Faith and Science on Darwin's 200th Birthday

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Personal Theme Song

Do you have one? I found mine a few months ago because I actually purchased the Oh Gravity album for one of my boys. By purchasing the album, you get a link and access code for an MP3 download of an acoustic version of this song which makes the lyrics easier to understand. If you haven't heard how it goes, it's the second song that plays when you go to their site.

American Dream by Switchfoot

When success is equated with excess
The ambition for excess wrecks us
As top of the mind becomes the bottom line
When success is equated with excess

If your time ain’t been nothing for money
I start to feel really bad for you, honey
Maybe honey, put your money where your mouth’s been running
If your time ain’t been nothing but money

I want out of this machine
It doesn’t feel like freedom

This ain’t my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain't my American dream

When success is equated with excess
When we’re fighting for the Beamer, the Lexus
As the heart and soul breath in the company goals
Where success is equated with excess

‘Cause baby’s always talkin’ ‘bout a ring
And talk has always been the cheapest thing
Is it true would you do what I want you to
If I show up with the right amount of bling?

Like a puppet on a monetary string
Maybe we’ve been caught singing
Red, white, blue, and green
But that ain’t my America,
That ain’t my American dream

Even as Christians, we hold on to these worldly values. Work 60 hours a week. Get a huge house. Keep our kids away from the "bad element". Drive a hot/cool/sophisticated car. Be responsible. Excel. Be ambitious. Pay for the kids school. Save for a lavish retirement.

We get tired. We neglect our kids, our friends, our spouses. We get buried in and enslaved to debt. We lose touch with the very people Christ sought out. We neglect our relationship with God and Christ and ignore the Holy Spirit. Our kids get spoiled, addicted, and dependant on us. We die before we retire or are too sick to enjoy our time after work. We may even end our own lives when it all collapses and we don't see any other purpose for our lives.

That's not my American Dream! In fairness that was never the American Dream, but we live in a society driven by marketing and buoyed by credit.

The other Switchfoot Song that resonates in my life the last few years says, "We were meant to live for so much more". "Have we lost our selves." "We want more than the world's got to offer."

I'm tired of fighting for just me. I want to live and die for bigger things. I'm turning to God's work for me now. I'm focusing on running and growing Servants Unite to relieve suffering for disaster victims whether after Katrina or after life in a fallen world. I'm focusing on my kids and my wife. I'm focusing on my relationship with an amazing creator, His son, and His spirit. I blew 35 years chasing the excessive American Dream.

I've spent the last 4 years (this week), since finding faith in Christ in conflict trying to get to where I know I should be and long to be. I've spent it sitting in my cube in the bank crying because there was so much more important work to do and I was chained to my desk. I've tried to have it both ways, making a lot of money and doing the Kingdom work I've been given with little sleep and an amazing amount of stress. Now I'm on His path and I have never felt such freedom!

I never realized how impoverished my life was without Christ in it. I never knew, probably still don't fathom, how rich it can be walking fully in faith. I'm excited by the opportunity to find out. I'm intoxicated by that freedom.

Join me?

Why Can't He Be More Obvious?

God's always been an enigma. Even when he was leading the Israelites around in the desert for 40 years as a pillar of fire during the night and a cloud during the day they couldn’t believe in Him or trust Him. In our world today it’s much easier to miss him.

I asked my friends the preacher and the youth minister one evening why he couldn’t be obvious. If God used to do all those miracles and Jesus performed all the miracles the Bible attributes to him and His Apostles you’d think we’d see some of that now. “I’ve never had any miracles happen in my life,” I told them. “Why can’t God show me a miracle?”

They didn’t really have an answer other than, “would it matter?” Given all the miracles that have been performed in antiquity weren’t obvious enough for most people. “Haven’t I ever had something happen in my life that was miraculous,” they asked.

There’s another hang up I’ve had. People claim all kinds of stupid things are miracles. People claim miraculous healing, miraculous rescues, miraculous football plays, or hockey teams. All these things can be attributed to people, scientific advancement, or just dumb luck.

