I was thinking recently and decided I wanted to add a section to my website to blog about issues of church and faith. It's interesting to consider what role the Internet might have in the lives of today's and tomorrow's young people -- could it be a catalyst for encouraging kids to explore and share their faith?
Birds eye viewMarch 17, 2009
As Meredith and I were flying down to Florida in February, I was looking down at the thousands upon thousands of lights on the ground. They were seemingly endless. And I imagined all of those people, hundreds of thousands of them, going about their lives, completely oblivious to the fact that I sat from my vantage point observing them. In a sense, I felt completely irrelevant, because I was totally detached from each of their lives, without any power to be seen or to affect them. I guess it was a kind of loneliness. But then I imagined that down there, in that sea of humanity, people were praying. Maybe I couldn't see them, but they were there. Some of them were laying in bed, reaching out to God. Some of them in their cars sending thoughts to heaven.
I had this moment of understanding, a window into that aspect of God's relationship with us: In a sense God is like I was, watching us, desiring this sea of people, despite their hectic lives, to turn their attention to Him. And when, against the odds, people do, how wonderful that must be to (proverbially) look down and see faithful people. Prayer is a loving act.
Shared reality VS private realitiesJanuary 19, 2009
Something that I've never really understood is post modernism. It's such a slippery, mushy concept to me. One of the things at the core of post modernism, I think, is the concept of relativism rather than absolutism, and that's another concept (relativism) that I've struggled with. But I think I've got it.
I had this sudden realization that my private "reality" is very different than everyone else's private reality: the stuff that's inside your head. What's at the core of this idea is that perception is reality. Our brains assemble all of our perceptions, they combine them with our beliefs/predictions about the world, and out the other end comes this thing called "reality".
And so Bob can say to Joe, "that might be your reality, it might seem true to you, but it's not my reality". And in a sense, he's right. His perceptions are knit together in a very different way than Joe's, and they form a "reality" that is, therefore, different.
Now here's the crux: I don't think that people who hold up this idea of "relative truth" are debating whether absolute truth exists, I think what they're saying, at the core of their argument, is that absolute truth isn't important. They're saying that, ultimately, it's the relative stuff that we experience, that makes up our private realities, and if the sum of our collective private realities make up the whole sum of experienced reality, it is thus what's truly important.
Clear. It's so clear to me now.
So let the debate rage on: Not whether one exists and the other doesn't, but this: Which reality is more important?
WhoopsSeptember 28, 2008
I had a flashback sitting in church today, to when I was in grade 9 or 10. I was sitting in science class, not paying attention, and our teacher Mr. Ross asked a question. As he finished his question, my attention snapped back. He had asked something about evolution. Did he just ask whether we believed evolution? I wasn't quite sure. The room was completely silent. I think he asked for a show of hands. I felt a need to answer the question, but I didn't know what the question was, exactly, and I was too embarrassed to put up my hand and ask for the question to be repeated because I wasn't paying attention.
After the class, a Christian girl approached me and inquired about the situation. She said something to the effect of "Do you think we should have put up our hands?", and in a stroke of idiocy I said something like "Maybe it wasn't really the best time". Wow, lame. I should have just admitted that I wasn't paying attention, and that yes, we should have.
I've often thought back to that occasion.
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