Why me?

I am puzzled by why I react differently to some others when looking at the existence of God. Why did I look at the futility of using just reason to work out if there is a God and find in that discovery the freedom to choose faith? Why do others get to a similar point and reject God? The following is a response from someone on the ex-christian.net website in response to reading my blog.

"I am definitely on the way back to finding some kind of faith again. The relief is huge! Following on from my last post, I finally realised the futility of trying to work out with just reason if there was a God." ( The Patchwork Blog from Monday 17th January 2011)

This person wrote the following in response to my blog on the ex-christian website. "Abandon reason and believe the unreasonable!   Obviously, some people aren't happy unless they have a belief in magic even if they know it is an unreasonable position as this one does. It seems that many people want so badly to think there is a god they will take the leap of faith that tells us fairies don't exist until we believe in them.   I see it all the time, but I still don't understand embracing unfounded beliefs while recognizing it goes against reason"

Getting to the same place as I did led this person to choose to reject God. It gave me the freedom to choose to have faith as an act of my will. What is it in me that makes that choice and in another person makes them reject God? Is it personality? Environment? Their past experiences of Church? Does it just boil down to the fact that I want to believe in God and so am happy to make that leap of faith? Maybe the other person did not want to believe in God and getting to that point gave them the freedom to not to believe.I don't suppose I will ever know the answer this side of heaven but it puzzles me and also makes me eternally grateful that I have chosen faith in God. 

Why did I become a minister of religion in the first place

I have been thinking about why I became a minister of religion in the first place. Did I really have noble aims of 'reaching the lost' and 'introducing people to Jesus' or was it something else? Maybe it was a mixture of things.

I think part of it was responding to a call from God to be involved in full time ministry of some kind. I spent much of my nursing career (I was a nurse before I worked for the church) terrified that God would ask me to go to some developing country where it is really hot and they have scary creepy crawlies. In fact when the call came it was to minister to the people of Britain not anywhere else. I was hugely relieved I can tell you! My view of God was 'if you dread doing something, that is always what He will make you do'. I remember being challenged and hopeful at the same time, when I read something by Gerald Coates  in which he said, 'your ministry is probably something you enjoy doing'. It was the first time I had seriously thought that maybe God would not make me do the very thing I dreaded.

On the surface I was feeling 'holy' and wanting to 'serve God'. Maybe a part of me was feeling proud of the fact that I wanted to do these things with my life. That in itself is not a good start! The more I have thought the more I realise that I was trying to earn favour from God. I thought if I was in full time ministry then God would be more likely to really love me and give me what I wanted. 

Although on the surface I was saying all the right things about why I was in ministry underneath it all was a little girl trying to earn love from her heavenly Father.  I was trying to prove to myself, and to God, that I am loveable. It was like I didn't think the cross on its own proved that God loves me.

Virtually all of  my understanding of God was head knowledge not heart knowledge.  I could say the right things, I could teach others the right things. I taught about the grace of God, His unconditional love and acceptance. But at a heart level I was still trying to earn His love and acceptance by being a 'good girl'. 

Obedience is a reaction of gratitude to God's grace, not a way of earning His love.  John 14:23 says, "Jesus replied, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. ²⁴ Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me."    When I used to read that verse I would see in my  mind an angry God wagging his finger at me, saying petulantly 'if you loved me, you would obey me', implying we don't really love him, and that to prove our love for Him we must sacrificially obey Him.  That is what I was subconsciously thinking when I went into ministry.

Now I see that verse  in a different light. I am beginning to realise that Jesus is saying 'It is your love for me that will give you the ability to obey me'. The more we love someone the easier it is to do things for them. The love we feel for them motivates us to do things and make sacrifices for them. Obeying Jesus' teaching is the same. The more we love Him the more we will automatically want to obey Him.

I am at the stage now where I need to concentrate on my love relationship with Jesus. I want to learn to really recieve His love and have a genuine relationship with Him. For this reason I think it is vital now that I don't rush into anything at all. I just take each day and each moment as it comes, learning once again to hear God's voice.

 ©Charlie Mackesy      www.charliemackesy.com

The picture to the right is called 'The Prodigal Daughter' and is by Charlie Mackesy.  I find it deeply moving to look at and have a small copy of it in my lounge (copies are available to buy on his website - see under the picture). He also has done one called 'The Prodgial Son' as well.  He's also done a scultpure of the prodigal son as well. If you are ever in the Brompton area of London, then Holy Trinity Church Brompton have the statue in their church. I could sit and look at it for hours!www.charliemackesy.com

A step of faith

"Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole  staircase, just take the first step."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 I am definitely on the way back to finding some kind of faith again.  The relief is huge!  Following on from my last post, I finally realised the futility of trying to work out with just reason if there was a God. By excluding faith, Scripture, personal experience, others' testimony, and tradition I am saying in advance 'there is no God' because I have excluded most of the ways He uses to speak to us. I am left with reason and how I see the universe around us and how it started.  It was almost like I had to work out what I believed before I started looking at evidence so I knew whether or not to include or exclude certain types of evidence. I wanted to remain totally open to there being a God or not being one.  I decided I wasn't going to exclude evidence simply because it assumed an existence of God.



