A guest author sent me these thoughts and questions about God.
When something dreadful happens we think “How could a good and loving God let that happen?” But I’ve been thinking, how could he not let it happen? If we truly have free will and a choice then how can we expect God to selectively and biasedly interfere so that this life meets our expectations of him? Some people have to die; should God only save some but not others? To know happy experiences you need to have a comparative standard of sadness. Where do we draw the line? Should God ensure that we avoid all painful experiences, bad moods, illnesses, anything upsetting at all? Then it’s not really our life to live.
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Esther (a friend of Off The Map who has attended our live events) sent me an e-mail version of this
International Husband of the Year awards.
Posted in Comments from others | Comments OffBill e-mailed me this letter after listening to the podcast I did about Mental Health Disorders and Faith Communities.
Hello! I very much enjoyed your podcast about having a mental illness and how it is treated within the Christian
church. I have Bi-polar Affective Disorder also, and I have felt feelings and hurt just as you have in the church community as a whole. You are very articulate in the podcast in expressing those feelings of rejection and abandonment for what I think must be a lot of us who have mental illness but still are Christians.
The only thing that I have to add to your thoughts is that oftentimes God will bring one person even one special person into our lives that is a Christian who has gone through the same tragic and mystifying symptoms of a mental illness or who has had a family member with those symptoms that can give us hope and keep us afloat until the cycle of the illness moves forward finally to a better place. God did that for me.
The man’s name was Alex Sawyer and he had been suffering with depression for years. He saw my state of mental unbalance and instead of criticizing, he took me under his wing and got me to this poetry workshop every Tuesday night because he knew I enjoyed writing.
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I met Josh and Karlene Clark at Off The Map Live last year. They’re good friends of Rachel, who co-hosts our Justice and Compassion blog.
Josh and Karlene asked if I’d post this request for them:
We are seminary students who have been given an assignment in one of our classes to have a series of conversations with others who do not share our Christian faith. The purpose of these conversations is NOT to convert anyone, but to practice talking about traditional elements of our Christian faith in ways that make sense, and even more importantly, listening to others about their beliefs and experiences. We are also interested in talking about the different assumptions atheists and Christians have about the “Christian message.” It is an exercise in friendly dialog across differences in belief, and for open, honest, and safe dialog together.
So we are asking for two conversation partners who would be willing to spend about an hour a week for the next 12 weeks talking on the phone or chatting online, who are not Christian and are interested in this type of friendly conversations with us.
Josh and Karlene
If you have questions about the assignment feel free to ask here.
Updated to add contact information: you can e-mail Karlene at singamiga(at)yahoo(dot)com and Josh at joshclark17(at)mail(dot)com
Posted in Comments from others | 6 Comments »Amy sent me this the other day:
I want to suggest a topic for discussion: the way atheists are portrayed in the media. After seeing “The Bucket List” (which I really did like) I’m getting tired of movies portraying atheists as rude, callous people. The same thing happened in “This Christmas”. The only non-Christian in the family was the drug dealing, distant son. “Dogma” treats unbelievers like they’re stupid. Not all nonbelievers are like that.
I liked all three of these movies, but I would like to see a movie that includes a NICE atheist every now and then.
That’s my opinion. I’d love to hear what others think.
I’d love to also. As well as commenting on atheists in movies, feel free to comment on other types of movie stereotyping too.
I’m guessing it’s not just atheists who have opinions about how they’re portrayed in movies.
Posted in Comments from others | 17 Comments »Claudia asked the following questions in a comment on the Church Rater blog post Beth and Traci and the looks on their faces .
Beth suggested we bring Claudia’s questions over here. I thought that was a great idea. I think it’s neat when people who aren’t Christians ask friendly curious questions of Christians in order to understand Christians better.
Posted in Comments from others | 8 Comments »I would love to hear more about your process of mulling/studying/struggling/etc. – are there guidelines you tend to follow, or patterns you recognize that lead you to read a given [Bible] passage in a certain way? Or do you trust to some instinct or divine guidance or feeling to let you know at what point God’s really speaking directly to you through the book?
And another question for the group at large – again, hoping this doesn’t come off as confrontational, it’s just really, really interesting: Can any work OTHER than the Bible be divinely inspired?
Laura M posted this comment last week about how she coached her son’s soccer team. Even though Laura knew nothing about soccer, her team did much better this year than previously.
I’ve been busier than usual lately because I’ve been ‘coaching’ my son’s 6th grade soccer team. I didn’t want to coach the team, but so many guys signed up this season they had to split the team in half, and there was no one available to coach the extra team.
To make it easier on me (I really know nothing about soccer) they kept most of the guys who had played previous seasons on ‘my’ team. These boys had lost almost every game they’d played before I began ‘coaching’ them.
All I did was show up to practices with the equipment. At every practice I asked the guys what did they want to do, what did they think they needed to work on most, what positions did they want to play and practice?
I let them make almost all the decisions for themselves.
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I’m reposting part of a comment by Steve S responding to me saying I read the Bible the same way I read Jane Eyre.
Do you read all books like you read Jane Eyre?
The New York Times?
A New Kind of Christian?
The Audacity of Hope?
Gallic Wars?
The Gospel of Judas?
Because I would have a completely different approach to Jane Eyre than I would to a newspaper article or a history textbook, or even a cookbook. Don’t the genres and the authorship play any role in your approach to a piece of writing?
I guess I don’t understand what you are saying…
Could you clarify how the approach is the same?
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Sarah posted this comment yesterday.
Hi, My name is Sarah and I was just today at a Lunch Q&A With Jim. I am in a catholic (Jesuit) highschool where i am the head of the christian non catholic section. I have many issues trying to promote christianity with my school board pushing me to be the head of Non-christians. I thought of starting a group at my school called Conversation not Conversion In which students can come together and talk. Jim told me to post my idea on here to receive feedback and perhaps help in being strong through my struggle of wanting to sit on the sidelines not in the spotlight.
Posted in Comments from others | 7 Comments »Eliza wrote this yesterday in a comment on 25 tips to become more productive and happy at work:
Have any of you seen (or heard about) Tyranny of the Urgent? I haven’t looked at this book (oops, actually it looks like a pack of 5 books according to the link) but the idea, as I’ve heard it, is to think of “importance” on one axis & “urgent” on the other, & to focus on those items which are important over those which seem urgent. Those which are “important’ but not ‘urgent’ often get overlooked. (Ironically, for me, this books/these books apparently talk about the whole idea from a Christian perspective, which somehow had gotten dropped along the way in the sources I’d previously heard about this).
Eliza continues
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