What No-One Wants To Talk About

 It's something no-one really want to talk about.

Losing faith.

It's been a hellish week of pain and puke and growing tumours and...can it get worse? (Short answer: yes, it can.)

If it were punishment, I could accept that...but it seemed more like indifference.

So my faith flagged.

Not faith that there is a God, mind you...the sheer complexity of life, and the huge odd against it developing randomly (something like 4 to the 300th power against a 300-ribosome chain of DNA building itself from 4 basic amino acids, to start...which translate to 4 times ten to the 180th power...which is a 4 followed by 180 zeros...as a comparison, if the Earth is really 4 billion years old, that's 2 times ten to the fifteenth power seconds...a lot smaller).

Yes, I know about Bartel and Sostak's 1993 experiment that 'showed' that catalytic RNA molecules could speed up the process significantly, but they 'selected in' the catalytic RNA (they compared it to dog-breeding for desired coat qualities) and provided a friendly and stable environment for the reactive process. In other words, they added a form of intelligent design to the equation.

So, yeah, I believe in a Creator.

But is the Creator beneficent? Does He care about me, or am I merely an expenaable pawn on a comic chessboard?

I can't get there through reading Scripture, or through Praise and Worship, or through listening at the feet of learned men.

But I can get there through context.

And the context off Christianity consists of three days at a long-ago Passover.

"Father, why have you abandoned Me?"

Jesus could ask the quetion we seem to be afraid to approach. He asked it for us, at the beginning of His journey.

The three-day road from the Cross to the empty tomb.

God didn't come to live among us as a man so that we'd have easy, pain-free lives, and have all our worldly dreams come true. God isn't Santa Claus.

He came to defeat the grave for us. And that, for me, is enough.

He died in blood and mire, the blood and mire in which our lives are based.

And then He rose, that we might rise.

(OK, a slight correction to the 'listening at the feet of learned men' bit above...I never had doubt about the veracity of the Resurrection, but don't have the energy now to explain why, so may I direct you to Lee Strobel's The Case For Christ?)

Are You really out there, God?

Do you really care?

Is my thinking deeply flawed;

am I talking to the air?

Is there something left for me

as bitter days wind down,

or is my testimony

the miming of a clown?

I search on King James’ pages,

in words of preaching men,

in tomes by august sages,

and it is only then

that I see when doubt and mistrust loom,

Christ’s context is the empty tomb.

Music from John Denver, with Looking For Space. (Click here if the video doen't appear.)

I do try to answer each comment in a timely fashion, but with Internet providers really stretched, I have only about half of the access I once did. Please bear with me!

Thanks to Carol Ashby, Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart is back on Kindle, and will be available in paperback soon.

Friends are everything. I couldn't have done it.

Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.