Man, but I miss the days where you could call someone out on the carpet for this one. Now-a-days you’re more likely to be branded a grammar nazi. It makes me sad when someone who is insulted by this is considered an unnecessarily-strict grammarian.

How do you know that Africa exists? How do I know? I’ve never been there. Now, I’ve known people who’ve said they’ve been there. But even there, by necessity I’m presented with needing to decide for myself whether or not a.) I believe that what they are saying is what they believe, and b.) even if it is, that I believe their information to be correct and factual.

“But there’s so much information supporting the existence of Africa! Everybody believes it.” By and large, we as a society believe that people during the time of Columbus believed the world to be flat, when in reality this theory was not taken seriously at this time (See Wikipedia’s “Flat Earth” page). But do you believe the explanation that is contained on this entry?

Faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see. There’s nothing mystical about that. The necessity of faith does not require the allowance for the existence of the supernatural.

I’m sure that I hope the red light at the intersection that I stop at will turn green in the imminent future. I’m certain of it doing so, even though I don’t see what is going on inside, mechanically or electronically. I’ve developed this faith because I’ve experienced traffic signals that have functioned similarly, where they are red and then they turn green.

Faith does not happen in a vacuum. It is logical conclusion based off of observation.

This guy has such awesome style. It’s one that I personally really enjoy and will be using as inspiration in my own work.

This is so cool.

AN ALTERNATIVE DEFINITION
So it was with surprise that a friend of mine stated that she actually liked the word. Through her education as a massage therapist, she learned that “religion” means “the re-attachment of two ligaments.” Looking at the word, it makes good sense. I just never thought of looking at the etymological roots.

APPLICATION
So, with that word picture, things kind of started to click, as far as what it was that really tied all the religious systems in the world together. I believe there to be an innate sense in all of us that we are separate from something that would make us whole. So we devote much of our lives in pursuit of the objective of re-joining ourselves with it. We can (and have) taken many paths towards that feeling of wholeness; pretty much anything in the world has been used in an attempt to feel whole. I would argue, in a sense, that every person in the world practices religion in some fashion.

Now, almost unilaterally, the term has spiritual connotations, and for good reason. All the religious systems in the world have this in common: The desire to join or be re-joined with the spiritual. There are almost as many methods of this as there are people in the world, and even organized religious systems number easily in the thousands. Anything from wicca to Mormonism to Christianity to Islam to Zen to Buddhism, animism and more are joined in this common goal. They just go about it in largely different fashions.

So, back on the actual word. For a religion to occur, at least one force must be actively attempting a reconnect. There is a part “A” and a part “B”. Let’s take “B” as those who are attempting the reconnect, and “A” being the spiritual thing which A desires to be re-joined with.

Without an exhaustive study of world religions, it seems evident to me that the vast majority of them function under the principle of B getting to A under B’s power. Humans develop, via various sources, a ruleset that is the means to the end of reconnecting with the spiritual (usually, but not nearly always, in the form of a deity). By following these rules, adherents hope to get into the deity’s good graces, keep off their bad side, and work toward being counted worthy of entrance into an eternity of spiritual connect (”heaven”, “nirvana”, etc. are both concepts along this line). These works can be rituals, laws to be followed, things to do and things to avoid, etc. This is a broad-brush generalization, but in my experience, this seems to be the case.

A DIFFERENT METHOD
There is, however, a religious system that functions very different in a fundamental fashion, as far as how the re-connect is initiated and its use of laws and rules. This belief is Christianity. The main difference I see is that instead of B (us) initiating the reconnect, it is A (God) that does so. Instead of building a stairway to heaven out of works, God extended His hand down to us, with the only requirement on our part being to grab hold of it. Thus is the reconnect initiated.

My post “Know, Live, Live” expresses my belief as to why God chose to behave in this fashion. I think I would be needlessly retreading if I re-explained it in its entirety, so I’m just going to give a nutshell explanation. Basically, God wanted kids, so He made us. He wanted children that would choose, of their own free will, to seek relationship with Him. When Adam and Eve sinned in Eden, the disconnect occurred, and it has been since that event that God has desired a reconnect.