The trick is, God has always given us the choice to believe in Him or not; to trust Him or not; to seek and do His will or not. The meaning of life, the universe, and everything is a topic for another essay (and not 42 hitchhiker fans), but God has given us the choice to love Him or not.

You can’t make someone love you right. This is a universally accepted truth no matter your spiritual persuasion. Love is a choice freely made by definition…and the point of our creation, that being to Love God.

Now if God came up to you on the street and said, “Hey Dude! Here’s who I am, the proof you asked for, and what I expect from you” you’d be convinced. But, would you really have a choice in that? If God were to make himself totally undeniable to you would you have made that decision to Love him? Or, would you be trapped into an inevitable relationship?

This goes way back. Adam and Eve, whether you take their story as metaphor or literal fact, chose not to trust God. They gained the knowledge of good and evil. In other words, they realized they could choose God, or what was behind door number 2. Unfortunately the lure of door number 2 was too much temptation for them and we’re still living there today.

The other thing that is true is you have to ask. If you’ve never made a heart felt, honest request for a miracle, you’ve probably never had one, and wouldn’t likely have recognized it if you did. Evidently my questioning God’s lack of miracles in my life was an appropriate way to ask.

I really hesitate to write this here because it’s important to me that readers don’t think I’m some kook or write me off as any other religious zealot and discount anything else I have to say. If someone told me this story 4 years ago I’d have thought they were nuts myself. Never the less I’m convinced He has given me a simple little gift and I feel obligated to share it with people. Take it for what you will.

I told my friends that night that the only time I’d had anything in my life that could have been called a miracle was after my first son was born. My saintly wife had a really hard time. She was really sick, had a horrible migraine and couldn’t get out of bed. After three days in the hospital we had to leave anyway as that was all the insurance would pay for. I took my new family home, got her to bed, and put the baby wrapped up in his crib. Within an hour I was on the phone with 911 getting an ambulance to take her back into the hospital.

She couldn’t catch her breath. We got her to a different hospital and some oxygen. After a few hours X-rays showed a lot of fluid in her lungs. She ended up in ICU for 5 days. The night after she went back to the hospital, her blood oxygen level was so low she was on the edge of death, though I didn’t know it at the time. For unexplained reasons, though, she came back. Out of the hundred some doctors we got bills from none of them could determine what was wrong and none of them determined what turned her around.

I told the guys this. It was a story we hadn’t shared with them before. “But how can I say that God saved her,” I said. “Something the doctors did must have made a difference or whatever was wrong with her began to heal or something.” There were not loads of ways to explain that away, but there were enough.

That story always shakes me up when I think about it, even 11 years later when I was telling my friends. I lay in bed that night upset and not going to sleep. She asked what was wrong and I told her. I was laying on my right side and she wrapped herself around from behind me with her chin on the back of my head. She was really quiet and just held onto me.

I felt something like a spark from the spot on the back of my head where her chin was that fanned out behind my left eye. Weird sensation. Not comfortable, but I was curious enough to lie still. My legs started going numb like they were falling asleep. I had my arms crossed up funny and thought if I fall asleep that way they were really going to hurt in the morning.

Sure enough, the next thing I knew I was waking up in the morning, my arms were cramped and kinked, and hadn’t moved all night. I rolled over at the same time she rolled over from the other side of the bed. “What did you do last night,” I asked her. “You really want to know?” I had a pretty good idea, but, “Yea.” “I prayed to God that I knew he couldn’t take your troubles from you unless you offered them, but I asked him to help you fall asleep.”

How do you answer that? No excuses. No way to discount that or explain it away. Kinda had to accept that for the small miracle it was: my own personal answer from God.

I told my friends the next week when we met up, this time the Campus minister and the Youth Minister. I started with, “your gonna think I’m nuts.” And I finished with, “so you think I’m nuts?” They both had these big stupid grins. Jay, the campus minister, said, “I don’t think you’re such a skeptic anymore!”

