Sometimes I respond with lengthy comments on other people's blogs, as I did today on Thinking Housewife. I thought it might be good to re-post my comments here on my own blog, because I think the subject is worthy of expression here. I dedicate these words to any who may read them, the believers, those who are looking for a reason to believe, and for those friends who may have lost their way.

 ON WHY IT IS EASY FOR ME TO BELIEVE

 

I personally have no problem with the miracles and unprecedented circumstances surrounding the life of Christ. Jesus said His believers would do the things He did on earth and even greater things, and I have witnessed many a miracle, myself. In fact, miracles just seem to be what happens where true belief exists and faith is walked out in the nitty gritty details of life. As one Anglican bishop said of answered prayer and seeing God’s hand, “These may be mere coincidences, but the more I pray, the more they seem to occur.”

Are we the most deluded, and therefore the most to be pitied for it? Even if that were true, I have had, so far, a wonderful, hope-filled existence by being such a believing rube! In fact, God through Jesus has not only given me life, but the gift of being amused by my own life. God is the divine comic, and since all comedies have happy endings, we can be confident and content with our beginning, the middle, and our end.

Jesus also tells us of a common sense way to discern whether He is the truth. He reminds us that a tree is known by its fruit. Fig trees produce figs, not brambles, good trees produce good fruit, and bad trees produce bad fruit. Where folks undergo a true conversion, they truly change, and the good fruit their lives produce testifies that God is real and really working through them and on their behalf.

Seeing creation itself, and God’s hand in my own life and in the lives of real people I have personally known, also removes the problem of evolution, the parting of the Red Sea, the virgin birth, and all the rest. A God who witnesses to Himself through this incredible creation, and who can redeem the most desperate, failed lives through His son, Jesus Christ, would have no problem making all the physical universe in six days if that’s what He wanted to do, or however He wanted to, with evolution, adaptation, or whatever. I really don’t see what the big deal is about that. Are we still such children that we think we have it all figured out? That there isn’t any more to know than what is known at present? Are we like the head of the U.S. Patent Office, who in the 1860’s quit his position because he said that there was now nothing left to be invented?

Maybe a lot of folks are so disheartened that they cannot fathom a God who would be so loving and personally involved that He could create them and wish to give them eternal life through His Son. I would just challenge any of those people to suspend their disbelief for a couple of days and just go with it, and see if their lives do not dramatically change. I know their lives will change because I know that God will show up.

Now I confess that I do enjoy all the traditions, the ritual, the liturgical seasons, the traditionalist culture, the art and ethics of a civilization that was once Christ-infused, but these are truly just dividends on the stock which is ridiculously rising all the time, that is, that the Holy Trinity exists, and that in Him we live and move and have our being.

That is why you will find me plodding along, in spite of a misstep or two along each day’s way, as I feebly attempt to lift high and carry the banner of Christ along the dusty streets of life.