Ross New Year

Sitting here, just a watching you sleep, I cannot think of a better new year celebration than being this close to you.

I'm tired and I know you are too. Our children are small but cause us to move great lengths to nurish and protect them. Sometimes, we may fool ourselves saying inside "how could I possibly keep going!?". But we can and we will together. Doing family isn't about understanding the each other in all situations, but rather about experiencing as many of those situations together as possible. Naturally, I mean those difficult moments when you think life just isn't going forward anymore.

Everybody has those kinds of life altering experiences that cause you to doubt the sincerity of those around you, or conversely cause others to question you're integrity, which is precisely why those kinds of moments are so important. They make us cherish whoever the stranger or family member across from us might be. Even if that person has done something awlful, which has caused trust to be broken. In the end, because you've been through you're own shit you there is simply nothing left to say other than, "hey, you're just like me!"

So to get back to my point from the beginning: my baby and me have been through the shit together and there's no other place I'd like to be on new years eve than alone with her at her feet on our couch, thankful for the few quiet moments before the new day, and with it, the new year dawn.

Friends

It's imperative to have friends! As I get older I cherish those friendships more and more that require little maintanance as they are the most fitting to my life with small children. In fact... I can't say I have any high-maintanance friendships at the moment. Come to think of it: I think it's just a sign of age.

And I'm okay with that.

Knowing God

I wish that in my "Information" section on facebook, I could have come up with some nice creative way of describing my religious views. It makes me jealous to read all the wonderful things that fellow heathens have come up with to voice their religious preferences. But in the end, I'm just a messed-up no-nothing when it comes to the God stuff. I mean... what's wrong with saying: "I don't know. Waiting for further instructions."? What is it about religion that makes us think we can or even have to know everything, or for that matter anything about God?

Jesus said something about the kingdom of God being here among us. He was saying that forgiveness brings heaven to someones life and harboring sin brings about hell. Right here and now. He showed us that God is walking amongst us, and told us to go out and live the same. We aren't to wait for Jesus to bring God to people. Our job is to be God to people. Right now! And I'm glad that this looks much more "normal" than I used to think it did.

In the end, like it says in Psalms: are we not all gods?

Things said...

Changing, becoming a different person was harder last year. Life as I knew it had ended. Years, of what I thought to be time well invested rendered, for the time meaningless. A new code of meaning and importance has since been developing inside of me. Life is much less complicated and quite a bit more enjoyable. 

Being able to laugh about the mundane and not have a bad conscience about being shallow most of the time. I think it's a gift. At least for now. So much time has been spent thinking about how to convince someone of a new way of thinking, that I right like my new found freedom to just listen to other ways of thinking, and doing less of the stuff myself.   

Life is great!

I have never felt this liberated. It is good to be with my wife and my children. It is good to be a husband and a daddy, without a higher calling than the one place before me everyday. I am content. ;-)

God. A loving father!?

Here's one that I would like someone to explain to me:

God is compared to a loving father. The father of all mankind correct?
Then why throughout history have people, starting with the Jews, been killing other people in the name of God? Yes, why would God even will it as he does in the Bible? Afterall he is the loving father of all mankind.

I grew up with the view that it is necessary for God to send some people to hell in order to lavish his made righteous with gracious love and entrance into heaven. But in the Bible it says that all are created equal. There is not righteous not even one. If that is so, what is different about a Christian? A Christian is someone who has said "yes with their mouth and believes in their heart that Jesus Christ is Lord". But what if someone doesn't say "yes" to God. Does that all of a sudden make them less righteous than the one who did say "yes" to God? But that wouldn't make since, because noone is righteous of their own accord but rather through Jesus, the loving Father of all mankind.

As a father of just two young children, I understand that I wouldn never punish the one to let the other one know how much I loved him. It would also never matter to me what either one of them did, no matter how bad, each of them will always be my child. And even if they should, for some reason, never want anything to do with me again and leave me completely out of their lives, I will continue loving them for as long as I have breath. This is grace! Even a thankless, disrespectful, embarassing child is loved by a loving father. If not, the father isn't worth his salt.

So if God is the cosmic Loving Father, why should he be held to a lesser quality of love than I? Why should he get to chose to kill some for the sake of others? That really just doesn't make since. Or maybe people have made something out of God that he really is not. If you look at the church today and how so much is based on holding to the right rules and wearing the right close, going to the right concerts, etc. etc., then it's easy for me to see how the people during the bible writing days were also merely trying to gather their people around a common set of mores and measurable values.

How else can it be explained that The Loving Father could will so much death even genocide?

Lost my religion

So the last post was from February. I was speaking of a longing I have for some type of ministry. Not so anymore. I'm completely and utterly okay with simply being who I am apart from a church ministry. Slowly, I'm developing something of what might be called an opinion of the church, but I'm not sure if I really want to share it on blogger yet. Often is the case, in which people who aren't going down your path with you, jump right in and want to start pointing out how you're doing, whatever it is you're doing, wrongly. I used to do that all the time. I missed out on the point that someone else was having a totally different, exciting journey of their own that had almost nil in common with my own experiences. Because of this, I always knew answers to everybody's problems: just let them know how necessary it was for them to become more like me. I even liked to say: "if everyone were just more like me". Of course I said I was joking, but now I realize how serious I really was.

It's enjoyable now to just be a fuck-up like everyone else, without the aching need to always preach at people and get them to understand the big picture. Sometimes, there is no big picture (at least for the moment). Sometimes, it's just that you're kid is really sick and you're trying to find hope that it will pull through. Or your wife is sleeping around with another guy. Or you've been having an affair and you don't know how to get out of it; or you're up to your eyeballs in debt and sick of not going on vacation with your family because you're always penny pinching.

In cases like these, it's not about if you pray hard enough or believe, it's just about feeling like shit because you know you're in a situation that you can't make-believe away. You know it's going to take long years of your life and lots of patience to get out of it. And that's not bad. It's just the way of it. There's a lot of good and bad along the way in each of those circumstances. Good and bad that desires to be shared with friends who are really interested in the good and bad stuff and not self-righteous idiots who want to preach to you about how you have to change your life. That was my daily bread for like 9 years (at least).

Liberation is a feeling, which can only be cherished on the other side of captivity. Like the reporters who were recently freed from North Korea: I have been freed from 'ligion.

LOST

It's nice to be on the other side of the fence. I've devoted myself for so long, to theology and the furtherance of the churches cause, that I was completely unable to realize that I had in a lot of ways left God's cause. Being on the other side of the church office (meaning a normal business office), helps me understand more of what people think about the church and what the really are searching for. Not just what I'd like them to know about a God I've created because it makes sense to me.

I feel a longing to be in some kind of ministry in the future, as of yet though, I'm not at all sure how that is going to look like. For now, I'm happy to be where I am. Discovering my own faults and learning to love me in spite of them, and learning to embrace the faults of others, letting them walk the path they have been given and not trying to convince them that they should be struggling down my path. Good to know that God goes down everybody's path. He's not scared or turned off by any of it.

Something totally different. Saw this funny parody of "LOST" the TV Show on YouTube. It made me laugh, since I've only recently (a couple weeks ago) started watching LOST.

Here's the parody:

Let me bite you