisions at key moments especially.

 

We must be given over to the notion first of all that listening to things like compassion or forgiveness etc. is beneficial to us. There is a rebellion in the human appetite that acts against these good ideas and so this rebelliousness must be resisted and the right thinking must be discovered. Lacking in our circumstances and situations are the knowledgeable councilors with those good arguments and examples. There are no great guide signs big enough in life, or posted everywhere, that are clear enough, universal enough and that can be thought about in our imperfect lives with our roaming and agitated minds. In life we all cross boundaries therefore stepping into wrongful places in our imagination, with me my past has had violence.

 

Many of us must consider the church as a potential guide to be a place of old fashioned Bible hymns. Old Testament myths are read there and then great leaps of correlation are drawn between the message and some moral message for our own time. Illusions in those who are regular in attendants might perceive themselves morally upright and perhaps what is unrecognizable at first about them is self-righteousness and hypocrisy. The Gospels themselves containing the story of Jesus and His teaching is incredibly helpful to a troubled mind while the darkness in the Church in some circles these days routinely seems to reveal real evil to consider. The evil festers and remains there out of sight while the hope that is the Church is supposed to guard against this evil but is yet to realize it.

 

Healthy desire, fantasy, sex shouldn't make people with an eye on God ashamed or guilt ridden or afraid of losing His friendship because of it. Why should these ideas that occur billions of times a second to everyone, every human being in the world, be a source of shame or create such guilt? If God exists not only is He aware of the thoughts but He engineered and designed them. He knows therefore  how sex would occur and be imagined through our thoughts the positions we imagine, situations etc. Nothing about thinking about adult sex is alien to God. If He is God He knows every thought we have and He is not surprised by us at all. The dusty Hymn books in a Church and the illusion there that people don’t or shouldn’t masturbate, for example, might be the thing about religion that isn’t attractive or realistic or healthy for people who need Gods friendship but are turned off by the mood of the building.

 

I don’t think the world offers a clear road forward. None of us, however close to the truth we may be, can walk down a clear path here in this life. What lies ahead of us will involve suffering, trauma, despair, grief while many of us will encounter overwhelming misery and then eventually death will come. The road, path, that all human beings follow offers no guarantee we'll find hope or experience much or any love. Chance itself may torment us and take us by famine or war or a car accident or a plague. For much of history people didn't live long lives to begin with.

 

Out of this chaos culture, family, entertainment, religious community, good ideas, forms of hope itself have interacted and fought for an influence in the world. Many greater minds have come closer then others to that kind of hope. Some of them have claimed to have a friendship with a force of good they claimed to know personally that transcends us. I believe in that God existing as we live our lives in this world.

 

Whatever life gives if there is a God He is the author of time. What seems to be a premature meaningless life in the hands of an eternal Being of unlimited creativity and compassion may prove not ultimately to be an ending that is as tragic as what it seems to be. This life here now is a glimpse of a longer experience and being absent God on earth is to be with God after life on earth and there is no comparison between them. Perfect peace, endless joy, no more pain, no more death, that’s what I look for.

 

But can we abandon the idea that we can know "the truth" as an absolute here? I don’t think all of us, half of us, or one percent of us, can know the truth by pulling ourselves up by our own boot strings in life. Even if southern Baptist evangelicals who take every word of scripture as literal history have it right how many of us can reasonably come to appreciate that? We can't know the truth in totality we are too doctrinally challenged on this planet. The mathematical probability, possibility, that while people interact with extreme social, cultural, religious diversity that they all make a sudden change to one hundred percent acceptance of a certain preachers ideas is impossible.

 

The ancient myths convince us of the "truth!"  *rolls his eyes* Alternatively supposedly the lengthy atheist accounts of evolving account of events through time can maneuver our understanding back with total consistency and absolute accuracy to the very "first causes" of everything without error or unforeseen circumstance. In these accounts supposedly they eradicate for us the need for explanations of "why?" or "What could have came before that?" that could open the door to larger possibility. Also while looking out to the ends of the Universe it leads to the questioning which asks "What lies beyond the edges of the Universe itself?”

 

These are all like myths, it seems to me, when we tell ourselves they represent the absolute truth. They are only masquerading in our appreciations as pure knowledge. The claims we human beings have discovered “already” somehow these very mysteries and know the truth from our deductions absolutely is misleading. The world, the Universe, the unknown all around us, is supposedly by some of these supposed “certainties” to be clearly distinguishable now somehow as Godless.

 

We will accept all of the beliefs we have, no matter what they are, out of desperation or because they appear familiar. Some ideas sooth our mood and give the greatest comfort to our minds intellectual foundations. We are ideologically challenged and disadvantaged. I will give you a greater truth. "We don't yet know the truth."

