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Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.


MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.


OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.


CHAT





Friday, December 22, 2006
I have a skewed perception of God. I always think he is a vengeful God with a limited patience threshold, and I'm on the brink of losing his favour over my life with each sin I commit. I don't know where I picked up this kind of theology, but it couldn't have come from my relationship with my earthly father, towards whom I feel no such potential for sudden and immediate severance.

But with God... I don't know man. It's always as if he's holding a sword aloft and upon my next commission of sin, he finally loses patience, and he drops the sword, and cuts me off from his grace. Maybe in my five years of Christian infancy, I've been weaned on too many of such biblical stories (but if they're biblical, then what's so wrong?).

Take for example the sermon on obedience from two sundays ago. Saul was made king over God's people, he goes to war and in his weakness doesn't destroy everything and just like that - God strips him from his annointing and he's left to reign the remainder of his days like a lousy no-good sonnnuvabitch. And all the while, I sat there continuing to be terrified by this hardline obedience lesson. I mean, surely you and I have been weak before, surely we've made decisions to please man over God before, so how?

I know it's up to God to assign what kind of smiting he so desires (in spite of what the new testament tells me about his abounding patience and slow-to-angerness), still i cannot shake off the possibility that the repurcussions of my sins will be as damning as that suffered by Saul. Or say whoever that king was who wanted to be a priest and got killed. Or that guy who withdrew early from his sister-in-law and got burnt into dust. If this is the God whom our spiritual leaders are so eager to tell us is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, then surely my complete and utter fear of getting one helluva divine bashing as the punishment for my sins is justifiable.

So is there anything wrong with me? How do I reconcile the fact that God is completely intollerant of sin yet aboundingly patient and slow to anger? How do I reconcile the wrathful uncompromisingly holy God of many a flawed man's snappy demise with the God who promises me that all my sins can be forgiven and in fact has been forgiven? I can't live like this man! I can't live with the perpetual fear that damnation hangs over my head and all it takes is that one more sin to break the back of God's patience camel so that he decides once and for all that I have crossed the line, and in so deciding "removes his hand" from me, as many a pastor has said.

How do you handle a fear like that? I don't know how to handle it. I'm so terrified of God, yet it seems so easy for him to tell us that perfect love drives out all fear because fear has to do with punishment. Well, I am terrified about punishment. I've seen this same God punish before and it scares the shits out of me. And I've heard enough stories about people who lost the favour of God because they went astray and how they ended up as a shadow of the men they used to be, like the lousy loser sonnuvabitch that Saul ended up as, and that scares me shitless too. Because I sin, will I end up like that too? Will God decide one day that enough is enough with this unrepentant brat and strip me of all the things in my life: family, girlfriend, job, car, friends, filmmaking career... hey, he's given me so much, if he takes it all away, it's a lot of blessings to miss, man.

And the scariest thing is that I know at all times that if he so wished to, he could turn my whole life upside down ala Job - after all, my life is his to take. And if he chooses to smite me in all the ways I fear most, then he has every right to do that. It wouldn't be much different from returning to the Jesusless life I lived before. I'll just be a wandering loser with no grace. The biblical part of all this is that I correctly understand that God has the power to absolutely screw up my life at the flick of a wrist. The unbiblical part is that I actually think he wants to. And the mystery in all this is that I'm not sure how close I am to this terrible fate.

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Genusfrog [ 10:59 am ]

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