The voice that I do not have...to little me

My decision...finally...for real...no turning back...hmmm

An interesting video...(one major flaw)

I was looking on YouTube, as you do, and came across this video made by a guy who is clearly an atheist.

He has gone through his arguments systematically, logically and stated why God DEFINITELY does not exist...however, although I appreciate a good debate and like to hear all sides of an argument, I do not have much time for people who pull apart other beliefs when their argument has a clear major flaw!!

The main problem I have with this video is the presumption that God is made of matter - that in order to exist He has to be made of something that we can tangible touch and experience physically.

'Existence is a relatively simple concept -- it is defined as that which consists of either matter or energy. Therefore if a god exists, it must be composed of either matter or energy.' (!!)

This is such a leap in argument and is only in the first two sentences! He is saying that if God is to exist He has to be made of something that we understand to be the building blocks of creation...fine, if God was part of the creation and not the CREATOR! I find that this, as a sentence, is incredibly egotistical; the idea that because we cannot conceive of something above and beyond humanity - then it cannot be real!

'If a god exists, then physical evidence is really the only methodology by which we can ascertain that a god exists. Of course, this does not require direct physical evidence...

Evidence is defined as that which impacts our physical senses in some manner, either directly, or through some translating device such as a spectrograph or an oscilloscope.'

This statement when viewed together is completely contradictory...the author states that physical evidence is needed to PROVE God exists and then says that direct physical evidence isn't needed as proof of existence... he uses the idea of blackholes that he knows to exist although he has never seen them(!!) because of their effect or impact upon matter. Hmmmmm...I am trying not to come over as sarcastic and am failing miserably...surely his belief that blackholes exist has to be taken, in part, on faith, as he has never seen one for himself and yet he states it like they are fact and cannot be disproven. To further back up his claim he then defines evidence...'that which impacts out physical senses in some manner'...HOLD UP!!

Why then are the healings that people have experienced and WITNESSED and the sensory perception of God's presence not in themselves evidence by this definition? It certainly seems to me that they could be. In my limited experience, the presence of God has many impacts upon someone's physical state, they are overcome and feel Him! That seems to me to show that God is able to affect matter by His presence and His 'energy'.

As the author states, we do indeed determine the existence and non-existence of things through the evidence of our senses, this is the only way we can after all. So I think that it is a little unfair for the author (referring to God) to then go on to say,

'If I argue that something exists, but then claim there is no way to detect it, my argument contradicts itself'

Christianity does not say that there is no way to detect God, for God is always present, we are able to feel Him and experience Him through prayer, through asking Him into our lives and troubles and through the Holy Spirit.

'If a god exists, then sensual evidence of some sort is required to determine the existence of that god. If a god is not made up of matter or energy, then that god does not exist, since that which is not composed of matter or energy -- does not exist.'

Here is the major flaw in the argument...to think of God within our own meager experience, within human terms is to miss the majesty of the creator completely. Of course we try to understand God on our own terms...referring to 'Him', His 'hands' working the potter's wheel, His 'eyes' as a way of showing that He sees and is aware of us...none of these things really mean that He looks like a human and is in fact a being in any sense that we have seen or understood before. It is merely our very basic way of trying to understand that which is in part inconceivable and would remain so if not for experiencing God!

Overall, there is much to say about this author and I could go on... but I will finish here and state instead that although he believes that he has offered a tight, logical argument for the non-existence of God, he has in fact produced a weak one because of the major flaw of believing that God is anything but the awesome, higher lifeforce that He is. Instead, trying to belittle Him by confining Him to our own very narrow understanding of creation from a human point of view proves nothing except that the author is too caught up in his own self importance, unable to think that something could be 'above' him.

Despite the last post...

I now actually think I may be going mad.

Further to the topic I discussed in the last post, it may be because I have actually focused on what I am hearing instead of ignoring it, or maybe I am just not a nice person...

For a few weeks now I have had the almost overwhelming urge to shout obscenities aloud at myself - not others - to tell the voices from the past and now of the present, to just remove themselves (the less polite version.) It is strange because it comes from nowhere - I can be driving, thinking of my day, what I need to do, all the mundane things that a person might think about and suddenly I will be shouting obscenities at myself and the voice that hasn't even been allowed to speak. I find myself just wishing that I could leave my head and my body for a while - just float free, away from this fight.

The more scary thing for me at the moment is something that has only happened a couple of times and although it has been only a thought and would never be an action, it's really bothering me. I have found myself thinking really very unkind things about people I see (and don't know) and imagining how much I could hurt them by saying it to them. I have found myself wanting to make these strangers HURT, really hurt. I want them to feel the pain that I will not let myself feel. I am disgusted with myself for these thoughts and the only thing that it seems to prove to me is that I am not a nice person, and the statements about me that I am hearing seem to be more truth than fiction.