SIN AND THE LAW
Regarding sin, I am going to re-hash a bit, because I think it’s important. Sin literally means, “to miss the mark”. So, it’s deviation away from an ideal path. God has a plan for our lives, and that’s the path. When we stray from that path, it’s sin. This act also creates a divide from God, as we’re moving away from His path. We can also sin with regards to each other, and we can sin without realizing it.

In my family, we keep our shoes on in the house. Kick ‘em up on the coffee table, who cares. That’s just how we roll. But say I go to someone else’s house with my clodhoppers on, not considering that their rules and expectations may be different from my own. So I go on in, walking on their carpet and messing it up. I’ve broken a house rule, and I’ve sinned against them. Even though I don’t even know, there’s now that deviancy from their rules, and a resultant divide. The only way to rectify and reconnect is for me to know that the transgression existed. The burden of notification is placed on the offended. If they were of a charitable and graceful mindset, they might say something like, “Yo, I know you totally didn’t mean to offend. We have a house rule here where we take our shoes off before we go further into the house. Now, you didn’t know, and we’re not holding it against you. Yeah, it will take some work on our part to clean the carpet, but that’s life. In the future though, would you be so kind as to adhere to this rule you are now aware of?” And we’d go on from there (ideally).

Like in the above illustration, the law is not an end in itself, but rather a means to the end of shedding light on a course deviation. It’s like the traffic bumps (”turtles”) on roads. They show us the edge of the path. So God’s intention of the law is not to create hoops for us to jump though; there’s no need for that, because He (the deity, the desired spiritual connect) has already accepted us and considered us worthy. Why would He, who desires real relationships with us and extends Himself to us unconditionally, make us do tricks for his approval?

Jesus says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” We all have burdens in this life. It is inescapable. It doesn’t matter who we are or where we are, burdens are common to all man. A yoke, then, when viewed from this angle, is a good thing. A yoke serves to balance out a load. So, in effect, Jesus is telling us that He has the right way to balance out our burdens instead of us trying to carry them in a lopsided duffel bag. And in addition, He offers us a lighter load.

The law’s purpose is to keep us on the road. But even if we disregard the law and crash and burn, as we so often do–multiple times daily–we are still firmly in His grasp, and nothing we can do or choose not to do has any bearing on that. We are powerless to alter or weaken His grip. Once we accept His hand, He wouldn’t think of letting us go.

I have heard this (or countless iterations) many times, and it bugs me. They didn’t lie.

There’s a fundamental necessity for a lie, and that is deception. Lying has nothing to do with the factuality of the thing being lied about. If an employee cleans something, forgets that they did it, lies to a superior about it (oh yeah, I did that), they still lied.

Lying is nothing about factual data and all about the intention of the heart. So the person who gave the incorrect time in the first example is doing simply that, and nothing more. Their intention was to properly inform, but failed to provide accurate information.

This might sound like mere semantics, but I think this is far beyond that. When we say we lie when we’re not, we’re watering down the real meaning of the word, and likely degrading ourselves in our own mind, even if it’s not a conscious thing.

So, don’t beat yourself up so much. We are prone to lying enough as it is that we don’t need to add fake ones to the mix.

You can’t love an arbitrary person in Croatia like you can your family members. You know your family, are known by them, have invested much time and emotion into their lives, as they have yours. You know their voice, you know their character and personality.

So, you have to know God to love Him.

And this is important because you cannot truly live life without knowing God.

I wanted to start with the creation of our universe and everything in it. Why did God create us? So, at some time in the ancient past, God decided to create our universe; He decided to create us. Why? Was He bored? Was he tired of playing chess against Himself and always stalemating?

Did He want slaves, people that He could tell what to do? No. If He did want that, He could have done a lot better than us. Because how often do we obey Him and do what He asks? Exactly.

So, why?

Because He was a dad who wanted some kids. Kids who would choose to build relationships with Him, who would choose to hang out with Him. He wanted to show love to them and receive love back. But to do this, He needed to create them with the freedom to choose. It wouldn’t be much point in Him making robots, because they just do what they’re told; they have no choice in the matter. So He made us.

