I love collecting rocks! Call it an obsession really. I even took a geology class for fun in college. Maybe I missed my true calling and should have been an archeologist, because I’ve been digging in dirt all my life locating the perfect hidden gem. About ten years ago, I became captivated with finding a heart shaped treasure on each vacation adventure. While wading in a stream in Virginia and engaging in a little active prayer time, I simply reached in the stream and pulled out this beauty.
Since that time, every trip I take, I find my stone and commemorate the journey with the date and location. On our first post-Covid adventure, the guys were golfing and the girls sleeping, and I set out on one of my walking meditations. As I gazed over the beauty of the Pacific Ocean, I happened to glance down and there at my feet lay God’s love signature - the photo I’ve been using for this Faith blog. Like all the heart rocks I’ve found over the years, He always manages to sign love notes to me when I take the time to notice.
I haven’t written in a few weeks. Not that time eludes me, but words do. Ye old writer’s block...
This next lesson is a doozy - a real toe cruncher. My personal life pokes and prods and prevents the necessary stillness and solitude to locate my “rocks” - my path of guidance - my trail of breadcrumbs to navigate toward:
To Believe or Not to Believe? That is the Question…
So why do people choose not to believe? Why is believing in God so difficult? Logic dictates that believing in a benevolent creator rather than random happenstance creation provides meaning and substance to an individual’s life. I went over this at length in Lesson 2. So why do we find ourselves living in an America where belief in God is in drastic decline?
It all boils down to that sticky issue of free will.
Because a writer writes from what she knows, I resort to my familiar illustrations of the parent/child relationship.
My kids are great, but discipline happened at our house. There were different degrees for different offenses, the most severe consequences occurring for behaviors that put their personal safety at risk. My mantra for enforced punishment went something like,”My role as a parent is not to be your friend but to make rules for your safety and protection and teach you how to have control over your own behavior when you are older. I don’t make rules to keep you from having fun but to keep you safe.” Something like that. A few times we took the car keys, the cell phones, regular teenage stuff, but not very often.
However, when I say my daughters are slobs, the mess got to the point my husband and child therapist friend banned me from going upstairs to prevent WWIII. The kids made good grades, behaved well, and made good choices so the filthy personal spaces needed to be “their areas of personal expression.” I almost lost my mind over this state of affairs, but my wise counselor friend continually advised me to “let it go.” I didn’t want to let it go!!! I wanted to punish and bend them to my will and force them to keep tidy rooms. After lengthy arguments and much debate, I chose not to venture anywhere near their personal spaces and accept their slovenly choice of living and overlook what I considered a personality flaw in light of all their other wonderful behavior. (Read this paragraph through clenched teeth as a paid child psychologist would instruct you to read it.)
However, when we planned a visit to our oldest child in her first college apartment, I dreaded the visit. As much as I missed her, I did not want to see the conditions in which she lived away from home. My mind imagined the dishes in the sink, the piles of wet towels and dirty laundry, and the overflowing trash. My heart ached for her, but the semi-OCD part of my personality felt nauseated and my eye began to twitch.
As my husband knocked on the door with an eager heart, my own caught in my throat. What was wrong with me? How could a mother not want to see her own child? Was a clean house really that important to me? My honest answer was...YES! How ridiculous was I?
When my child opened the door, she had the cutest little grin on her face and the intoxicating smell of Clorox and lemon greeted me like an old friend. When I tell you she had scrubbed that little apartment shiny, and she also had decorated with the cutest little touches! I had no idea she possessed the know how!
The profound and overwhelming joy I experienced from a child acting out of a personal will of obedience because that child knew she conducted herself as her loving parent raised her to behave has never left me. That simple act - that mundane moment - gave this mother a clear picture into the heart of God.
God creates us with strong wills. He could easily bend us to worship him aka tidy up our rooms. He is the creator of the universe. He made the sun and the stars. But He gives us free will to choose whether to believe or not to believe.
Bottom line for most people... the choice boils down to simple obedience. We don’t want to obey. We don’t want to keep clean rooms. We want to do things our own way. We want to live life in the mess of it all. We NEVER want to admit what joy lies in obedience. Peace flows from learning to worship freely by one's own personal choice to obey - the act of positively exercising free will.
If I can recall the sheer emotion I felt when that Clorox smell hit me the moment my daughter opened her apartment door, what joy must fill the Father when one of His children chooses to trust and obey Him? This is one earthly moment my Father in Heaven allowed this mother to show her His heart.
So why do people choose not to obey? We do not like what we find in the Bible. Be honest. Here comes the toe crunch part. The Bible possesses some pretty specific standards of living. Our current culture is becoming more and more hostile to the content of the Bible and let’s face it, Christian’s do not do much to help build a positive relationship with those who find the Bible non-palatable. We like to pick which “rules” are easy to point to as offensive behavior while ignoring the ones we break on a daily basis. When in doubt, we should remember, we all sin and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).
Obedience is NOT the natural state of mankind from Adam and Eve down to the best of kids whose only childhood misbehavior proved to be messy rooms. But at the end of the day, the choice must be made. We choose to enter into a relationship with God through His Son, Jesus Christ, or we choose to stay in rebellion and follow our own path. If we choose to enter into a relationship with God, the Bible comes too. That is how we get to know God. The world tries to tell us that the Bible is full of oppressive, outdated rules. Jesus simply holds out his hand and says, I came to save the world. Trust me.
My favorite verse in the Bible is 1 Corinthians 1:18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For those who are not in a relationship with Christ, the Bible does seem foolish. Many take issue with the word “perishing” (a subject for another lesson), but I love the second half of this so much. To us who are being saved...this doesn’t mean I have to profess my faith over and over, it simply means I have a lot to learn still, and I need to keep studying. However, the power of God is at my disposal. What powerful and comforting knowledge!
Blaise Pascal in the 1600’s put forth his philosophical wager on this very question. If God does not exist yet I believe in him and place faith in Him then I have lost nothing. I simply look foolish in the eyes of man. However, if He does exist and you do not believe in Him, then you have lost everything and gambled away your eternal soul. Are you willing to place this bet? If not, then what do you have to lose by believing that God exists?
If I can find heart shaped rocks everywhere I go, what a simple love letter from God. He is all around us waiting to enter into a relationship, our simple dogged choice of disobedience keeps us from taking his hand and tidying up our rooms. Our sheer stubbornness blinds us that His book of obedience calls us to a relationship with the creator of the universe. What kind of parent would He be if He offered no guidance? No boundaries? We get so focused on the rules that every single person ever born is destined to break that we lose focus of the One who came into the world to die so that we might live. We chose not to believe because we don’t want to obey. The reason we don’t want to obey - bottom line - we don’t trust God that he will be a good parent - That His rules are meant to prosper and not harm us - That life will still be worth living once we turn over the reigns.
So Trust will be the subject of Lesson 4.
Look hard at this picture again and think about that little girl who wanted to be an archeologist when she was digging in that dirt... He is a good, good Father.
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