...Dad walked into the kitchen wanting to talk about the seemingly irreconcilable fact that God chooses so few for salvation throughout Biblical history. More seem to be damned than granted eternal life...
...Dr Brian May, lead guitarist from Queen and astrophysicist was on NPR yesterday.
He believes the whole universe is expanding and will eventually become a very lonely place. He went onto say he hoped so cause we seem to be screwing this place up pretty badly and he wouldn't really trust us flying around the universe spreading our bile...
...Brian McClaren seems to be developing a different image of hell than the one I grew up with that corresponds quite nicely with Brian May's theory about the universe. It echoes eastern philosophy of karma and Jesus' philosophy that we reap what we sow. It does not so much make hell a place as a result of our actions and is a state of being. (My thinking on this is that his hell is the logical conclusion of our continual "becoming" in this life. Ultimately we become what we create in this life.)
Dad and I continue to talk about evangelism and how it is missing from the lives of many who claim to follow Jesus. I keep reminding him that it is missing because people are not experiencing the eternal life they have been promised. They are living hoping for eternal life but not experiencing it's reality now. The hope is merely a future event. It is not real and it comes up empty. Most are left with hardly anything to share with others from their own experience. Few seem to have truly met Jesus. Most have only read about him in an old dusty book that might make it off their shelf once a week or so. Others read about him every day willing him to be real in their lives. But it appears, very few know him or allow him to know them. They have nothing to share and so real faith remains awfully silent.
I'm struggling with this whole thing now. People who clearly don't bow their knee to Jesus seem to live more like Jesus than do people who say they bow their knee to Him but don't look like it. Who is in and who is out? What are they into? What are they out of?
People can experience real eternal life now. I am. Now that doesn't mean that life is all roses. It isn't. Life is hard. I fail all the time. But I am learning to get out of the center, bow my knees before my Creator, and give up control of my will and my life on a moment by moment basis. In so doing I find peace, life, hope, joy, contentment, happiness, faith, and love. I am also bound to others that walk with me. Michelle and I don't walk alone but amid a crowd that look like outsiders to the kingdom but whom live as if God has welcomed them.
Meanwhile, others choose to serve themselves and the god's of this world. They find themselves creating an existence that shuts people out and is full of self serving and self appeasement.It's course seems to be the course of the universe. People drift further and further apart until they are left being isolated islands -- alone and serving only themselves. They still get what they want; it is simply not what they were created for.
The chosen though, often give up what they want in order to become what they were created for. They find it leads to an existence of interdependence and connection.
I guess that's what Jesus meant when he said, "If you want to save your life, you must lose it..." By being chosen I live a life that seems to me to be harder than those not chosen to this road. However, as Dr. Brian May also stated, it is possible the outward movement of the universe could reverse and everything be drawn back into the center where it all started. Maybe that is astro-repentance.
by Jeff VanVonderen at the insistence of my counselor. This led me to read another of his books entitled, The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse. 
This one I read because I really wanted to point my finger at the leadership of the house church I was a part of. They seemed to have a nasty god-complex (they knew better than anyone what and how everything should happen). Instead of getting ammunition to fire at the leadership of this little fellowship, however. God seemed to point all His missiles at me. I was the guilty one. I was the abuser. I stood accused with no defence. I was an abusive pastor who used God as a carrot or a stick to get people to behave in a way that I wanted them to. I was guilty of coercive tactics, manipulation, stretching the truth, using guilt and shame, and all the tools of the Kingdom of this earth to move people the way I wanted them to move. What is worse I trained my staff to do exactly the same thing. One of my staff wrote to me while I was spending a month away in part to recover from the realization of my abusive nature, "I will not come down and feed with you at the pig trough." God has a funny sense of humour.
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