So I have consequently spent much of my time in prayer asking for forgiveness, but then I am now at the point of thinking that if I keep asking for forgiveness and then the thoughts continue to pop into my head then God has to at some point consider me to be insincere, when I really am not.

This post doesn't make any sense - sorry I just need to put these thoughts out there so that they are not just in my head...

Voices in my head...

I'm not mad - I promise...well at least I don't think I'm mental. Recently, I have been having a tough time, more so than I ever have before, mainly because I have never allowed myself to get this far down the road less traveled. Life is good, many positive things are afoot and I am making progress in many areas of life, but equally life is very hard and sometimes feels like it is too hard to face. It is times like this that I am thankful for my job which means I have to get out of bed and thankful for friends and family that spend time with me (even though they don't know how much I need it at the moment.) Sorry to be blunt but you need all of this 'heart-warming' information so that the next bit makes a little more sense.

I have heard much said about the enemy; the devil, and how he tries to put you off your path with God and lives, in order that you will not. And up to a point I thought it was a little sci-fi until now. At church, people have prayed with me at various times and in their prayers they have asked God to protect me from the devil and the voices that are speaking lies to me and I just accepted that sometimes people pray relevant things and sometimes they don't. But more so than ever those are the prayers that I am clinging to now. The voices that I am battling, the voices from the past and the things that they are saying are tearing me apart, they are like knives into my very soul and the weird thing is that until yesterday when I prayed aloud at my Life Group meeting for God to make His voice the loudest in my mind, that I realised that there were so many negative voices whirling around in there.

It's funny but if you have been hearing something for long enough, you don't hear it anymore, not like an outside thought, you feel it. It becomes a part of you. The words that I hear the most, many of which are highly unpleasant, feel like they are who I am. As if they are so a part of my core that if you sliced me in two they would appear there like in a piece of seaside rock.

The realisation that there are these voices that have been with me for many years has had a two fold effect. Firstly, it has annoyed me. I feel like I have been stupidly duped into believing these things and that I have been weak enough to accept them. I am now more angry at the injustice of it, and at myself for allowing it.

Secondly, I am scared. I am scared that now I am aware of these voices that they are louder. That although I know them to be the work of the enemy and his accomplices in my life, they are all struggling for space at the same time. (This is hard to explain so i'll used an analogy...it feels like the difference between a bank queue and the stock market floor...before this realisation the bad thoughts were in a nice neat little queue, biding their time, waiting for their slot of airpace in my head. Nice and neat, one at a time, constant but simple.
Now it is like a crush of thoughts and voices grappling for attention, like the people trying to get the attention of the sellers and buyers, trying to make their voice the loudest and no one is taking their turn anymore - it is a free-for-all.)

With this image in mind, I am now trying to listen to God's voice, which would be the one voice that I want, and need, to hear. The one voice that speaks the truth and the only voice that can lead me out of this. The problem is that I can hear nothing but babble, too many voices all at once, I can't process which are good or bad until I listen to them and at the moment the ones I have allowed have been so cutting that I am scared to allow any more though - I am tired of this inner battle already.

So, I am back to wishing I had never started down this road, that I had just stayed where the voices, although bad, were in a manageable queue. On some of my worst days I hear the one voice that hurts the most, the one that tells me that God doesn't love me or He wouldn't have left me all those years ago. That one is the hardest to hear because I have no answer to why God would have let things go on as they did. Instead, all I can cling on to is the fact that God loves all of creation, even little me.

Saw this on The Simple Pastor...

and decided it was cool so I visited Wordle and did one of them for this blog...interesting array of words picked out from this blog...which one is the biggest??!!

A very quick point...

As you know, many things in my walk with God have surprised me but I have another to add to the list.

Whilst driving home I found out that one of my friends had given birth to a daughter. This was lovely news not only because of the baby element, but also because we had been anxiously waiting since 11 pm Sun when her forewaters broke!!

Now this is the surprising part...once I had got over the shock of the baby being a girl (we had all assumed it was a boy), I turned off my music and prayed!! It was just a prayer of thanksgiving and strength for the new family and it wasn't until I had finished it that I realised my first reaction to the news was to pray......this shocked me, not because I prayed (I have been known to do that before) but because it felt so natural that this should be the first thing I did!!

I'm very happy that it was but I shall take a while to get over the shock...!

A weekend with God...

