Category: Love

The Secret to a Happy Healthy Life

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I recently read this entry in a local paper that allows readers to call in and leave anonymous messages of current and political import. Excuse the length of the following entry that I am reproducing here. I think it is important enough to reproduce in its entirety, because it bears some comment:

My parents had four daughters. We are all in our 60s now. Three of us earned master’s degrees. The happiest daughter is the daughter who spent a short time in college and married young. She has a wonderful husband and children and grandchildren. The other three are without husbands and can be very crabby. I know because I am one of them…. The three single sisters are all working because we have to work. Our married sister has a job, by choice, and loves her life. To all the 20-something girls out there… You cannot hug a diploma. A wall of degrees will not fill your heart with love. You will be alone night after night wondering what it would be like to have a nice guy at your side. Marriage is far better than a life of degrees.

Before commenting, I need to preface what I am going to say. Marriage is no guarantee of a happy life. Plenty of married people are unhappy. If that weren’t the case, the divorce rate would not perennially hover around the 50% mark. Marriage is no magic pill.

Gaining a college education is also nothing to snub. The reasons people go to college, however, are many: to get an education (duh!), because it is expected of them, to get a good job, because they don’t know what else to do, to find a spouse….

Looking back 40 years later with the kind of clarity that hindsight reveals puts those reasons into perspective, apparently. If only we could gain that perspective looking forward! But then, looking back may not really be 20/20 – unless you are looking back at a 75 year Harvard study. Continue reading “The Secret to a Happy Healthy Life” →

The Divine Experiment

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Chris Frayley On Rock at River Bend
Photo by Chris Fraley – On Rock at River Bend

Imagine, if you will, a God creating a creature in his own image, a God who “naturally” exists outside of time and space, who is infinite. The creature, however, could not be infinite, regardless of the image of the God she bears. The creature would be limited to time and space, but the creature would have the capacity to create like God and to choose, including the choice to go its own way.

Giving this creature choice is dangerous, but it’s the only way for the creature to be able to understand love and to be able to return that love to its creator. This God loved the creature and desired to give love to this creature and receive love in return.

This is the divine experiment.

And, the very fact that we can reject God is proof that God loves us.

Continue reading “The Divine Experiment” →

The Sun Shines Now on Saints and Sinners

Our lives in this world will end. Then, we will have nothing between us and eternity.

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(c) Can Stock Photo

(c) Can Stock Photo

This is the fifth in of a series of posts on Putting the Wrath of God in Perspective. I have previously written on the subject of the wrath of God several times. In my last blog, I considered how God is perceived through the filter of human experience: if a person sets his self against God, he experiences what feels like condemnation, anger and rejection; while the person who attempts to draw near to God experiences love, grace and acceptance.

God does not change in this exercise. We do. Where we stand in relation to God determines how we experience Him. If God is the source and giver of life, and if God is love, we should experience life and love when we draw near to Him; conversely, we experience the opposite of life and love when we reject God or withdraw from Him. We experience love or “wrath” depending on where we stand in relation to God.

Taking this a step further, if we love what God loves, we find fellowship with Him, but if we love what God does not love, we find that we are separated from Him by our love of things God does not love.

We don’t naturally love what God loves, so we naturally feel some tension with God. In order to know and understand God, we need to get beyond this tension. There is no tension on God’s part, however; the tension is with us and our posture toward God.

Continue reading “The Sun Shines Now on Saints and Sinners” →

The Wrath of God and Eternity

Our eternities rest on the choices God has given us. This life is serious business.

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(c) Can Stock Photo

(c) Can Stock Photo

This is part 3 in the series of Putting God’s Wrath in Perspective. We started by considering the fact that God is God. We are not God and really have no say in who God is or what He does. He could be nothing but wrathful, but we discover that God is, ultimately, love.

From there we discover that God’s wrath in history is employed to achieve the ends God purposes to accomplish, beginning with meting out justice, but more importantly to accomplish His ultimate purposes. His ultimate purpose is to bless the entire world and to reconcile the world to God and to mete out justice as justice is due.

This can only make sense, really, in the context of eternity. If this world is all there is, a just God would have to accomplish justice within the parameters of time. He would have to accomplish justice for each person during the life span of each person. That would be impossible to accomplish in a world in which individuals have real choice.

We tend to think of justice in terms of our own experiences. We think of justice at first instance in terms of our own lives; then we look out to the world that we know in the time in which we live. Justice is lacking in our experience – both in our own lives and in the world in which we live. In fact, if we are honest, injustice seems to be the norm.

Yet, we have this insatiable ideal and longing for a just world.

Where exactly does that come from? If justice seems so elusive in this world, why are we not simply accepting of the “way it is”? This is all we know. Why do we long for – actually insist on – something different from the injustice that is our experience?

Continue reading “The Wrath of God and Eternity” →

The Evil We Must Guard Against

The truth is that we can take every possible measure to protect ourselves and protect our families and still be vulnerable.

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© Can Stock Photo Inc. / aaronamat
© Can Stock Photo Inc. / aaronamat

Immigration continues to be in the news with Donald Trump calling for a ban on all Muslims who want to immigrate to the United Stated. In the wake of widespread criticism, Trump is holding his ground on barring Muslims and tracking the Muslims who already live here until we can determine “where this hatred comes from and why”:

“Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” Mr. Trump said.

Meanwhile, Loretta Lynch, the highest prosecutor in the land, pledged she will take aggressive action against anyone who uses “anti-Muslim rhetoric” that “edges toward violence.”  She has since toned down her own rhetoric following backlash on the grounds of freedom of speech, but she stuck to her guns on the pledge to protect Muslims against violent actions that might be inspired by “hateful speech”:

“We always have a concern when we see the rhetoric rising against any particular group in America, that it might inspire others to violent action — and that violent action is what we would have to deal with,” Lynch said on Monday.

These heated words on opposite ends of the spectrum follow on the heels of the mass killing in San Bernardino, which the FBI now says was planned out by a couple who had been “radicalized ‘for quite some time’”. We barely had caught our breath from the mass killing in Paris by another group of radicalized Muslims who may or may not have had direct ties to ISIS.

Continue reading “The Evil We Must Guard Against” →