Darkness must pass
A new day will come
And when the sun shines
It will shine out the clearer.
—J.R.R. Tolkien
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can.
— J.R.R Tolkien
Occasionally you wake up to a news story that helps start your day off in a happy way.
“A group of heroes have been pictured waiting with a man for two hours to stop him from jumping from a bridge.
[…]
“Each person held on to different parts of his body, refusing to let him go. Some even tied ropes around his body and legs to secure him to the railings until the emergency services could arrive.“None of the people are thought to have known each other before the incident – but they all stayed with the man for two hours.”
This is one of those stories that can brighten anyone’s day and really restore faith in mankind.
Is it possible for a man to lose his religion but keep his faith in God? Even more so, is it possible for a man to lose his religion and, in doing so, find his faith is even stronger than before.
Can losing religion make a man a better, more faithful Christian than before?
When everything gets stripped away faith can remain as long as what remains is the simple truth of:
“I see the need for Jesus.”
This then gets built up to:
I want Jesus.
And then a new, fresh, yearning wells up inside and the man dives back into understanding and learning with new eyes. It is a whole new way of seeing the world.
It is possible because I am that man.
With all that has happened this year, all around the world, a lot of people are ready to throw their hands in their and just give up.
This quote is a reminder to look back to the early followers of Jesus, who often had as many “bad years” as our modern world, and instead continue to look forward and to do what we can to improve the world around us.
I used to enjoy regularly writing and blogging and I have been wanting to get back into it for awhile but time and various demands and stresses of life have not allowed it. However, as the last couple of months have been a time for fresh starts in several areas of our family’s life, now seems an appropriate time to begin blogging again.
I have begun by updating WordPress on this site and giving it a fresh look and a new domain. I have missed blogging and think more people should return to it as it can be so much more fulfilling then Facebook and Twitter and so much more personal. A large percentage of the posts here will definitely have a theological/spiritual focus as I use writing to learn and clarify ideas about God and this journey we’re on for myself more than anyone else. Feel free to join me and add to the discussion though.
Image credits: toothpastefordinner.com, pixabay.com
“It is not sufficient to forgive others: we must forgive them with humility and compassion. If we forgive them without humility, our forgiveness is a mockery: it presupposes that we are better than they.”
– Thomas Merton
A man once told Oswald Chambers that he read only the Bible. Here’s what Chambers replied:
“My strong advice to you is to soak, soak, soak in philosophy and psychology, until you know more of these subjects than ever you need consciously to think. It is ignorance of these subjects on the part of ministers and workers that has brought our evangelical theology to such a sorry plight…The man who reads only the Bible does not, as a rule, know it or human life.”
First, we have to accept that God is the explanation for everything. He is all-knowing and all-powerful. He is perfect. Therefore, anything that God creates can only be inferior to Himself. Because of this suffering and evil, or imperfection, are therefore an inevitable consequence of Creation.
“On God’s part creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation. God and all his creatures are less than God alone. God accepted this diminution. He emptied a part of his being from himself. He had already emptied himself in this act of his divinity; that is why Saint John says that the Lamb had been slain from the beginning of the world. God permitted the existence of things distinct from himself and worth infinitely less than himself. But through this creative act he denied himself, as Christ has told us to deny ourselves. God denied himself for our sakes in order to give us the possibility of denying ourselves for him. This response, this echo, which it is in our power to refuse, is the only possible justification for the folly of love of the creative act.”
– Simone Weil
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From the writer John Blanchard:
“[At] what level should God intervene? We might say that he should not have allowed the worst offenders – the Hitlers, Pol Pots and Mao Tse-tungs of this world – to do what they did. But what about the next level – say, thugs, sadists, rapists, child abusers and drug pushers – should God step in and stop them?If he did, another ‘layer’ of offenders would become the worst – say, drunk drivers, shoplifters, burglars and the like. If we argued like this we would soon get to the point at which we would be demanding that God should intervene to prevent all evil. Would you settle for that, even if it meant having your own thoughts, words and actions controlled by a cosmic puppet-master, robbing you of all freedom and responsibility?”
Food for thought.