It came to me that it's a choice. I can't prove it  one way or the other. I have to take that first step of faith into the unknown without being completely sure. I did that last week. I just decided as an act of my will, and not feeling it, that I was going to believe there is a God. It was a conscious act of my will and my mind. Once I made it, I felt a huge sense of peace. 



I am not going to rush things though. It would be too easy to rush into a Christian life as it was before which would be a mistake. It is important to me that I take each step one by one. I've decided there is a God. I never really doubted Jesus being the Son of God, if there was a God. For me I always knew throughout my time of doubting that if there is a God then Jesus is the Messiah, he is the Son of God.

I've been reminded of when the Israelites crossed the Jordan river. The river didn't part until after the priests at the front of the line stepped into the water. They had to step in before the miracle occurred. "Yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away" Joshua 3:15-16. 

 I think I will just live with that for now and enjoy where I am without trying to rush into anything else. One step at a time.

The long way back

I have a feeling I may be starting the long road back to faith again.  I have had so many things going round my head over the last few months. I have tried to work out how I can see if there is a God or not. I have tried to use reason, as well as other things. The more I thought about things over the last few days, going on from my last post about Scripture, Reason, tradition and experience, the more I realised something.  You can't prove God to yourself, or disprove him to yourself, using just reason if you want to remain open to the possibility that he is there. When I disregard all but reason is trying to work out if God is there, I am already deciding that he is not there, so I don't need to use those things to base my decision on.  To remain truly open I want to consider all things, from all angels.

I think I am coming round to the fact that if there is a God, then faith must be involved in how we approach him and how we come to believe he is there. If there is a God, then I have to use faith in every aspect of my relationship with him. If there is a God, I believe that he is different to us. Yes, we are made in his image, but that means we reflect him in aspects of who we are.  It does not mean he is the same as us. For me it means I accept that he is eternal. He has always been. He doesn't have a beginning or an end. The 'Who created the Creator?' question simply is redundant in my opinion. If there is a God, then he is beyond our human understanding because he is not human.

I have come across some very kind people on the ex-christian website I have been looking at. They have encouraged me, and helped me to see I don't have to rush my thoughts. I can take my time. Many of them seem to use only reason to decide about God. At first it seemed sensible, but now I am really questioning if that is the right way for me. I know there is more to me than my ability to reason and think. I am what I feel, I am what I have experienced. I am how I have been brought up.  There is more than flesh and bone to me. To a certain extent I use faith every day. When I get in my car I have faith that other drivers will stop when there is a red light. Sometimes they do not, but mostly they do. Drivers sometimes not stopping doesn't mean I stop trusting the lights as a way to drive on our roads. It means I use caution and have my wits about me. Even in our courts a jury is expected to find someone guilty 'beyond all reasonable doubt'. There is an element of accepting that I can not always be 100% certain of what happened in any situation. We use reason but accept that there is a limit to our reason.


There is a limit to my reason when dealing with God. My reason tells me something but then other things I do not yet know. When I began to accept that I couldn't work it all out with reason, the burden became lighter. I realised a mixture of  faith and reason is acceptable. I feel that I am a little like St Thomas. I have been doubting and refusing to believe but Jesus has just held out his hands and shown me his side as he did Thomas.  Thomas uses  his reason to get to a point of faith. I hope I can do the same.

Banging my head against a brick wall

Every time I think I have decided what that there is/or is not  a God I read or hear something else that makes me think the opposite. As I said in my last post,  some of the countries more intelligent people can't agree on whether there is a God or not. This surely means it is really hard, or impossible,  to prove  that there is a God one way or another. Is trying to work it out intellectally really the right way? But I don't want to leave my brain out of it, God gave it to me, if there is a God, so would he not want me to use it.

I've had these verses going through my head for a few days, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. ............. without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. ." (Hebrews 11:1, 6). Trying to combine faith with using my brain seems to be like banging my head against a brick wall - pointless and just leads to pain. If this is some kind of test of faith I don't want to fail it, but if I am believing a lie I want to know as well.

Even as I write this, I am suddenly reminded of essays I used to have to do after a practical placement during my ministry training. We had to look at a particular issue or situation that had arisen during our placement and work through it theologically, using Scripture, reason, tradition and experience. So I guess I can apply the same things here. I could look at it from those 4 angles. Looking at Scripture, using reason, what is traditional thought, and what does my experience tell me.   Some of the people I have read on various sites for ex-christians seem to concentrate on reason but I want to use all of the resources that I can.  I have had experiences of God (or what I thought was God at the time). Traditionally speaking most (but I am guessing not all) cultures have some sort of deity that they worship. It seems to me that it is ingrained some how in human kind as a whole to believe in God (obviously not all individuals believe in God within that society).

