Just kidding. Awesome post, Cindy. Thanks for sharing. I once heard a teacher (Malcolm Smith, of course ) say that prayer is like a man rowing a boat, and he thinks by pulling on these paddle-things he is pulling the shore toward him. But really he is the one who is being moved. So even if we start off with a “wrong” prayer, or something that isn’t God’s will, as we pray and dialogue with Him, we are changed, our desires are changed, and our prayer changes accordingly. Which is why we are to continue to pray until we see results. As we pray, He works, both in us and in the situation we are praying about.

Rachel

Rachel

Don’t worry — I didn’t expect you to believe that those things were miracles. As you say, you weren’t there. My reason for sharing them was to explain that I do have more to base my faith on than just “I’ve always believed that.” There are empirical arguments as well, but they take longer to lay out and they are other people’s evidence, however good they may be. I don’t discount them or fail to value them; I just feel more comfortable telling my own stories.

A detail I failed to mention; I was in CCU because I was working as an RN there. The man in question had been with us for several days and when challenged, never took a single breath on his own. Then the next morning (I always worked midnights), he starts breathing when they turned down the vent. I was impressed, but as you say, it could have been a coincidence. I haven’t worked as a nurse for 20 years — I took an LOA for maternity and just never could bring myself to go back. You know how those babies are — too cute, too sweet, too hard to leave. And I was taking care of my grandfather as well, so there was a lot to do.

God does things for me that I suppose you could attribute to my “asking my subconscious” for help. But then He also does things my subconscious isn’t able to do (unless you attribute to me more than the usual human capabilities!) And you could say they’re all coincidences; they could be. All of them. It used to be that I would get upset because God didn’t seem to answer my prayers, but really, I didn’t know Him. He never promises to answer prayer that isn’t according to His will. Some sickness (and some death) is according to His will. Unless you can hear from Him, you’ll spend a lot of time disappointed and angry.

Now to me, the idea that God would create beings with whom to share His love makes perfect sense. In Himself, the Three in One, He is complete. But He has love enough — infinite love — for an infinite number. The one who loves always seeks out a beloved. The first thing most couples do is produce a new life — a new person to love. This is precisely the sort of arrangement you’d expect from a God who loves.

For us as humans, this doesn’t always end well, but in most families, children are cherished by at least someone. We find it horrifying when children are mistreated. This is because we, in our hearts, know what’s right. And it’s not just evolutionary instinct, or we’d have to agree with Nietzsche’s philosophy on the “magnificent blonde brute” rightly terrorizing nearby villages, murdering the weak, raping the women and taking home plunder.

I appreciate your desire for a straightforward word from God in the Bible. It isn’t that simple, though. God wants people following His Son, not a rule book. Yes, the Bible is helpful in that it paints a picture of who God is and what He wants, but of course, not everyone can have a Bible; not everyone could read it if they had one. The early church didn’t have the Bible. The NT hadn’t been written, and you could hardly ask the Gideons for a free pocket Torah. They had to get by on a letter or two and what bits of the OT they had memorized and/or copied out. It was Jesus they followed. And if you’re following Him truly, you’ll act from His love, and you’ll do well with or without a copy of the Bible.

Your point about raising our children is a good one. God also wants mature and competent children who can help others (the younger ones? those who have yet to believe?) Our practice of shooing our kids out of the house as soon as they begin to be useful isn’t a very old model. It’s what we do today, but historically, families stayed a lot closer together (as a general rule) and helped one another throughout their generations. In many places, they still do.

The “going to heaven” thing is a bit misrepresented. According to the Bible, we will be spending the next age (at least) on the re-created earth. (Revelation 21-22) Some of us will spend at least part of that time in the Lake of Fire, which is figurative language for a period of purification. Beyond that, it isn’t spelled out what we’ll be doing. If you subscribe to the current view of eternity, we’ll just be sort of suspended in this sort of, I don’t know, non-time kind of thing. The Bible doesn’t contain a concept of eternity the way we look at it today, or even the way people like Plato viewed it. Reading scripture, I see no reason to think that an orderly progression of events will cease to be. But I’m getting off the topic . . . heaven.

Jews of Jesus’ day (and today) avoided pronouncing the name of God. I’m sure you’ve seen people type G-d in their web postings/e-mails. So when they wanted to talk about God, they would say things like “the kingdom of heaven,” or “heaven” or “the power,” and etc. So when you see “kingdom of heaven” or “heaven,” particularly in Matthew’s gospel (which was written to the Jews), it isn’t talking about our eternal destination. It’s talking about God’s sovereignty in a person’s life or simply about God. But all this is aside from your point. Yes, God wants His kids with Him forever. If our kids were all we desired, we would too.

God doesn’t make all this so easy for perhaps precisely the same reason — His goal is mature offspring, not helpless children. You know what happens to kids when you do everything for them. If He wasn’t able and willing to give us plenty of time to grow into our destinies — if He intended to give up on us after 80 or even 120 years (or far less for many), then I’d have to say He was acting incoherently and unreasonably. But as someone once said, God wants oak trees, not cabbages. He’s willing to wait and work until His creatures are complete. So o o o, yes, I’m going to stop now.

Blessings!
Cindy

Nice to hear from you again. I think cause and effect are, um, multi-universal. It’s just as well to look at it that way, as we have no basis for any other view except if we need to account for the things all around us without resorting to God. So it’s convenient to have multiple universes not subject to the rules of logic. I guess my mind isn’t quite flexible enough to imagine worlds without logic (or with what wouldn’t be logic here, taking logic’s place). At any rate, it is no more than imagination and, let’s face it, magic. Scientists can resort to that black box magic too, you know.