It was true. Overcoming my intellectual problems with faith were really getting me there, but this gift he gave me. This answered prayer by my saintly wife. This response to my request for a miracle really pushed me over the edge.

It never hurts to ask. Give it a try.

How Can I Believe the Bible?

My Christian-all-her-life wife and I used to have this discussion about believing. Understand, this was when I didn't. "The bible says this, the bible says that, yadda yadda yadda" she told me. "How do you know Jesus was who He said he was?" "Because the bible says he was", she'd reply. "Yea, but how do you know that's accurate?" "Well, at some level you just have to have faith."

People have dropped stuff like that on me all my life. "You just have to believe." "Isn't it easier to believe than not?" "Isn't it safer to go with it than keep doubting?"

The answer is, no. I've gotta understand. I have to have proof. What kind of idiot just believes something without being able to confirm it? “But your soul is at stake.” “I don’t think so.”

My poor saintly wife (she really is). I told her, “you don’t believe in Jesus, you believe in that ancient book.” Two thousand years ago that stuff was written down about Jesus…in Greek. I’ve been to Cyprus for work. Being surrounded by Greek signs, Greek speech, Greek culture is like being on Mars for an American. The phrase “It’s all Greek to me” didn’t come about for no reason.

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew which is even more alien.

I believed the Bible to be the result of stories handed down from generation to generation through tribal story tellers for hundreds and thousands of years. Those legends get “enhanced” and bloated with supplemental information. Ever do the rumor game with a line of people and compare the original secret to the end product?

Eventually, in my presumptions, all this was written down in Hebrew and Greek once such languages existed. From there translated to Latin which allowed the church to dictate the important parts to the peasants through the middle ages. Then translated to middle English (King James can seem Greek) and then into NIV or NLT or whatever. Lots can get lost in the translation, changed, enhanced.

All this does not lead to a confidence in the information within that a person can base their life credo on.

Fortunately I was wrong. There are serious flaws in that logic and assumptions I’ve determined. This is yet another case of me being too sure of my own intellect and unwilling to trust those authors or the head Author.

Here’s where many people get this wrong, including some Christians. Historians place most of the writings of the books of the New Testament as being created between 60 and 90 AD. That seems like a long time, but not hundreds of years like many of the Gnostic writings which “build” on the older texts. The early Christians did pass down the word of what Jesus did before the books and letters were written. That timeframe, however, allowed many to live across that span and dispute them if necessary. The apostle John survived that long to personally keep the story straight.

The books of the New Testament were written by people who were with Jesus and gave first hand accounts, or those who knew the original apostles from shortly after His death and resurrection. In the telling of those stories, Christians had no motivation to lie about Jesus doing Miracles or acting in such unexpected ways. They were killed for those beliefs.

In fact Christianity only survived because it spread faster than it could be killed off. The word, now documented in the bible was passed surreptitiously between the believers who were persecuted by the occupying Romans as well as the Pharisaical Jewish order of the society of the time.

Ironically one of the most prolific writers in the New Testament was one of the most ardent persecutors of the faith. Saul of Tarsus, a trained Pharisee who presided at the stoning death of the apostle Steven became the leader of the gentile (non Jewish) church until his death at the hands of the Romans. Paul, the name he took on after his personal experience with the risen Lord, went from militant anti-Christian to the hit lists of many other anti-Christians in the course of a few weeks at his conversion. He became so outspoken about the truth of Christ that he won the trust of the Jewish Christians who then had to protect him from his own Jewish order.

I also got over the translation problem I’d always cited. It seems strange to me now that the New Testament wasn’t written in Aramaic or some other now dead language. Even the Latin has faded but Greek is still an active language in the world. The translations we read in English or Spanish today are direct translations from a language that is still spoken, written, and read. Greeks, who know English, would certainly point out any faults in translation. If it were not written in Greek, it would be harder to trust.