Having never been to a 'Christian Weekend' I had no idea what to expect, as for the content and the worship, it was better than I had imagined and I enjoyed starting each day physically worshipping God and now have an emotional understanding of the idea of fellowship and the community of God. I was able to speak with people over the weekend and ask questions, even answer some(!!) without the confines of society - God could be in everything. This invariably led me to the realisation that God should be in everything and IS, whether we like it or not.

Bearing this revelation in mind...
As I have said above, I enjoyed the weekend immensely but I found it very hard and am now left reeling from my moves along the path and unsure how to deal with it.
Throughout the weekend there were numerous words from God, a large majority pertaining to personal hurdles and self worth and how God wants to take the pain away but He has to be given it, we have to 'step through the door' and admit our struggles and ask God to help us. This really struck a chord with me. As i have mentioned in many of my other posts, I have a big hurdle in the shape of forgiveness and regardless of all that I have written on it about forgiving daily and not being able to grow in God without sorting all the hate and hurt out...I have merely been paying lip service because although I truly want to forgive in my head and logically understand that it is not my place to judge others' actions and that God with deal with it in good time...my heart has not been following. A huge part of my heart has not wanted to forgive and not known where to start...my honest thoughts about the people I need to forgive have been more vengeful and murderous in some cases than they have been merciful and loving.

Linked to this is my tendency to 'control freak' ways and my learned habit of not letting go emotionally. All of this thrown together leaves a very messed up person who has learned to 'forget' (for this read - brush under the carpet) because she couldn't forgive. So I became a little annoyed at God in the middle part of the weekend because all the words that we for me were saying that I had to give all of this up and hand it to God and I knew that that would mean a dis-assembly of my very being. The hurt and anger is so deep and has been a part of my life for so long that to give it up to God means that I'm not sure what will be left, I'm not sure if there is anything left. I can't imagine being free of this and although I want to be desperately, I am also scared.

This was in my head as I went to the final worship of the weekend and although I had had a chat with my pastor and been told the truths that I already knew - that I needed to let go - I had found it impossible and resigned myself to the idea of carrying on with life as I had and just getting over it..........................until.....................................God stepped in.

Halfway through the worship part of the meeting we were singing a song that I had never heard before and a line in the chorus said something like 'I give my heart to You' and I found myself silently singing 'I give my broken heart to you' and visualising my smashed up heart being handed to God on a silver plate physically and I felt Him recieve it. This was when I started to cry and I continued to cry for the remainder of the meeting. This was a BIG breakthrough as I haven't cried properly for years and have been frustrated that I couldn't or felt I should hide my feelings.

So i left the weekend feeling drained and more emotional than I have ever felt. The problem I have is that I am now back in a life where no one knows about the things I am confronting and so I have to put the mask back on, which is hard because the glue isn't there anymore. This means that I am now fearing a relapse into old ways to cope, only now I have more gulit about that because I know that God will know.

My only answer at present is to pray almost continually to God to help me to survive this because I haven't even started and already it is too painful.

That Christianity is all about rules........

Before I became a Christian I viewed religion as a whole from a purely academic stance. I have studied many religions throughout my education and had come to the conclusion that all of them were simply about rules.

My understanding of Christianity was that there were Ten Commandments brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses which Jesus then simplified to the two commandments 'Love God' and 'Love your neighbour'. Which although simple to say, I thought of as extremely complicated to follow because there were all the 'little rules' that followed on from the Big Ten such as looking after the environment, becoming responsible for all of your actions, giving your money away, not being too materialistic, no sex before marriage, no excess drinking etc etc etc. It seemed like such an effort to be a part of this religion that I wondered why anyone bothered - surely it was easier to live life for myself, caring for others but not have a judge that held me accountable for everything. Sure, in the short term it was but I've found some interesting changes in my worldview and within me that have happened as a result not of being bound by Jesus, but by being set free by Him.

I was talking to a friend yesterday that I don't get to see very often and he asked me how the whole 'church thing' was going and it led me into a conversation and a path of understanding that I had not been down before. I told him that it was going well and that it has only changed me for the good. At which point I found myself explaining how Jesus has and is continuing, to change me. This led me to the statement 'By having an ideal in Jesus I find myself changing for the better and free to be me in my entirety.' I once was told that being a Christian allows you to be more you, it doesn't change who you are but makes who you are. I thought at the time that this person was talking a load of tripe because I didn't think it possible to be more me! But that is my exact experience.

I have found that the 'rules' that had put me off (amongst a whole range of other things) are the thing that allowed me to become the true me that God wants me to become. I am not a better person for following rules like a duty, because I HAVE to, I am a happier person because I feel that the guidance I receive from God through the Bible and Prayer takes the pressure OFF of me. I am feeling more and more free from the strains of society and what it expects of me and more focused on my purpose as a child of God.

