I love my family. I have amazing and loyal friends. They all are my past, present, and future. They are my roots and my legacy.
At night when all are asleep and silence surrounds me, and I'm up yet again unable to shut my brain off; I realize that I am an individual. I am connected to these wonderful people. Relationships make up what I recognize as life. Yet, people fail to be constant. People move. People change. People die. Life takes us in directions we never plan. Controlling our life or the lives of others is a grand farce.
When I consider my children all snug in their beds tonight, I know that for now I can hear them softly breathing in the next room. They are temporarily mine...temporarily. Eventually, they will wander and find loves of their own and live a life all their own. I'm excited to watch their lives unfold.
When I consider my husband, my sweet, wonderful, loyal husband, I am ever thankful of the time we share; every second we share. Still, our relationship is marked my seconds because it is temporary.
These are the reasons it is futile for me to resist a relationship with Christ. These relationships daily reveal to me that I do not wish for a life alone, an eternity alone. Most of the time, relationships mark the reason I love Him.
If there were no Christ, no eternity, then this carnal, temporary life would be all I had to cling to. Good byes, literally, would mean good bye.
Why would I want to believe that?
What is simple about that?
What is comforting about love forever gone?
I have a selfish faith. I don't want my relationships to be futile or pointless. I don't want to give and love so that I can wisp away into nothingness or watch the owners of my heart wisp away into nothingness. I want it to go on. I want my love to go on. I want them to go on. For this reason eternity makes sense to me.
It is my opinion, that it is human to seek the divine. To some, divinity in found internally, an internal journey to perfect oneself. To others, divinity is far above, an accomplishment never to be achieved. To a Christian, we walked with Divinity. He walked in our dirt, held our hands, and loved our children. He reminded us that to love one another is the second greatest achievement (to love Him is the first) born out of law that came from some of the earliest recorded moments in history. I can do that. I can love. Love is divine.
In the quiet of a still house, while all my loved ones are safe, I see that each moment is precious. I fill the moments with love, so that we recognize eternity when we reach it. I fill the moments with love, so my loved one's recognize me within eternity.
The more we cling to the temporary; the more we live a life alone.
The more we cling to love; the more we live.
do you know if there is existence after we die? of course you don't. no one does. you cling to ancient superstition that talks of rewards and punishments and fire and streets of gold. they feel good to believe. it has helped millions of people make sense of this life. but is it reality? you say yes. i say no. neither of us knows.
ReplyDeletethere is a beauty in not knowing. of believing this is all we have. it has forced me to be more loving and more forgiving and more graceful. because this is all we have. i am not motivated by a reward or a punishment. i am motivated by making the life of other people more bearable. more liveable. without mythology or pointing to the unknown. without burdening people with guilt or shame or forcing them to believe things no one really knows for sure.
i have been set free from that sad mindset. i love because it is the right thing to do. not because i get something. or i go somewhere when this is all said and done. i love because humanity has seen this is the best way to live. it's sad that we can't be better at living in love. christianity didn't invent this. it only did a really good job of promoting it.
You are right that I do not know much about the afterlife. I know what I believe, just as you do. You have faith in there being nothing after this life. I have faith that we go on after this life. We both have faith because we both don't know.
ReplyDelete"There is a beauty in not knowing." This is true. Not knowing has also forced me to love and be more graceful. Not out of guilt, shame, or even punishment, as you assumed, but out of love. -And out of the similar understanding that I get one shot at life...just as you pointed out.
My faith system is built around the creator of love. The creator of time and space and energy. God sent Christ, but God was here before Christ, sure enough. God is love. He's been trying to teach us about love and show us love before He sent the ultimate love example. You are right though, Christianity didn't invent love. Love was here and existed before Christ. God was and has been.
I'm sorry that your interpretation of faith in God is that of shame or guilt. This is certainly not what I believe or is it what God intended for us.
There have been many many mistakes made for the sake or cause of Christ, and I'm also sorry for that. Many believers have forced their faith on others in despicable ways. For that I'm sorry too. Please do not hold me or all of Christendom responsible for the mistakes of some. (As I'm sure you don't hold all of Germany responsible for the Holocaust.)
Perhaps Christianity is the reminder that people need to love. We promote it because we believe in it. There is no shame in that.
Hmm in the book of Revelation We can see in the end and some other areas I am not really going into a doctrine thing here but I have read over and over that Heaven is going to be several times much better than this old earth. I know its hard to describe how great its going to be, but afterall no dieases, sickness, death, etc.. and to See Jesus & The Lord himself well its worth seeing, and we will be there for all eternity , how long ? FOREVER and EVER ! Mind boggling, some of my family and friends has gone into eternity I will see again, and we will be together, and My wife & I will be there. Something to look foward to. Mark
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