 

We should humble ourselves therefore and have understandings for the alternative perspectives in life in this world. Can we open our minds to humanity despite the doctrines that persuade us personally. Can we look for hope itself as something real existing beyond our state of bewilderment here while doing it?

 

I pity the poor ideological struggles that living in the world produces. Why on Earth are people so determined to judge and condemn what isn't their own experience. Aren't all human beings hindered by the same inaccurate understanding of the truth.

 

Why not love the total humanness of every last person swayed by ideas and ideology on Earth. Whatever doctrine moving with the wind that is persuading us can’t we resist allowing it to make us so terribly afraid.

 

My belief of God is that He is a God of compassion and love. His love transcends therefore the suspicion that is afraid of the different kinds of thinking that are normal in a confusing world. Everyone is loved here by God.

A struggle for love

I struggle to understand the world we’re a part of as I make entry’s to this blog. For anyone who reads it there is no doubt that some readers will have given these issues clearer thought then I have. I don’t profess to have any expertise of course in questioning issues like this one. I just have an opinion that’s continuously growing. 

 

When I look at life and access reality then what occurs in thought, when I’m honest with my own feelings, is finding myself desiring that the entire world be loved and by loved I mean really loved completely. In thinking about the word love I believe that the world we inhabit is already indeed truly loved in this way. I understand that religious scriptures speak of this love for us as a part of creation in a very profound way. Unfortunately however the answer to what love is for humanity appears to stop loving many people inevitably and ultimately at the end of their life. Multitudes of people’s lives by this scriptural interpretation then are rumored to be lost to love when death arrives. Even worse then the majority of people not going to be with God in love are the very cruel, cold, hopeless and archaic story’s of eternal punishment that have haunted many past and present generations imaginations unfairly.

 

Different ideas in the world convince people of different truth claims and lead to differently perceived understandings of what the truth is. These underpinning arguments form an understanding of God or science etc.. They describe to people how the world works and result in the different beliefs people have. When our lives end in these various states, states of different misunderstandings, the idea many religious people have, that they seem far too comfortable with, is that Gods love is gone for those who are wrong about the truth. For mass groups of human beings they have been excluded from salvation. Theology for the human beings outside a certain understanding seems terribly unfair however.

 

I cannot accept this claim that “most” of the world will end up abandoned for denying the truth. That people could have accepted this one belief as the truth but didn't seems unreasonable to assume. Such a calculation so observed is clearly false given the nature of the world and the competition in it for ideas. The belief that love will abandon people who are being persuaded and shaped simply because they are vulnerable and impressionable  to ideas is sad. People come from different cultures entirely and the idea they fall victims to error because of their own will is a cruel outdated concept that causes great pain. Such thinking causes pain because it loses sight of our common humanity and therefore makes us distrust and suspect one another unreasonably and unnecessarily. We are all in this world as people. I believe with great conviction that God loves the whole world.

 

I know there is a God too. My problem with what scripture is seeming to say is not a doubt about Gods existence. I trust God who I communicate in prayer with. I want for Gods love to really belong unto all of mankind because it makes sense. I want to have real compassion, a deeper connection without suspect, for people. I want a compassion that's not based on conditional love that leads to inevitable collapse. I want to love human beings in every remote and impoverished place, in whatever war torn region of Earth that people kill and are killed. I want to love people whatever thought dominates their minds whether it’s good or bad thought that’s effecting their judgment.

 

This is the love I feel when I talk to Jesus of the Gospels in prayer. I trust God as having a love that loves us far beyond other human beings understandings.

 

Life is difficult to live for love. When we try to dedicate our life in a way that truly loves people people intervene and remind us how we’re not really doing it. Even believing in God as love and taking His council to heart makes navigating people extremely difficult. Chaotically, confusingly, amid a difficult terrain, life is a mind field of ideas to navigate. Gossip and other forms of human discussion aggravate into disruptions to:  peace, pride, ego, reputation and honor. Behavior and it’s consequences are then obviously going to challenge us all in this way. Our peace can be effected poorly in us in this way very frequently. As our emotional journey proceeds interactions with individual people lead to intense loyalties with some and intense hatreds of others if we don’t overcome those angers.

 

Love when pursued amid the difficult terrain of the world can be harnessed for very good effects though. If we pursue love with resolve and vigilance trusting that God is love and replacing our egos unrighteous attitude. If we conquer our pride that would of lead to the harm of others then we win.

 

In the world there are ideological assumptions of who God is and who He loves and is loyal to. Wars between cultures occur on this  ground. Here for us with time dwindling by and our mortality ever nearer to it’s end we can choose to pursue love for a mystery and a reason we value. Our entire generation will be beyond the mortal world soon enough and then I believe we’ll really there begin to cultivate our relationships in a way that truly loves and matters to each other in a place of real fairness.