The problem of pain and evil in determining if there is a God is more of a problem for atheists than it is for a Christian to answer. You can look at the world and see all the hurt and therefore argue if God is good, but you cannot argue his existence by that standard. Because if you do use a sense of justice or good and evil or morality, then you must ask where it came from? If it is man made then it is illogical to hold God to that standard. If it is an absolute, then we must ask by what means is it present in our consciousness. To someone who doesn't want to believe, this feels circular. But in order to exclude the presence of God, you must include that good and evil do not really exist, they are mere construction of evolution and culture. And if you can look at the world and say that there is no good and there is no evil, then you have made a greater leap than you would have to make to believe that there is a God of absolutes. From there the Christian worldview makes the most sense of why things are the way they are and what the resolution to our ache for justice and goodness is.
|
Saturday, November 8, 2014
Good, Evil, and God.
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
He Giveth More Grace...
|
|
Monday, November 3, 2014
The Bestowing.
My God, grant me:
A heart like David’s, showing,
A mind like Solomon‘s, knowing,
A faith like Abraham’s, growing,
And a face like Moses‘, glowing.
With the ease of thy yoke, I delight in my work,
Sweet Jesus reaping what I am sowing.
Generational.
By the light of Heaven!
How can we crave what we cannot see?
Without an authentic Absolute,
Why is it that we ache for authenticity?
Each generation is a reaction to the one that previously came to be.
I can't remember if I go boom or X, Y, Z.
I do remember that I depended on dependency.
I felt good in fear.
I felt good with walls too big to scale
In a corrupt system too big to fail.
I felt good with consumables marketed and packaged well.
Bad things that tasted convenient,
Convenience tasted good as hell.
The sleek, the clever, the ease,
Were confirmation that I could do what I please.
There was comfort in the layers:
The distance between me and the source.
The bureaucracy insulated from fault,
The retailer protected from remorse.
It was all (intentionally) too much to take on.
Hope might have made me act, but I felt too far gone.
I felt like a boy in a grown up plastic suit:
Fully loaded, yet not equipped,
Fully endowed, yet destitute.
I put layers between the creator and me
And the world aided.
Feeling felt too scary to feel,
And I wanted the feel faded.
So my generations time is fading gone.
Yes, please let's move on.
Now to the new perennial,
To the Z and to the Millennial.
What can a generation do when there is no one left to trust?
They take things into their own hands,
Though crumbling, they believe in rust.
No preservatives, no packaging, just unmarketable dirt,
Fair trade belt and hand made shirt.
The fuzzy crackle of the vinyl doesn't feel like a loss of fidelity.
Sweet analog truth, absent of digital reconstitution,
Gladly suffer lack of clarity to avoid the prostitution.
His pickles come from his cucumbers grown in his soil.
Vintage vinegar, rooftop dill,
His strained oil, his free range boil.
His pie cools on his window sill.
He knows the whiskey because he reaps the rye,
Imported Indian ink paints his own sky.
When I was a boy and had a bike, 10 speeds was the best you could do.
Now one fixed gear is the standard,
The oldest ideas made shiny and new.
And now why isn't it better,
Better to be more?
Because more breeds layers,
And layers numb the core.
Get to it, remove the layers.
Let transparency awaken.
Lift up the grungy
Redeem the forsaken.
Sincerity through Irony, in it's poetic, abstract best,
Is an attempt to get the over-indulged completely undressed.
Peel all the layers back,
Get to the root.
Will you find a god of your own construction?
One you built to suit?
Almost there now, one layer more to get to the real.
One big wound left to open, to get to the heal.
Our souls ache for the most basic deal,
We want it to be in our own hands,
Preferring decay to the hermetic seal.
But our efforts only take us so far,
You can't quite keep from depending on dependency
And sooner or later everyone lets you down.
Nobility gives way to the petty,
Compulsion pushes out the steady.
Everyone is soon to be distrusted.
"Are the farmer's hands dirt encrusted?
Does my coffee maker roast his own?
Are my strawberries really organically grown?
Is my wheat ground by stone?
Do my chickens have a lovely home?
Is my bag conscientiously sown?
Can I even trust the flesh of my bone?
Am I authentic?
Am I to be trusted with my beliefs?
Shall I bash myself onto the sharpness of religious coral reefs?"
Belief, Religion, so many layers to comply,
Good Lord, they obscure what they labor to magnify:
A great scaffolding making truth hard to see,
Beyond the priests, pastors, rules and liturgy.
I hunger to be sustained.
And was malnourished by what I had kneaded.
On my own, it's never enough
"More!" my soul pleaded.
"What will it take, how can I atone?"
"You tell me I can't live by bread alone!"
Yes I need something bolder, something richer,
Something that I can't quite express,
Has it always been there in this Pilgrim's Progress?
How can surrender be the answer?