The nothing . . . now that is fascinating. This morning when I was spending my alone time with God, He was talking about (I don’t know how else to say it) the nothing. (And that was completely off the subject I’d asked Him about.) Maybe we’re on the same wavelength, you and I, or maybe it’s God. He said, to put it in far fewer words, that the battle is with the nothing, to wrest it into the form He desires, which is love. The nothing is empty, hungry, hateful, ravenous, etc. He already fills all that is, and He intends to fill all that is not. It’s pretty metaphysical. I didn’t get the impression from Him that it was empty space, but rather, just nothing. I’m not pretending to understand this, but if you’re curious as to what He said, just ask I’ll copy it down and e-mail it to you. It isn’t personal stuff for me, so I don’t mind sharing.

(BTW, He speaks to my heart — I “hear” His words, usually only two or three at a time, in my thoughts. It’s not like I’m hearing an audible voice or anything. I can usually tell if it’s not Him when I read back over it in the next few days. That spiritual sensation thing that you’d call a “feeling.”)

You’ve mentioned this brain sensation thing in connection with prayer a couple of times and I guess I overlooked it as I was more interested in your other points. I never used to have the “brain sensation” though I really wanted to. But I have experienced at least three objective miracles (that I can remember.)

First was a patient in CCU where I worked. He was a 30-something trauma patient. We got him because MICU was closed due to lack of nurses. He’d sustained brain-stem damage and the doctors said he’d never breathe on his own again. You can imagine how bad I felt for him. A man of his youth, so many years of life ahead of him, spent on a ventilator. After much hesitation, I answered when he put on his call light, and after taking care of his needs, asked if he’d like me to pray for him. He signaled that he did want this, and so I did. I was off for the weekend and when I came back he was gone. Being the woman of great faith that I am, I asked whether he had died, and was told that he had been weaned off the vent next morning and was on a medical floor. On my break, I went to visit him. (He didn’t remember me.) He had been discharged and was preparing to go home. No respiratory distress whatsoever. His voice didn’t even seem traumatized by the intubation.

Second; my 5 yr old son had a 107 Fahrenheit temp, was becoming incoherent, would not take meds, and had signs of meningeal irritation. I thought bacterial meningitis, which is terrifyingly rapid in progression and kills/cripples if not checked in time. As I prepared to take him to the ER, I called the pastor of our church and asked him and his wife to pray. By the time I got my son halfway to the hospital his fever had gone and he wanted to stop at a playground we were passing by. When we arrived, there was no sign he had been ill.

Third; same kid around 12, I think — he broke his collar bone. I could see it bulging out under the skin. I prayed for him and watched as the bones sank back into place. I did not touch them and he did not move during this time. The bones remained in place and he didn’t need medical treatment. It’s still fine, and he’s now 32.

Despite all this, I did, years later, go through a long period of doubt approaching atheism. One day though, as I was driving to town, God began to remind me of these things and also to point out the beauty around me in the snowy mountains and the stars, etc. It was at that point that an inkling of belief began to seep back into my thoughts. Returning to Him was a very slow process, and not one in which I felt I had much of a role to play. It just sort of . . . happened. Like the miracles did. You could tell yourself they hadn’t really happened at all, and yet you knew they had. You had seen them. It’s hard to believe something like that, even when you do see it, because I suppose it’s just not the sort of thing that you expect to happen.

I had previously had quite a wrong idea of who He was, and it was in this phase of unbelief that as I see it, He kind of “pushed my reset button.” He had to take me back to the foundations and rebuild them, because they had been badly built on faulty doctrine. I knew a lot of scripture and understood all of it according to what I had been taught (and much of that was wrong.) So that was my new beginning, and while I keep my mind open, I don’t honestly feel the need to search for a different truth.

Now searching for *another* truth is a separate matter. I am always asking Him to reveal more truth to me of who He is. Since He is infinite, I think that will go on forever. Every time He shows me something new, I feel that I finally know all there is for mortal men to know of Him in this life, and every time, He leads me on to something yet more wonderful and new (and yet clearly substantiated in scripture — how had I missed it?)

I’m okay with most of the world not knowing Him yet (though eager to share what I now realize actually IS good news) because I believe He’s orchestrating this whole drama and will work ALL things out for the good of those who love Him — and ALL will in time come to love Him of their own free will. So I don’t have to worry about people any more. I drive into town and see people jogging, driving, playing golf or walking their dogs and a real surge of joy courses through me to think that they will ALL be saved; I will one day get to know and personally love each of them, and that we are genuinely all brothers and sisters.

This also drives me to want to do my best for anyone God gives me to help in any way, because wouldn’t I do that for my own brothers? These are people I (in an eternal sense) love. I may not know them now, but I WILL know them, and won’t I be glad then if I can serve them in some way now?

Yeah . . . you’re probably shaking your head and rolling your eyes, and I guess I can’t say I blame you, but that’s how I feel about it. Jesus was compassionate toward people around Him with regard to their temporal needs. He wasn’t driven to persuade them to follow Him. I used to think that was a little odd, considering the “danger” of hell. Now that I understand He has no intention of allowing them to go down into unending flames, it makes a lot more sense.

Well . . . another book. :blush:

Blessings, Cindy