My Crazy Faith

     One of my all-favorite Christian movies is Do You Believe?   It is an excellent movie.  But it's very emotional.  I cry through the whole thing.  (Have tissues ready!)      The whole movie is great.  But when I first watched it, one part stood out to me more than the others.  A lost, hurting, confused man was in a hotel room when he found a Bible.  And I thought about how sad it is that, nowadays in America, people are trying to get Bibles out of hotel rooms and to erase all references to God in public areas.      What about the hurting person who needs help?  The lost person who needs to be found?  The hopeless person who needs the Truth, Love, and Healing that only God can give?  How will they find the answers they are looking for (even if they don’t know they are looking for them) if we eradicate God from our society?  (Another reason I love this movie is that it shows that no one...

Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, I can feel it.  Fear.  Anxiety.  The buzzing of panic churning in my stomach.  Before I even get out of bed, my mind will start throwing at me all the things that could go wrong in life, all the things that have gone wrong, all the things I fear I'm failing at, all the things that are out of my control, all the possible problems of the future. "What if I fail?  What if I can't keep it together?  What if another dream crashes and burns?  What if my efforts don't pay off?  What if I'm failing those around me?  What if I'm not doing enough?  What if I make a mistake?  What if I can't handle it?  What if ...?  What if ...?  What if ...?" Some days, I dread getting out of bed, because life is too big and too scary and there's too much that can go wrong.  Too much that has gone wrong.     Some days, the future feels like a tsunami off in the distance, slowly, ...

People often say things like "If God is real, then why doesn't He show us?" Well, He did ... it's called Creation. "No, no, that's just evolution. It's nature," they reply.  "But if He was really real, then why doesn't He send us a clear message, in black and white?" He did ... it's called the Bible. "Oh, that was just written by men.  It's an interesting old book.  Nothing more.  But if He was really, really real, then why doesn't He come down here and show Himself to us physically?  Because then we'd believe." Once again, He did ... and His name is Jesus.  And they still don't believe. "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."   ( Romans 1:20 ) "But these are written that you may believe that Jesus...

This was originally on the end of my post "If Calvinism is true, then God is a liar."   But I think it deserves its own post (I recently updated it a little bit, March 2021): I read something once about how very few people end up freeing themselves from the clutches of Calvinism because of the strong hold it has on people.  I think this is partly because ... 1.   We (I am talking as if I were a Calvinist here) would have to admit that we were misunderstanding Scripture this whole time, and no one wants to admit they could be wrong. 2.   Calvinism appeals to us prideful intellectuals.  (And prideful intellectuals have the greatest aversion to admitting we could be wrong.)  It makes us feel special, like we alone understand the "deeper, hidden meanings of Scripture," while the simple-minded Christians can't understand it.  Calvinism (with all of its contradictions, word play, round-about reasoning, and multiple layers of meaning for verses) gives u...