If it was just people who were not intelligent who believed in God I would think that maybe I could use reason and work it out. But some very clever people believing in the existence of God. Maybe to the list of Scripture, tradtion, experience and reason I can add looking deeper into my psyche, for reasons why I might not want to believe in God. What are the reasons that I am so keen for there to be a God? What is the payback for me if there is a God, or if there is not a God?

All food for thought over Christmas - the first time in years I will have the whole of Christmas off!

Questioning

I've just watched the film "Billy: The early years of Billy Graham".

It has got me thinking. It showed not just Billy Graham but also his friend Charles Templeton, who was also a preacher but then renounced Christianity. It was their respective reactions to WWII that made me think. When seeing the horrendous pictures of the concentration camps, Charles Templeton's reaction was to question God, 'how can a loving God allow that to happen?', he seems to have lost his faith since then, the doubts it caused being too many to keep believing. But Billy Graham's response was 'but man did that not God', and it did not seem to shake his faith much. He carried on believing in God.

What makes one man doubt and one man believe when looking at the same evidence.  I thought the same when reading Richard Dawkins book 'The God delusion' and then reading a book called 'The Dawkins Delusion' by Alistair McGrath. Both men seem to point to the same evidence, for example the nature of our universe, and find proof of their particular view from it.

If much more learned people than me can not find definitive proof of the existence of God then maybe by looking at things from an intellectual, or reasoning point of view is not going to get me far. My trouble is that I can often see all parts of an argument, and  consequently find it difficult to come down on one side or the other. When I hear Billy Graham I find myself thinking, 'Yes that is right, there is a God and Jesus is His son. etc', but then I listen to atheists and find myself thinking 'how can I be so silly as to believe there is a God'.

If there is no God,  then I am left with a question about Jesus. Who was he? What did he do? Did he die on a cross at the age of 33 or not? If he died  like that, did he rise again on the 3rd day or not? If he did rise on the 3rd day does that not prove he is God, so therefore there must be a God. Maybe he was just human. But if he was then he seems to have been an extraordinary one, if so many people follow what he said 2000 years after he died.

I find myself really wanting to believe in God but having these huge doubts that he really exists.  But it doesn't seem to be questions of God allowing suffering that is causing me the doubts. I am not sure what is behind it. Maybe I don't need to know.  I am trying to listen to both sides of the debate equally and then try to make my own decision. But the good thing is that I don't seem as anxious about my doubts as I was.

Who broke my chains? Did anyone break them?

I think I am becoming a little less anxious about my crisis of faith. I am beginning to accept that it is a journey that I am on and I don't have to hurry to the end just yet! I dont like things to be indetween, I like to know what things are. Part of me still really wants to know if there is a God.

I can see what people mean when they look in the Bible and see a God they don't like. Their reasoning is something I can follow. But my heart and my experience tell me that there is a God. The excperiences I have had tell me there is a God. But that is a very subjective way of working out if there is a God or not. I can't find another answer for why things happened to me. 

One thing happened some time aga now. I was at a meeting at my church. We had a visiting preacher from USA with us.  It came to a time of prayer. I stood up in line to receive prayer. A man from my congregation prayed for me and I fell over in the Spirit.  This is not something that happened to me very often, I usually fought it, and stood rooted to the spot determined that no one was going to make me go  over. The man praying for me didn't even touch me and I went over. As I lay there I started to wimper to myself. I was thinking in my head (witnesses confirm I was not saying anything outloud) 'don't leave me' over and over again. The visiting speaker apparently heard my wimper and immediately stopped what he was doing and came straight over to me. He ordered a 'spirit of abandonment' to leave me. Instantly I found myself screaming.  The scream was so intense that I had pinpricks of blood around my eyes. He then left me with church members praying for me while he finished praying for the person he had been with. Once he had finished he came back to me and talked to me for a while.


If it was not God, what was it? I know I wasn't talking out loud when I kept saying to myself 'please don't leave me', outwardly I was wimpering. Eye witnesses confirm that it was my wimper that got the speaker's attention. I am not someone who automatically falls to the floor and starts screaming. It was out of character. I am the kind of person who is suspicsious of that behaviour.   Was it just co-incidence that the speaker talked about a spirit of abandonment when that is what I was laying there fearing? Why did I scream? It wasn't a conscious thing at all. It felt out of my control.

Things like this make me think there is a God but then I think there must be a rational explanation for it. I think my anxiety about it all is becoming more curiosity. If there is a God I think  he will guide me through my doubts.