Now, He knew what was going to happen before He even started creating anything. He knew about Adam and Eve, about David and Goliath, about Moses and the burning bush and the Israelites being slaves to the Egyptians. He knew that His creations would choose not to follow Him, would choose to disobey Him, would choose to hurt Him, to disown Him and say that they didn’t know Him. He knew that we would get hurt accidentally, that we would willfully put ourselves in harm’s way, and that we would even choose to hurt His other children, their brothers and sisters. But even with so much potential for heartbreak–even though He knew there would be heartbreak, in His heart was so much desire for being able to hang out with us, to talk with us and build relationship, to love us, that He still did it. He knew it was worth it. He knew the life and love that would come out of it.

So He made us. He wants to see us play, to learn and be happy and full of joy. “God’s glory is man fully alive” (St. Irenaeus of Lyons).

Now, There are three characteristics of God that are important, here.
God is a God who:
- Knows everything (omniscient)
Proverbs 3:19
- Can do anything (omnipotent) and is everywhere (omnipresent)
Isaiah 46:10, Revelation 1:8
- Is the embodiement of love
1 John 4:8

So He knows what we need, He has the power to do what is required, and He has the love to actually do it.

So, what is love? John 15:13 says, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” So, God is the embodiment of that. He laid down His life, He opened His heart to us. We can all think of a time where we were reluctant to tell someone something because it was so close and near to our heart, and we were afraid of being rejected or of being laughed at or mocked. We’ve also experienced both the joy of that part of you being accepted, and the pain of it being rejected.

God feels that pain a billion times a day, and this is not hyperbole. He has opened up His heart to each and every one of us fully and continually. He doesn’t build walls around His heart to protect it, because He knows it’s what we need. Jesus came down to earth to walk among us for more than thirty years. Thirty years of giving up “God mode”, of being trapped inside of a human body. Thirty years of know that, every second, He was fully able to transform out and fly around and nuke the stuffins out of anything. Even when He was walking the cross to calvary, when He was being whipped, when He was dying on the cross, He was intensely aware of His deity and Godhood.

Yet He chose not to. He laid down His life for His friends. Laying down one’s life is not just in death; it’s an ongoing life process of constant decisions to put others before yourself.

And He feels that for each one of us. He loves us enough to meet us wherever (WHEREVER) we are at. Whatever we’ve done, however low we feel like we’ve gone to, like we’ve hit the bottom of the hole, someone tossed us a shovel, we dug, we hit stone, someone tossed us a jackhammer, we dug more. He still meets us there. Even if we feel that we can’t even forgive ourselves, God is there. God loves us enough to meet us where we are at.

But God also loves us enough to not leave us there. He wants to revive us, to get us back on track. And He’s right there in the hole with us. He wants to show us the things that we are doing that are not productive and that are hurting us. But He’s not doing this to show us how bad we are, but so that we can see them to break away from them. If you’re in the dark and keep getting hit by punches, you will never see what is hitting you. If it goes on long enough, you might just live with it. But you’re still getting punched. So God gave us the law to show us what’s punching us. The law is the light that shines on the bad stuff so we can identify it and take care of it. It shows us where we are sinning.

Now, the word “sin” has gotten some pretty negative connotations. It’s understood as a noun, like there’s an universal scoreboard of how many sins we have next to our name, that God’s counting down the time until it’s lightning time. This is not the case. “Sin” is not when we’ve broken a rule; God’s not interested in keeping records of how many sins we’ve committed. The Greek word for sin, hamartano, means, “To miss the mark.” So all sin is is us deviating from God’s plan. God has a road for us to walk, and when we walk off it, we’re missing the mark; we’ve gone to the side. So God made the laws (10 Commandments and such) to show us the boundaries of that road so we know when we’re getting off-course.

When you look at it in this way, you see that the law is not an end in and of itself, but a means to the end of the restoration of our lives by a God who is a father to us, who has our best interests at heart (Jeremiah 29:11); that not only does God have no need to keep track of sins, but it would be an entirely fruitless endeavor.

Please, even take what I’ve said and line it up against the Bible. Don’t let it just end with me.

Deal is (I believe) for this day, only.

So, I’ve found the most amazing music making device I think I have ever laid eyes on.

-Splintofewnious