Tag god

Thoughts on Prayer

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What is prayer? A wish, a hope, purposeful thoughts, or a conversation? Prayer as a conversation means there is another engaged in the dialogue. Who is the other you converse with? Is it an idea, a standard, a disconnected deity, a person in power, or possibly a true God who responds and engages in the conversation with you? Faith and religion can be as simple as the Bible describes or as complicated as humans can make it, and we often complicate things extraordinarily.

Consider an ant holding a conversation with a blue whale as a wild example. The whale is beyond any ant’s imagination in size and power. It lives in an environment beyond anything an ant can experience. An ant entering a whale’s environment, though natural to the whale, is death to the ant. Neither can the whale live in the small, earth-bound environment of the ant. There is no way the two can coexist in the natural. These two creatures are incompatible due to their different natures. We are both whale and ant in this strange example.

That relates to humans and God only to a point. There is a third element that is within humans that can directly connect to God’s nature, and that is spirit. Spirit is that part of us that is made of the divine nature in that it is a forever piece of us that is bonded to flesh and blood. That means there is a piece of God’s environment tied to this physical nature. We are, to keep with the example, part whale and part ant. It is no wonder that the differences do not leap into harmony with each other within us.

Jesus is the perfect manifestation of God in both natures to connect with humanity, body and soul/spirit. Jesus is the perfect wedding between spirit and physical humanity. He is able to communicate through all barriers and confusions to create understanding for productive conversation. He is spirit made physical for the work of relationship. His life, death, and resurrection is convincing proof that God wants the conversation/ relationship. He has truly gone the “extra mile” by coming to us as only He can. Prayer is a living conversation with God who starts the conversation, carries the conversation, and responds to the conversation. Prayer is not words on the wind, but a dialogue, a two way conversation.

Dad’s Complaint

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I’ve talked to many fathers who have a similar complaint about how children hear. Dad would tell us some truth that we children needed to hear and master. A neighbor would mention this truth in passing, after father had told us the same many times over, and we would come home with that truth as a sudden revelation. Dad would complain, “I’ve been telling you that for months,” and he had.

Recently, like many times before, I went to church and had the same experience. Ideas floating through my mind would be coalesced into clear images during the songs and/or sermon, and it was like I heard it for the first time. I can imagine the Lord, like my dad, saying, “I’ve been saying that to you for a long time,” and He has. Sometimes it is easier to hear it from someone else than to trust that my thoughts are being encouraged from heaven.

I have talked to many people, faith and non faith, whose ideas have been encouraged from heaven. Maybe it is easier for me to see/hear it than it is for them because the ideas form in their minds. They are aware of the thought, but not the source. I had an atheist explain his beliefs to me one day. He was all about life being random, but his love was order and organization. He perfectly described intelligent design of creation while saying it was all formed by random. He was saying one thing, but we were hearing different things. Order and random are absolute opposites, but he didn’t hear it in what he was saying. I think that he loved the qualities of God but just didn’t want anyone to interfere with the way he structured and lived his life.

Artists see beauty and want to have it, be it, create it. They accept that discipline is a requirement of the process. Christians perceive that God has invited them into His beauty and accept that discipline is a necessary part of the process. The beauty of God’s life is way beyond us requiring us to have help and leave the bad parts of ourselves behind. Non believers see what we believe to be wonderful as God the enforcer shoving His will and priorities down their throats. What Christians see as rescue, non believers see as having their boat torpedoed.

I find this confusing because everyone seems to love the values of God like love, joy, peace, justice, honor, truth, and the like. We all seem to be in agreement on one level, but not in agreement as to the source or the process for gaining those true values. The purest qualities of all those values only come from God’s warehouse. All other sources are like bathtub gin, pretty low grade and chancy, the difference between street drugs and medicine from the pharmacy.