Zondervan Inspire

beautiful

Albert Camus begins his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" with these words: "There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." It is a haunting question; in fact, as I followed atheism to its logical conclusion in my own life as I grew up, it became my question.

I ended up in a hospital room in New Delhi, with doctors battling to keep me alive. It was in that lowly condition that I was handed a Bible, and the story of the gospel was read to me. All I can say now is how grateful I am that Sam Harris was not my mentor or his tirade my inspiration. Instead, I trusted the Christ of the Scriptures (see Romans 10:9-10), and today, four decades later, having traveled this globe dozens of times, speaking in numerous countries and lecturing in scores of universities, I find Jesus to be more beautiful and attractive than ever before.

From The End of Reason:
A Response to the
New Atheists

by Ravi Zacharias

Any comments or testimonies today?

paradise

Find a peaceful setting, surrounded by the beauty of creation, to meditate on what life must have been like in the garden of Eden. Think about what your life would be like if you experienced peace in all your relationships, if you never suffered physical or emotional pain, if you were never confused or ashamed or guilty, if you always experienced God's love and friendship. Let your imagination run riot as it fills in the details of God's original intention for your life and for those you love.

Then consider this: You were made for paradise. The joys you taste now are infinitesimal compared to those that await you in heaven, for "no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Corinthians 2:9).

From Women of the Bible

by Ann Spangler

Any comments or testimonies today?

belief

Belief in God is not just about evidence, or at least not in the sense that we usually think about evidence, where, say, data from science, history, or some other source are used to justify a position on an issue. Most of us believe in God because of personal experience. Yes, the reality of God is confirmed by everything from design in nature and big-bang cosmology to near-death experiences and the commonsense belief in moral values. But what really compels most of us is our sense of God's presence with us.

From Gum, Geckos, and God: A Family's Adventure in Space, Time, and Faith

by James S. Spiegel

Any comments or testimonies today?

perceive

Barb and I are always enchanted by the gorgeous rainbows we view from the front porch of our home. Usually illuminated against the dark clouds on the eastern horizon, the rainbow reminds us of God's everlasting love for us. Every time we see one, we are amazed by God's glorious artistry. It also reminds us of how differently men and women perceive the world. When I look at a rainbow, I see only seven colors. However, Barb usually sees eight or nine colors in the rainbow.

Male/female brain differences in perceiving are not limited to sight but occur in how we hear, feel, smell, and taste. If we expect our spouse to have our senses, we are in for a rude awakening.

From His Brain, Her Brain: How Divinely Designed Differences Can Strengthen Your Marriage

by Walt Larimore, MD and Barb Larimore

Any comments or testimonies today?

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My Prescription in a Dangerous World

by Ben Carson, MD

As boys, whenever my brother, Curtis, or I offered our mother an excuse for failing to accomplish something—whenever we complained about some seemingly insurmountable problem, whenever we grew weary or discouraged by some obstacle in the road of life, or especially whenever we whined about anything—she always offered the same response. She would get a puzzled look on her face and ask, “Do you have a brain?”

The implication was crystal clear: If you have a brain, use it! It’s all you need to overcome any problem!

My mother instilled in me a deep respect for the potential of the human brain, and that respect has deepened over the years to an attitude I can only describe as awe. Every time I open a child’s head and see a brain, I marvel at the mystery: This is what makes every one of us who we are. This is what holds all our memories, all our thoughts, all our dreams. This is what makes us different from each other in millions of ways. And yet if I could expose my brain and your brain and place them side by side, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference—even though we might be very different people. That still amazes me.

Inside each human brain are billions and billions of complex interconnections, neurons and synapses, which science has only barely begun to understand. When you add to that the mystery of mind and spirit, the human brain becomes a laboratory so vast and intricate you could work in it for a millennium and hardly scratch the surface.

Whenever I speak to audiences, I try to inspire them to consider the power and implications of such potential. I tell them that no computer network on earth can come close to the capacity of the average human brain. This resource that each one of us has is a tremendous gift from God—the most complex organ system in the entire universe. Your brain can take in two million bits of information per second. I tell audiences of several thousand people that if I could bring one person up onstage, have her look out at the crowd for one second, and lead her away, fifty years later I could perform an operation, take off the cranial bone, put in some depth electrodes, and stimulate the appropriate area of her brain, and she could remember not only where everyone was sitting, but what they were wearing.

That’s how amazing and complex the human brain is. It’s literally mind-boggling.

When I speak to students I sometimes illustrate this further by asking how many of them remember what they had for lunch in the cafeteria that day. (If I’m addressing accountants, I’ll ask who remembers the last time they did a sum total of values.) The point is to get them to raise their hands.

