trust

I guess you could say I've been having trust issues. The Christian walk is built on trust. Trusting that God is in control, that he will reign victorious, and that He has our best interests in mind. Trust is also integral to prayer; prayer is founded on the belief that God listens, and trusting that prayer is more than good for the psyche. The Bible is full of stories of how God protected His people; those who remained faithful to Him. It tells us of the glorious victories God brought the nation of Israel, yet it tells us little of the men who fell in battle. The Bible is the story of how God intervened in history, not of how He didn't. One of the few authors that takes us behind the scenes, is the author of the book of Job. Although many people claim to take comfort in Job, I can't help but admit that I do not feel the same way. We are brought to the climax, the topic of interest - why did God allow Job to suffer? Only to fall belly first to the surface, "who are you to ask questions, just trust me."

We are told to trust in God, to step out on a limb for Him, He will take care of us. Yet great thinkers such as Solomon are left distraught at the apparent lack of differential treatment between the faithful and the ungodly, exclaiming "There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless." To me, this speaks of a world where God does not intervene. He may well be there, observing from afar, but this does not vouch for the God who protects those who love Him. My mind could be at rest believing in this kind of a God. A God who because of the choices we made watches the consequences of sin unfold, until the day when enough is enough. This belief could go hand in hand with what I see. Perhaps this is why anger stirs somewhere inside me when I hear stories of how God saved someone's life; how God saved them to live another day because He still had a plan for their lives; because their work for God was not yet completed. Although this sounds like a pleasant sentiment, what does it imply for the lives of those who were not saved? You are left with some very unpleasant conclusions - although you may not be aware of this until disaster strikes a little closer to home. The Bible does not offer the rationale behind God's decisions in the book of Job, but perhaps Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived - perhaps he figured it out? Alas, no, Ecclesiastes ends on a similar note to Job: fear God, he deserves it.

perspective

Travelling home to Wales for the week-end, I was reminded of the fact that the ideal method of transportation is the train. The clean interior and smooth motion bring an aura of class, despite its relative simplicity. There are neither breathtaking take-offs, nor nauseating sea-sickness. There may be no panoramic view, yet from the train the rolling hills offer their soothing beauty; which ironically goes unobserved from the aircraft. The depth of detail that is overlooked by the aviator in the clouds, may seem inconceivable to the astronaut on the moon. It seems that the brain is incapable of contemplating the micro- and macroscopic simultaneously. Perhaps this is the case for Mother Nature herself, as the Laws of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics appear to govern their respective aspects of her being.

As our eyes focus first on that which is near, then afar; so does our mind. The same way our brain gathers all the individual pictures together to produce a single, coherent view of our surroundings; our brain attempts to conceptualise our knowledge and experiences to a single, consistent truth. The instances in which our explanations fail to agree with each other are most dissatisfying. Although I have been able to accept that there may be no single law or model that can explain every observed phenomenon in nature; I am, as yet, unable to come to terms with a similar discrepancy I have been faced with in my religious experience.

Lee Strobel wrote his book The Case for Faith in response to people such as Charles Templeton, who's loss of faith can be traced to a picture of a woman and her baby child dying because of the lack of rain. How could the loving God that controls the weather let children starve to death when all they needed was some rain? He wouldn't, so this loving God who controlled the weather couldn't possible exist. I have sympathy for this man. I fail to understand how my friends, who claim that God held the rain back until after they had finished the day's street evangelism, do not have a problem with the fact that the very same God let a child in Africa die because the rain he had been praying for, the past month, never came. My religious experience is suffering, not because I do not understand the reasoning behind the doctor's decision I blogged about a few months ago, but because I do not understand how any good doctor could possibly behave as he did.


http://thereflectorblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/life-insurance.html