Love me or else?

I heard someone say recently that they didn't believe the Church mentioned hell near enough anymore. I've thought alot about that. I can agree with him that it isn't mentioned as much as it used to be; however, I'm not convinced that is such a bad thing.

While I completely agree that hell and eternal separation from God are biblical realities, I question the motive of using it to solicite a response of faith and love in Christ. Getting my child to love me through spending time with him, loving him, protecting him, teaching him, and getting to know him is one thing. Telling him that either he loves me or he is tossed out on his ear forever is quite another.

It seems to me the motives are different, though I am by no means an expert on the issue. On one hand, the motive seems to be to get people to do something akin to registering to be in a organization. You do it, you are good and you belong and we love you for it. You don't, and you are an outsider and we don't have any use for you. One the other hand, the more difficult one, is to try to get people to understand the life long benifits of enjoying life in the organization. You let them explore the benefits of joining, let them seek, wrestle, question, doubt and reach their own decision rather than force them into joining out of fear and intimidation.

If God wanted to make us love him, he could have just put Adam and Eve in the garden without the tree, i.e. the option to choose otherwise. Loving him at that point would have not been an option. Would that truly have been love? Getting people to make a decision for Christ by scaring them with a promise of hell seems to be similar in my mind to not giving them an option to love. Who wants to burn eternally? No one I'm quite sure. Who wants to live out a relationship with a God who is amazing enough to make doing so our choice? That is the question.

Is He Smiling?

If God was sitting across from me, what expression would be on his face?

Would he be smiling? Scowling? Gritting his teeth? Would his brow be furrowed with a look of utter disappointment? Do emotions flow fluidly thru his face as ours, varying greatly with our circumstances? Or are they chiseled over time like moving claymation figures so that a disappointed look stays that way for some time?

I don't know that I can honestly say what his face would hold. I want to say that he would be smiling, and from what I read in scripture, I want to believe that. The fact is that I don't think that that is how I operate. Seems to me that operating with loving smile of God in the front of my mind would be so incredibly freeing.

I think the look I often see on God's face I feel is disappointment. Why? I don't really know. Well, I say I don't. I have a number of ideas why. But what I want desperately is for that look to bring within me an overwhelming approval of me as a person. Approval of me, separated from my actions, but a smile of quiet confidence in me. A smile based on the ultimate act of love he showed for me in Jesus's sacrifice.

Father, help me to change. I want to know you as a person, to have a personal relationship with you so that I can know your feelings toward me and be confident in the fact that no matter what I feel, your feeling towards me are overwhelmingly loving.

Stepford Christianity

It occurs to me that for a large part of my life I have subscribed to a sort of Stepford christianity. By Stepford, I mean a type of christianity that results in me putting on a face...doing what everyone else is doing, afraid to share my deepest thoughts, doubts, fears, confusions, and joy.

I was sitting in a meeting recently when a good friend of mine shared this the idea of Stepford Christianity and something about it resonated with me. The thought of having a community where there is complete freedom, freedom to hurt, to mourn, to question, to rejoice all without the fear of being rejected for "living life".

For so long, I have made following Christ about staying in line with the crowd. I took pride in the fact that I looked like everyone else, could talk like everyone else, and could completely hose anyone who was sincerely asking about my life. I exceled at it. I was a masterful "christian chameleon". I could blend in complete.

What changed me? The aching feeling that there has to be something more. I think that this feeling drove me to search diligently for something that was designed to envelop a relationship with Christ but for whatever reason, I had been missing. More later....

The first....

kinda interesting...this whole blog thing. I've read them from all over and what possessed me to post my own I have no idea. I do know that the thought of being able to write and post just about anything and get some reply is pretty amazing.