You know I’d never read the Bible. Pretty short sighted to judge something without investigating it, huh? It amazes me, but even most Christians haven't read it through. Where there is a question about wording or meaning, most Bibles point it out and highlight the possible different meanings that could have been intended in the original Greek. At the end of Mark where some versions had a couple extra controversial paragraphs at the end, the debate is usually highlighted to allow the reader to make their own decision.

And what about all these different translations? I didn’t realize how many there were actually. There are dozens of modern translations compiled in the last century. What is really amazing about the time I’m writing this is that we are truly in the information age. All these different versions are accessible in book form for comparison. Better yet, all the most popular are available at biblegateway.com. You can look up a passage in the NIV (New International Version) which seems most popular with many current Christians. You can then look up the same text in the King James version, the New Living Translation, or a Spanish or Bulgarian version if you choose.

There’s a Young’s Literal Translation which is a very direct translation from Greek words to English, but it’s pretty hard to read and get meaning from. You can also back check any verse at Greekbible.com. Click on each word in Greek and it will pop up the direct English translation for that word. Really kewl!

As a non-reader of the bible I had a much different impression of the content. There’s a lot of “real” there. Stuff they don’t teach you in Sunday school. Stuff that’s not easy to explain or even contradicts doctrine. My first year as a Christian I read the whole thing cover to cover. There are a few inconsistencies, but it seems that actually adds credibility. It’s not written by humans after all, but as it says, from the Holy Spirit working through man. Passages that, when read one day, are hard to understand can be very relevant on another, and may provide different meaning on yet another occasion.

In short, reading is believing. Man doesn’t write a message so comprehensive and versatile. It has to be God’s Word.

God’s Word also can’t be put in a box. Many of the differences in the branches of Christianity, the division of the Body of Christ, come about through differences in interpretation. Many try to interpret the Bible literally so as to get the “right meaning”. People add up the ages of the genealogy in the Old Testament and assert that it’s only been 6,000 years since the earth was created. Similar theologians once prosecuted Galileo for heresy because his findings contradicted the “biblical truth” that all heavenly bodies revolved around the earth. Because of the differences in understanding combined with their pride, they declare they are right (and heaven bound) and others are wrong (and doomed).

What I find amazing are people who read between the lines literally and conclude that anything not specifically mentioned in the New Testament must be sinful…

In order to find a Bible you can believe, you have to read it critically for yourself rather than listening to the rhetoric about it or what someone else gets out of it. In the 1500s, a person could be burned at the stake for translating the Latin Bible into English or any other language that could be read by commoners. That made it easier for the church to control the masses. Now, you have so many easily readable translations and paraphrases that put the Message into modern relevant language that you have no excuse for not reading and deciding for yourself.

My favorite is the New Living Translation which is very close to the NIV used in most evangelical churches, but is easier to read and more meaningful to me. Some verses though, can’t sound as majestic if not in the King James Version.

You know what else is awsome about the experience between my wife and I through my conversion is that she found more solid evidence for believing the words of the Bible than what she had before.

So there ya go. I pray this entry has at least given you enough faith in the book to get a copy and crack it open. I welcome your comments back on what you’ve found.

A Great Bad Example

The apostle I identify most with is Peter. The dude's always saying the wrong thing. He's right on cue with, "oh no Jesus, they'll never kill you. We're going to kick some tail". And for that the response he gets is "Get behind me Satan!"

Shortly after I accepted Christ a friend of mine who I know was desperately looking for faith told me he didn't think he could be good enough. I expect there's a lot of them out there. People who don't feel they can live up to the standard of being a Christian. Come to think of it, my son's coach just told me those exact words last week.

My friend said, "you don't know about my past. You don't know what I've done. I can't give up drinking. With these guys I work with I can't imagine I could quit cussing..." He thought he had to make himself good enough for Christ before he could be accepted as a child of God. I think a lot of other people think they are good enough which can bring other problems.

