Paydirt

OK, I just hit bedrock on what's been bugging me about the last few months. I was pretty angry at some things that happened (long story, not all that important at the moment) because I felt like they painted me into a corner of having to ask, very seriously, what I believe about God. I have always been very comfortable from my vantage point that Christianity looked like a great idea and all-- on paper...The logic, the mathematics of Christianity is certainly a beautiful thing. In math, the square root of negative one (-1), called "i", is an irrational number which makes all kinds of impossible math possible. It had been stuck in my mind for the last month or so as a symbol of the faith that it takes to live knowing that the destruction that Jesus experienced was transformed into life...i x Death = Life, if you will.

I was getting comfortable with yet another newly abstracted view of things, but it still allowed me a degree of freedom from a statement of my own faith. Then it occurred to me that I've never really had good reason to respect "Christians"-- which is not to say that I haven't had respect for people who are Christians, but that has pretty consistently felt like a coincidence. My thinking (and yes, I realize that there are holes...but this is pretty old thinking, habitual and subtle, so it's been tough to step outside of it) goes something like this:

• I assume that my friends, family-- those closest to me are generally like me
• If I lack respect for Christians, then the people who are like me also probably lack respect for Christians
• If I dig down and find what's truly in my heart about God and it looks distinctly "Christian" then the people I know will then lose respect for me according to the second point, above

Looking over this, it looks like another case of trying to control my environment, which is impossible. So, what's in my heart is this:

I believe that God is good and trying hard to love me. I recognize that I'm human, not perfect and the more I try to control my own life, the louder my life cries publicly, "I don't trust God and how he is trying to love me."

If anything is a coincidence in life, therefore, it is how a man who doesn't trust God can amount to anything more than a slave to his own fear.