It’s been a while, but exams can do that to you – I’ve been logging some of my thoughts as drafts, so you might see quite a few posts in the coming days as they actually make it to the stage of being published! In light of that the title of this post isn’t quite accurate where is says Today read: approximately 3 weeks ago!
Quotes are fantastic, I love quotes. On my iGoogle home page I have a quote of the day and most of them are pretty good. Not long ago, this was the quote that appeared:
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. – Rene Descartes
I read it, then re-read it and then pasted it here to blog about it! I think, at least in my life, it is very true. To give a basic example, your sitting at the dinner table and the person who cooked the meal puts down a dish and says “Careful, the dish is hot.” Following this statement two different people proceed to touch this dish and both follow with an exclamation along the lines of “Ow! That is hot.”
I see two options, either the people wanted to burn themselves (which is doubtful) or, albeit with good intentions, they didn’t fully believe that the dish was hot.
I think it is human nature to doubt, but I think we only want to doubt safe things. I don’t think we want to doubt deep important issues, probably because we know that it will lead us to the truth and to some extent we are afraid of the truth. I think if the quote (yes, another one) “You want the truth?You can’t handle the truth!” or “The truth hurts.”
I’m not entirely sure of the point of this post, but I take two main things out of it. If you really want to know the truth you need to doubt, however in doing this be prepared to discover the truth, though the truth may not always be want you want to hear. I think this quote is very true and can be applied in almost all aspects of life.
This post in some ways, follows on from the last. It was inspired by more thinking about the last post, some further discussions and reading, and, as some of you may have picked up a song by Casting Crowns.
The song is ‘Somewhere in the Middle’ and I think it is pretty effective in describing my Christian life & walk. The especially powerful and poignant lyrics for me though is the intro line to the chorus and then two lines in the chorus: “Just how close can I get, Lord, to my surrender without losing all control … With eyes wide open to the differences, the God we want and the God who is, But will we trade our dreams for His or are we caught in the middle” I don’t want to make this generalization for everybody, but for me I think the first part is exactly what we want. We want to surrender to God, as Christian’s it’s a desire we have. Having said that, we don’t want losing control to be a part of that. It doesn’t work, yet we try to make it work – I can mostly surrender, but in case something goes wrong I’ll keep just enough control to fix it. As the songs says, we end up somewhere in the middle.
The next line, the title of this post I think is obvious to most Christians. We know God, we know who he is, we also have preconceived ideas of who he is and how he should do things, but we know in practice this isn’t how he works. I think the next line is the real test but – knowing who he is, are we willing to give up our dreams and desire in favour of his. I think this is one of the hardest things we have to do – but it comes back to Trusting God! Our society doesn’t help in this scenario, when we are as young as 4 we are encouraged to dream and to turn our dreams into reality. I’m sure God cares about out dreams, but if our dreams aren’t in line with His will do we really [after deep consideration] want them to be reality?
Edit: I’ve been meaning to do this edit for some time, because I think the above paragraph could well be misconstrued. I’m not trying to belittle our dreams or say they’re not important, indeed in many cases those dreams may have been planted by God. I am saying that our dreams need to be tested against God’s will & word and sometimes God will act to make impossible things possible and block normal possibilities. (Hopefully this clarifies and is not more confusing!)
Lord, help me to willingly surrender and give you complete control of my life. I pray that your Holy Spirit will work to align my will to yours – that I will be willing to trade my dreams for yours, that the way I live my life will be a worthy response to you, the God who is, not the God I want – yet ultimately you are all I could ever want, and more than I will ever need!