It's tough being the bad example, but there's ample biblical precedence. Peter recognized Jesus for who he was upon their first meeting and knew he wasn't worthy. Even at his best, Peter, stepping out of the boat and walking across the water to Jesus lost faith and sank. He brought the sword to Gethsemane itching for a fight with those troublesome Romans and Pharisees coming for Christ. Jesus had to heal the servants ear after Peter cut it off.

Instead of going down in a blaze of glory, he skulks in the shadows while Jesus is tortured and convicted. How unworthy must Peter have felt standing beneath the cross with his hope hanging, dying in front of him. He tried to go back to his life fishing after he thought Christ was gone, but Jesus came back for him.

Three times, Peter had denied he knew Jesus while awaiting his fate. Jesus predicted the event. Three times the resurrected Lord asked Peter if he loved Him and in response to each affirmative answer, he gave him his commission.

My friend has his too. Like many Christians, he's now a good "bad example". So am I. We weren't good enough, but found that didn't matter. In fact I've come to the conclusion that the only reason anyone thinks they are good enough is because they are mistaken.

You see when a person walks through the church doors on a Sunday morning or professes their Christianity, they are admitting they are not good enough. Christ came to save the lost. None are worthy. If we could be good enough, we could not claim to be followers of Christ...Christians.

God's whole point in sending Christ was to bring us back to Him. He gave the law to show us we could not comply due to sin. He gave us Christ's grace as our way of being holy with Him, conquering sin.

Christians aren't good enough whether they think so or not. We're all just a bunch of bad examples. My friend finally let himself believe that and found acceptance he thought he didn't deserve. You can't be good enough either without Him. But with him, we are eternal and glorious.

My friend was right. He couldn't be good enough. And that's the whole point. That wasn't keeping him from Christ, that's the very reason we need Him.

I Hate Church

Many people don't find their faith in church. The first connotation of the word for most people is of an uncomfortable fancy place where they have to be good. Church actually is defined biblically as the body of Christ; a commune like group of followers; a family, but one with a mission.

My first memory of church is this beautifully old and plain Presbyterian church in Spring Hills, Ohio. My mom's family was one of the founders in the 1800s. It's a clapboard clad building with a tall steeple and tall stained glass windows. It sits on a hill surrounded by an old graveyard and walnut trees that drop their fruit around the parking lot at the end of summer. The pews and steps were always equally worn and hard.

I visited the old church and added this picture after writing this entry and have to confess all this is actually a fond memory.

When you're little, churches are torture. You have to sit on that hard pew and be quiet and still and not make noises. You have to stand when everyone stands to sing at the first organ notes and sit through day long sermons. Occasionally it's communion Sunday and that makes it even longer. To keep me occupied, my dad used to give me gum to chew or do the trick where you lace your fingers inside a double fist (here's the church), put up your first fingers in a point (here's the steeple), and then roll your wrists around so the enclosed fingers are showing (here's all the people). We'd race to see who could twiddle their thumbs faster, but that led to giggles and shushes.

After that we'd move to Sunday school class, or sometimes it was before church. Another place to be still, listen to nice stories about nice biblical characters with cute paper lions and feltboard reenactments. I always pictured the Lion of Judah as a pussycat and the battle of Jericho as a marching band in a parade I'd seen once. There was always some moral to the story about how God didn't want us to lie, or hit people, or be mean to our sister, or we should turn the other cheek...What was that good for?

Bible school was more of the same, but cooler since there was always Koolaid and cookies. We always had some flower we'd potted, or seeds we'd planted or crown we'd colored to take home. How nice.

As a teenager that turns to how boring. That saccharine sweet Christianity is boring. Where's the fun in that and besides, who can live up to those expectations. Who can be good enough to be a Christian.

Things happen. We moved to a Methodist church when I was eightish. We had Christmas programs where we sang Christmas songs and Santa Clause came and gave us each an orange and a candy cane. I went to catechism class when I was 12 and confirmed, but I don't think I really knew what that meant. I ended up dating one of the girls who was in that class later in high school. I don't think she did either.