Then I run through a rapid-fire riff something like this: “Let’s think about what your brain had to do when I asked that question. First, the sound waves had to leave my lips, travel through the air into your external auditory meatus, travel down to your tympanic membrane, and set up a vibratory force that traveled across the ossicles of your middle ear to the oval and round windows, generating a vibratory force in the endolymph, which mechanically distorts the microcilia, converting mechanical energy to electrical energy, which traveled across the cochlear nerve to the cochlear nucleus at the ponto-medullary junction, from there to the superior olivary nucleus, ascending bilaterally up the brain stem through the lateral lemniscus to the inferior colliculus and the medial geniculate nucleus, then across the thalamic radiations to the posterior temporal lobes to begin the auditory processing, from there to the frontal lobes, coming down the tract of Vicq d’Azur, retrieving the memory from the medial hippocampal structures and the mammillary bodies, back to the frontal lobes to start the motor response at the Betz cell level, coming down the cortico-spinal tract, across the internal capsule into the cerebral peduncle, descending to the cervicomedullary decussation into the spinal cord gray matter, synapsing, and going out to the neuromuscular junction, stimulating the nerve and the muscle so you could raise your hand.”

Of course, that’s the simplified version. If I were to get into all of the inhibitory and coordinating influences, I would be talking for hours about this one thing.

The point is, we can decry the dangers we face or ignore them or even allow ourselves to be paralyzed by fear.

Or we can ask ourselves, do we have a brain?

Then let’s use this incredible tool God has given us to assess the risks that we face every day. We have the means to analyze risks and decide which are worth taking and which should be avoided.

Do you have a brain? Then use it.

That’s the secret.

That’s my simple but powerful prescription for life, love, and success in a dangerous world.

From Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live with Acceptable Risk by Ben Carson, MD

Welcome the Pruning Shears

by Rick Warren

If you are going to be fruitful, you must cooperate with God’s pruning in your life. In John 15:1–2, Jesus says, “I am the true Vine, and my Father is the Gardener. He lops off every branch that doesn’t produce. And he prunes those branches that bear fruit for even larger crops” (LB). Pruning involves cutting off the dead branches and cutting back the living branches, both to shape the tree or vine and to stimulate growth.

I have a neighbor who is an expert rose grower. His front and back yards are beautiful, so I invited him to come over to my back yard and work his magic on my roses. He was a wonder to watch. He brought his loppers to do his pruning, and he was ruthless. It hurt me just to watch him cut back my rosebushes. Whack, whack, whack! By the time he was finished, my rosebushes were only little stubs. Professional pruners will tell you that most people are too timid when it comes to pruning. I used to think that pruning was going in and gently cutting off the little dead pieces. Not so. The live stuff needs to go too—branches, leaves, and flowers. Evidently my neighbor knew what he was doing, because my roses have never bloomed so beautifully.

Here is my point: most of us think that when God prunes us, he cuts off the sinful and the superficial, the deadwood in our lives. He does do that, but he also cuts off stuff that is alive and successful: a business that is going great, a satisfying relationship, good health. Some of that may get whacked off for greater fruitfulness. It is not just deadwood that goes. God often cuts back good things too, in order to make us healthier. It is not always pleasant, but pruning is absolutely essential for spiritual growth. It is not optional. Remember, God is glorified when we bear “much fruit” (John 15:8), and that requires pruning. We must remember that the loppers are in the hands of our loving God. He knows what he is doing, and he wants what is best for us.

If you are a Christian, you are going to be pruned. Count on it. You may be going through pruning right now, and it may not all be deadwood. God cuts off branches that we feel are productive so that more fruit may be produced. This can be confusing. We believe that we are being fruitful and are puzzled, even frustrated, by God’s pruning. We ask, “Why are you doing this, God? I have given my business to you, but it’s failing. I have committed my health to you, but I’m going into the hospital next week. I have been tithing faithfully, yet I’m going bankrupt.”

I watched an educational TV program on houseplants in which the specialist suggested that viewers talk to their plants to help them grow. He explained that soothing, stroking, and talking to your Creeping Charlie will build the plant’s self-esteem. Imagine yourself saying, “You’re a good plant. My, you’re looking good today! You look marvelous.” Now imagine yourself talking to a plant you are pruning: “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” Whack! “You’ll thank me for this later!” Whack! “It’s for your own good!” I can imagine the plant talking back, “You have no heart. You don’t love me. I’ve worked long and hard to produce those roses you just cut off.”

Isn’t that what we say to God when he prunes us? “Don’t you love me? Don’t you care? Don’t you see what’s going on?” And we think God is angry with us. No, he’s not angry. One of the biggest mistakes Christians make is confusing pruning with punishment. Pruning is not punishment, so don’t equate the two. God is not angry with you. He just sees that you are someone who can bear more fruit, someone who has potential for greatness, someone he wants to use in a significant way. He wants you to be as fruitful as you possibly can be, so he prunes you back, even lopping off some of the things he has been blessing in your life. You lost your job? Don’t worry. God has a better idea. He sees what you do not see.