An example of this would be my self esteem. I have had low self esteem for as long as I care to remember brought about by many different factors. I had let this govern my actions for so long that when I heard that Jesus had died on the cross for ME I couldn't accept it, but when I did it became my new bedrock. I now know, even at times when I feel like i've forgotten, that I am loved by God. This is so powerful a realisation that I cannot do anything but worship Him and thank Him for His grace. I do this by following Jesus' example. I cannot begin to tell you how glad I am to have the guidance of the Bible (and my Church) in order to know how to glorify God, because without it I don't think I'd have a clue! The 'rules' are not rigid thou shalt's and thou shalt not's, they are suggestions that I now follow through CHOICE and they are helping me to accept me.


There are many other ways that the 'rules' have help me to understand myself and accept myself more and I will cover those later but sufice to say that all in all the rules that put me off before are the path that has and will continue to lead me closer to God and the real me.

I couldn't find Jesus...

I was at a different Church yesterday for a special occasion - a Christening, where I had the great honour of being one of the Godparents. It was a lovely day and I really enjoyed myself...but that isn't what my post is about.

As the title suggests, somewhere along the line I couldn't find Jesus, He wasn't lost to me because He resides in me but I wasn't able to connect during the service...let me explain.

I have been to Christenings and Dedications before, pre and post Christianity. I am now of the opinion that I prefer dedications because they are a promise to God and the child and not a promise on behalf of a child (I won't go into this at the moment but suffice to say that if I have children then they will have a dedication). At previous Christenings I have thought that it was a nice service and felt that pang that I wanted some of this 'religion' but left the Church and not really considered it again and yesterday I realised why this had happened. It was because I hadn't experienced or met with Jesus at these Churches. I had gone through the motions and said all the right things and felt secretly proud of myself for remembering the Lord's Prayer without looking at the words but that's it. No connection to the essence of the service.

The service was nice (an awful word but it encapsulates the feeling of the service for me) but it wasn't electrifying or encouraging. This is not in any way a reflection on the vicar as I am sure that for other people the service was what they expected and felt comfortable with. (That sounds sarcastic and I really don't mean it that way - sometimes written word is not the best media for explaining feelings! I just mean that different people worship in different ways)
Whether it was received well by people or not is not the issue I have, my issue is the lack of emphasis on experience and understanding of God. I felt that it was all lip service, it was explanation and liturgy that was delivered in a monochrome way. There was no real room left for people to praise God and most importantly there was no explanation. We were told that candles were being lit to show that Jesus was 'the light of the world' but no mention was made of WHY He deserves this title, or how that directly affects the child being brought to Him, or the congregation, or how Jesus could light up so many of the people's lives in the Church if they accepted Him. It was merely a passing comment, this is what you should believe because it's right...where is the evidence?? (I would say that in our party...it was a double Christening with another child...95-98% were unbelievers...why then they came to a Christening or indeed had the child christened, and why I agreed to be the Godmother when I know it wasn't done from faith is another subject(s), probably for a later blog...what a missed chance to bring God to them). I'm not saying that there has to be a sermon and a sales pitch but at the same time I think the Church as a whole is doing a dis-service to people if they are not open enough to proclaim God's Grace. As Christians we are called to witness, to share the Gospel with everyone because it is FOR everyone, never more so than when you are in Church. The sad thing is that I was at the same Church for the Christening of an elder sibling two years ago. Part of me feels cheated that I didn't at least get to glimpse God then because I might have found Him earlier. It isn't a regret, it is more of a hope, that when people enter a Church for whatever reason, they have a chance to encounter Jesus, not just to read from a script and go through the motions because 'that's what you do' then leave and not return until the next Christening, Wedding or Funeral.
The lack of enthusiasm for God that I saw yesterday reminded me why I couldn't connect with Church before and also left me a little concerned that if this is the image that the Church is portraying, then we have little hope of bringing God to people.

I have rambled but based on yesterday I have come to two (surprising) conclusions:

1) Even though I often feel like a newcomer in my Church in repects to the relaxed way we worship and conduct services, I am an Evangelical Christian through and through. I wholeheartedly believe that God is immanent and can be experienced, that He is personal and wants a RELATIONSHIP with His creation, not to be feared and revered from a far but to be in every breath of a person's life.

2) I'm turning into an Evangelist. I want others to know Jesus...I don't mean that I am going to ram it down people's throats but that I have a flame within me that wants to proclaim God's Grace and Glory and wants others to experience His love. So much so that when I am in a situation where that isn't happening, it makes me sad and a little mad. I am excited by the good news that I have recieved and feel that it is unfair of me to keep this to myself, and moreover, I am unable to. at times I feel God spilling out of every pore in my body and I want other people to have this wonderful gift.