It's too easy to believe that "Church" is what it's all about. By that I mean, church the building or event that happens every Sunday morning. The place with stained glass, hard wooden pews, poor singers, and droning ministers. Nobody had ever taught me anything different and I believe now that many of them still don't know there is anything more to it in their life.

That's sad.

With that premise and the lack of logic and meaning in church it's easy to not get it. It's easy to see TV preachers with private jets and think it's all a big scam. Christians seem weak...people who need this crutch to get through life. Not what the world tells us we should be: independent, self sufficient, individualistic. Something as amazing as what God is purported to be wouldn't live there. Why would I expect to find him there? More importantly, why would he need my weekly financial contribution?

We Sunday school kids think these things through and fall away giving up on God's existence. He has only ever been fairy tales and myth to us; never a person much less one you could talk to or expect an answer from. God in church just doesn't seem real so when we see the amazing things humans have learned in the pursuit of scientific discovery the last half millennium doubts solidify into skepticism.

I went full atheist for a while myself. Met my wife. Got married. Made the mistake in between once of referring to Jesus freaks not knowing she took her faith so seriously. She was pretty offended.

The wedding was in her church of course. There were more rules than in most. This one believed instruments in church were sinful so all songs were acapella. Once a year or so the "senior" minister would get up and give a lecture on why, but it never made sense to me.

There are so many different churches all with their own strange beliefs which they attribute to the bible. I never figured out which one was right and for the most part there wasn't much substantive difference in the experience at one relative to another. I didn't go except for the rare inclination or when she really wanted me to for a special reason.

I did always believe my kids should go to church. Figured the whole faith thing was good to have if you needed it. Just because I didn't require the crutch didn't mean my kids may not some day. I believed you have to get it when you are a kid because most of the people I know who go to church always have.

One morning when I did actually go with them, my wife was teaching a Sunday school class of 1st graders so I went to one of the adult classes. They guy teaching that day dropped his lesson and shifted gears entirely around to talk about how before he believed, his wife used to take the kids to church every Sunday without him. He started going out of guilt that she was saddled with the kids by herself (hint hint). Eventually after he listened to enough sermons he decided he was going to hell if he didn't change his ways. That fear of spending eternity tormented by Satan converted him. How 'bout that. A special lesson designed just for me. I didn't go back for a while.

I did meet so many very nice people at these churches though. Really smart people. Really "real" people. And they believed. They accepted me even though I didn't. Let me help them move someone who needed help. Let me hang out with their kids in the youth group and drive vanloads of them on excursions to Cedar Point. And some of those kids believed. The skeptic in me thought, "yea, for now, but they'll probably come around eventually, poor kids", but you know several of them had this solid, genuine, well thought out faith.

What was really different is they acted on it. They led prayer groups at their school or were involved with Athletes in Action. At high school graduation time several seniors give sermons.

Real Christians.

As it turns out, church isn't the place or the event. I'd gone too church when I joined Christians who were helping a single mom move to a new house. I've been in church with 16 other sweaty, disgustingly dirty, people in a flooded moldy house in New Orleans ripping out rotten drywall. The best quote I've gotten maintaining the blogs for that work came from a high school girl named Angie a few weeks after the hurricane came through.

"I don'’t want to go back to church and dress up and everything be nice and pretty. What we'’ve been doing here is real church, it'’s getting dirty and helping people."

Though I still don't really like it, I can tolerate church much better now because the songs have meaning to me and I understand the premise of the lesson. I firmly believe in "the body of Christ" and our need to commune with our brothers and sisters in faith. But I also believe that Christian is a verb and I'm happier serving others in "church", or hanging with a youth group on the top of a mountain in the smokies.

If you've never been to that kind of church, find one. You'll find God lives there. And, he's much harder to miss.

I don't speak for all Christians...