How can sacrifice be true?
They are the only things that remain
Irreducible whether by passion or by fool.
Jesus.
Jesus Remains.
He was there when the world was new,
The time that our hearts remember and crave.
He was there to show us Love in sacrifice,
Victory in the grave.
He will be there again, when all Hope seems gone
And we finally cry out to a savior that has been there all along.
How can we crave what we cannot see?
Without an authentic Absolute,
Why is it that we ache for authenticity?
Each generation is a reaction to the one that previously came to be.
I can't remember if I go boom or X, Y, Z.
I do remember that I depended on dependency.
I felt good in fear.
I felt good with walls too big to scale
In a corrupt system too big to fail.
I felt good with consumables marketed and packaged well.
Bad things that tasted convenient,
Convenience tasted good as hell.
The sleek, the clever, the ease,
Were confirmation that I could do what I please.
There was comfort in the layers:
The distance between me and the source.
The bureaucracy insulated from fault,
The retailer protected from remorse.
It was all (intentionally) too much to take on.
Hope might have made me act, but I felt too far gone.
I felt like a boy in a grown up plastic suit:
Fully loaded, yet not equipped,
Fully endowed, yet destitute.
I put layers between the creator and me
And the world aided.
Feeling felt too scary to feel,
And I wanted the feel faded.
So my generations time is fading gone.
Yes, please let's move on.
Now to the new perennial,
To the Z and to the Millennial.
What can a generation do when there is no one left to trust?
They take things into their own hands,
Though crumbling, they believe in rust.
No preservatives, no packaging, just unmarketable dirt,
Fair trade belt and hand made shirt.
The fuzzy crackle of the vinyl doesn't feel like a loss of fidelity.
Sweet analog truth, absent of digital reconstitution,
Gladly suffer lack of clarity to avoid the prostitution.
His pickles come from his cucumbers grown in his soil.
Vintage vinegar, rooftop dill,
His strained oil, his free range boil.
His pie cools on his window sill.
He knows the whiskey because he reaps the rye,
Imported Indian ink paints his own sky.
When I was a boy and had a bike, 10 speeds was the best you could do.
Now one fixed gear is the standard,
The oldest ideas made shiny and new.
And now why isn't it better,
Better to be more?
Because more breeds layers,
And layers numb the core.
Get to it, remove the layers.
Let transparency awaken.
Lift up the grungy
Redeem the forsaken.
Sincerity through Irony, in it's poetic, abstract best,
Is an attempt to get the over-indulged completely undressed.
Peel all the layers back,
Get to the root.
Will you find a god of your own construction?
One you built to suit?
Almost there now, one layer more to get to the real.
One big wound left to open, to get to the heal.
Our souls ache for the most basic deal,
We want it to be in our own hands,
Preferring decay to the hermetic seal.
But our efforts only take us so far,
You can't quite keep from depending on dependency
And sooner or later everyone lets you down.
Nobility gives way to the petty,
Compulsion pushes out the steady.
Everyone is soon to be distrusted.
"Are the farmer's hands dirt encrusted?
Does my coffee maker roast his own?
Are my strawberries really organically grown?
Is my wheat ground by stone?
Do my chickens have a lovely home?
Is my bag conscientiously sown?
Can I even trust the flesh of my bone?
Am I authentic?
Am I to be trusted with my beliefs?
Shall I bash myself onto the sharpness of religious coral reefs?"
Belief, Religion, so many layers to comply,
Good Lord, they obscure what they labor to magnify:
A great scaffolding making truth hard to see,
Beyond the priests, pastors, rules and liturgy.
I hunger to be sustained.
And was malnourished by what I had kneaded.
On my own, it's never enough
"More!" my soul pleaded.
"What will it take, how can I atone?"
"You tell me I can't live by bread alone!"
Yes I need something bolder, something richer,
Something that I can't quite express,
Has it always been there in this Pilgrim's Progress?
How can surrender be the answer?
How can sacrifice be true?
They are the only things that remain
Irreducible whether by passion or by fool.
Jesus.
Jesus Remains.
He was there when the world was new,
The time that our hearts remember and crave.
He was there to show us Love in sacrifice,
Victory in the grave.
He will be there again, when all Hope seems gone
And we finally cry out to a savior that has been there all along.
Marriage 2.
There is a tightrope to be walked of protecting your spouse from the world, while still exposing the dangers of your own collective hearts. In the Power of Christ we can overcome our desire to keep each other comfortable and instead plunge in to the dark places in order to shed light. We willingly dig up the mess knowing we can't clean it up ourselves. This is dependency, this is a marriage surrendered to Jesus. Broken and beautiful, his power made perfect in our weakness. It may not sound appealing, but it is a glorious thing to be a part of, to be witness to watching Christ pull the person you cherish and love up and to himself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)