Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Finding Your Road Map

It sometimes is useful to use our imaginations in relation to God. How we imagine God, how we imagine heaven, how we imagine our journey to eternal life is very important in our development as Christians. There are countless artistic representations of God, heaven, Jesus Christ. 

How we view the journey to God provides insights into our strengths, weaknesses, our needs, our desires.


Does the journey begin with loud noises, explosions. Are there grand declarations and cinematic arguments? Christian conversion is an ongoing process. Parts remain within the inner world of the mind and soul. Parts enter the outer world of friends, families, and strangers. The journey includes monologues, dialogues, miscommunication, communication. This journey becomes the biggest event in many lives, the most important event in many lives. This journey often includes access to God’s hotline. This journey rocks the foundation of many lives with basic questions about goodness, holiness, kindness. This journey creates bands of humility, charity, obedience, compassion. This journey begins with each individual making a private, interior offer to God. Human beings seek solace from the daily torment and torture of popular culture induced angst and anxiety. Popular culture creates cliched fantasies of mayhem, sex,  chaos, death, and destruction. There is a cartoon brilliance, a cartoon exaggerated color pallet inviting and yet --this angst, this anxiety leads away from truth, away from honor, away from God.


Popular culture distills agony, legitimizes it, encourages temporary escapes, blames this agony on other people. Popular culture profits from this agony. How many young people are encouraged to be  self-loathing, to vacillate between lethargy and urgency senselessly? How many people slip into desolation without even realizing it until it is too late? How popular it is to announce that “I am damaged!” Popular culture is quick to discover and hype the cruelty and hypocrisy faced by all living people. Popular culture finds each annoyance, finds each irritation, plays with it for a moment and then turns it gaze to something else.

Believing in God creates a path for each of us to make sense of our lives in relation to others, in relation to God. Our relationship with God can help us fine a place in the world.

Angst and anxiety are never original. They borrow, they imitate, they mock. 




Being Christian remains the ultimate rebellion, remains radical. Being Christian encourages a clever worldview of peace and love. Being Christian remains a constant learning and sharing the grace and glory of God, the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the love of God. The fusion of humility, charity, obedience, patience, compassion, wisdom creates a path to God, encourages love for neighbor, love for self, love for God. The love for God, over time, can produce coherent lyrics that can reach the alienated, the disaffected, the marginalized and invite them to come home, to return to the Lord.

It all begins with a journey, with a call. With both a call and response. With a call from God and a response from someone’s heart. Someone saying yes to the journey, yes to God.

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