...I think that's a just one of the problems in our world is that too many people say they do. Pat Robertson, Benny Hen, The Christian Right, The Moral Majority, Homer's neighbor Ned Flanders... Stereotypical caricatures. They are the "they" other people talk about accusingly referring to Christians. Christians tend to be our own worst enemy. People always disappoint. God never does.

You doubt that? Or do you just find it trite. I did not so long ago myself. Three years ago at the age of 35 I finally found faith in a being greater than myself. Rather, I should say God came to get me. I did go looking seriously for the first time, but spiritual matters are things I've always mulled over. For various reasons I really can't comprehend, He decided it was my time to claim my sonship in His family.

What he did for me was different than some people. I had intellectual road blocks like, "Christians say I should believe the earth is 6,000 years old when I know we have so much observational scientific evidence that it is a much more ancient place." When I asked how I could believe, asked Him, He showed me by clearing away the clutter that religion has put up as a stumbling block to faith.

There's a huge difference between faith and religion. Many Christians don't get that. Because of this deficiency, they can seem judgmental, accusing, closed minded, and often just plain dumb to the outside world. Their own worst enemy. I know Christians who won't question any portion of the dogma they subscribe to for fear of losing their faith. I worry they don't have the faith talked about in Romans or even the faith of a mustard seed to use Jesus' metaphor.

I also know Christians of all stripes who do. Who have questioned and strengthened their faith repeatedly. God put a couple of these guys in my life who befriended me, were interested in my thoughts on philosophy and theology, and were open to His guidance when I made a serious attempt to find faith.

I hate to call such people "real Christians" because I can't condemn those who seem to have what seems to me a superficial "religion" that they practice. The validity of either approach isn't my judgment call. I can't draw lines around the "faith" referenced by Paul in Romans 3 in verses 27 and 28

Can we boast, then, that we have done anything to be accepted by God? No, because our acquittal is not based on our good deeds. It is based on our faith. So we are made right with God through faith and not by obeying the law.

I'm not qualified. Not my job.

I'm writing this for two audiences. Those who are religious and those who don't believe, but are interested. If you aren't even interested, you won't be convinced and it's probably not your time. When God is calling you you'll be interested. I suspect, however, that if you weren't interested you wouldn't have gotten to this paragraph.

To those who are religious (yes I used that word on purpose) I hope to clue you in on some of the barriers to faith you can put up. I know you all mean well and I'm sure those people and groups I referenced earlier do too. I don't want to alienate you. The need I'm trying to meet here is to make finding a Christian faith easier for a certain type of seeker who has to have it all explained. Who can't just believe and follow a set of rules. I hope to give you a better understanding of us skeptics and how to relate. I also believe in my heart that you may find a deeper more meaningful faith if you question the peripheral tenents of religion and strip away all that is ancilary to your relationship with our Lord.

I do thank God for those real people who believe in Christ who He has put in my life. I now strive to be one of them to others which is a nice segway into why I'm writing this blog.

When I first believed, I wanted to write a book about overcoming all the things that had kept me from it. One of those real people who believe in Christ, my friend the youth minister, and I even outlined the chapters. Now, three years later it is still unwritten.

A month into my faith, I got up in front of the church on a Sunday morning and gave a sermon on these things and how God had gotten me through my unbelief. You don't realize how short a sermon is when you are on the receiving end. There is no way to put all the important detail into a 45 minute talk even if you run over by half an hour ;-) I tried though.

Blogging is relatively new for me, but I've been keeping a couple up for disaster relief organizations I have been working with and building over the last 5 months. Hurricane Katrina relief has been an amazing place to see God at work if you are looking. He's pretty obvious in critical situations. It occurred to me today that this is a good format to at least get my thoughts down and work on organizing them.

So here we go. This morning there were 6 or so topics I had in mind. We'll see if I can't get them out of my head frequently enough to keep readers of this blog interested.

A final note, I am counting on your comments. Correct me where I'm wrong in grammar or in understanding. I welcome your questions, your doubts, and your support.

Thanks for reading!

John McGuire
Westerville, Ohio
February 16, 2006