hmstmil wrote:
1000Knives wrote:
I feel you, I was gonna make a similar post to this effect. You go to any public place, you see this sort of interconnectedness like this. In some ways, though, this type of behavior disgusts, too. You feel at times like you're in Babylon or something.
As far as meaning of existence, I ponder it, too. I don't get what God exactly wishes for me to do. In Christianity, you're supposed to help your fellow man, it's hard when there seems to be a chasm between them and you.
My old church was a Charismatic/Pentecostalish kinda church, that really emphasized "connectiveness" and togetherness and stuff. It was there I learned there really was stuff markedly different about me. It seemed to equate how good you were as a Christian to how well you connected with others. So I guess I'm a crappy Christian? "What he has made crooked cannot be straightened." Why, though?
Your old church emphasized togetherness because that is effective at reaching a lot of people. The people who thought up these ideas were only going with what they knew and understood.
Not everybody is like them, though. Does that mean you can't be a good Christian if you are not like them? I don't think so. That is not written anywhere in the Bible.
What is true is that you are exactly as God intended you to be. God made you different- "crooked" in your words- and if you believe God is all-powerful, then no, that "crooked" part of you cannot be straightened. But why would you want it to be? God does not make mistakes. He had a purpose in mind for you.
Could it be that the things that make you different help you understand and reach the people that the rest of your church can't? If God loves everyone, then He welcomes all people into the fold. Could it be that He intended for you to help welcome them? Who is going to reach out to the people who are considered "different"?
Well, now I'm Eastern Orthodox, just for the record. I wonder, though, according to Calvinist theology (which is not Orthodox, and is usually condemned by Orthodox people) am I just predestined to damnation? Does God just hate me or something? I don't know. I also feel God's given me the "second chance" too many times. Maybe this time what I've done in my life, he won't forgive. I don't know if I've forgiven others in my life, I've probably not. I cannot help but feel God has just created me for damnation, though.
As far as reaching out to other "weird" people. Maybe. Who knows. I don't think even most of them like me. And right now I'm incapacitated and doubting God loving me, or anyone for that matter, so I don't know how well that's working out. Even if God likes to test people, I can't help but see God not as a loving father, but like, a stern coldhearted martial arts teacher father.
To the OP, though. Who knows. To be fair, maybe in some way it's a blessing we cannot participate in such things very easily. Less to answer to on Judgement Day. Or maybe more. Who knows, CS Lewis says this in "Screwtape Proposes a Toast"
Quote:
In each individual choice of what the Enemy would call the “wrong” turning, such creatures are at first hardly, if at all, in a state of full spiritual responsibility. They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them.
Conformity to the social environment, at first merely instinctive or even mechanical — how should a jelly not conform? — now becomes an unacknowledged creed or ideal of Togetherness or Being Like Folks. Mere ignorance of the law they break now turns into a vague theory about it — remember, they know no history — a theory expressed by calling it conventional or Puritan or bourgeois “morality.” Thus gradually there comes to exist at the center of the creature a hard, tight, settled core of resolution to go on being what it is, and even to resist moods that might tend to alter it. It is a very small core; not at all reflective (they are too ignorant) nor defiant (their emotional and imaginative poverty excludes that); almost, in its own way, prim and demure; like a pebble, or a very young cancer. But it will serve our turn. Here at last is a real and deliberate, though not fully articulate, rejection of what the Enemy calls Grace.
Oh well, God bless and good night.
02 Dec 2012, 12:51 am