How does God prune us? He uses problems, pressures, and people. Oh, does he use people! People will criticize and challenge you. They will question and doubt you. They will challenge your motives. God is using them to prune you. As I have said throughout this book, God can use every situation in your life to help you grow if you will just have the right attitude. He can use it all—the problems you bring on yourself, a major disappointment, a financial reversal, a sudden illness, a broken marriage, a rebellious child, the death of a loved one. He will and he does use them all as part of the pruning process to make you even more fruitful.

Why does God do this to us? Look at Hebrews 12:11: “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.” We can all agree with that. It is not pleasant when you are being disciplined. The writer of Hebrews continues, “Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” God does this for our own benefit as well as for his glory.

Like discipline, pruning is unpleasant. Have you ever looked at a pruned tree or a pruned plant? It is ugly. A few years ago I had twelve sixty-foot eucalyptus trees in my front yard. I had a man come out and top them. He “topped” them all right—he left no branches! I ended up with twelve “totem poles” standing in my front yard. Some of my neighbors joked that a UFO had dropped these giant toothpicks. I think some of them thought I was starting some kind of Stonehenge cult. Those trees were ugly. But do you know what? After that pruning, the trees came back with greater fullness than ever before. Now my problem is raking up all the leaves!

My wife went through a time of severe pruning several years ago. She was ill, had a tough pregnancy, and was bedridden for months. It was a very tough time for our family. God cut back every activity in Kay’s life. I mean everything—leading women’s ministry, teaching Bible studies, all the things she loved and looked forward to doing. Even at home everything was chopped off; she couldn’t get out of bed to do anything. We talked about it a lot because it didn’t make sense at the time. Our church was growing rapidly, and I needed Kay’s help. Nevertheless, it was a valuable pruning time. Kay learned a lot, because when you are flat on your back, all you can do is look up. Her fruitfulness in the years since has been astounding. God has opened up new ministries and opportunities for her that we never imagined. The results of that pruning in her life are exciting, but it wasn’t fun going through it.

Pruning is never fun, and it is not pretty, but it is for your future benefit. The purpose of pruning is positive. God is not mad at you. The Bible says that there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). God does not “punish” his true children. Your punishment was taken care of on the cross. God’s pruning is for your very best, for greater fruitfulness in your life.

From God's Power to Change Your Life by Rick Warren

Four Steps to Transformation

by Rick Warren

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? Most of us are interested in change. Bestseller lists perennially include self-help books, and the New York Times even has specific categories for Hardcover Advice and Softcover Advice books. We attend seminars and read books and try diets and listen to tapes.

Moreover, God wants us to change. A life that is never willing to change is a great tragedy—a wasted life. Change is a necessary part of a growing life, and we need change in order to remain fresh and to keep progressing.

But often the new ideas we gain from books or seminars just don’t seem to last. Maybe we will be different for a while, but then discover that the new methods do not have a permanent effect. The main reason for this is that we work on the exterior, our outside behavior, instead of on the interior, our motives. Any lasting change must begin on the inside, and that is a work of God.

In the story of Jacob we can see the process God uses in helping us become the kind of person we have always wanted to be. The situation recorded in Genesis 32 was a turning point for Jacob and serves as a dramatic example of how God can change us.

Jacob was a somewhat shifty fellow. Even his name means “cheater” or “schemer” in Hebrew. But a life-changing experience transformed him into a new person, and he became Israel, the man after whom the entire nation of Israel was later named. After that experience Jacob was never the same again.

In this story we have a clear expression of the four-step process God uses to help us become the kind of people we want to be. It is a truly encouraging message—a message that says we don’t have to stay in the rut we are in, that God will help us to change, to overcome that weakness or sore spot in our life. We just have to let him. So how do we let God do that?

Genesis 32 relates that while Jacob was alone one night, someone (an angel, according to Hosea 12:4) appeared and wrestled with him until daybreak.

You may be asking, what does a wrestling match with an angel several thousand years ago have to do with changing me today? There are some important insights in this incident that show clearly the four steps required for transformation.

The first step is crisis. Jacob had a long wrestling match with an angel, and the angel was struggling, but it was a no-win situation for them both. By daybreak the angel was getting tired of the struggle because he saw that he could not win. It was a situation beyond his control.

The lesson we see in this is that when God wants to change us, he starts by getting our attention, by putting us in a frustrating situation that is completely beyond our control. We cannot win, and we just keep getting more and more tired in the struggle. God uses experiences and problems and crises to get our attention. If we are experiencing a crisis right now, it is because God is getting ready to change us for the better. He needs to do this because we won’t change until our fear of change is exceeded by the pain we are experiencing.

The second step in being changed by God is commitment. When the angel asked to be let go, Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me” (v. 26). Jacob was committed; he was persistent; he stayed with the situation until he worked it out. He was in a situation he didn’t like. It was frustrating and it was getting him down, but he was one hundred percent committed to staying with the situation until God turned it around for good.

Here is the lesson we learn from this: After God gets our attention with a problem, he does not solve it immediately. He waits a little longer to see whether we really mean business. Most people miss God’s best for their lives because they give up too soon; they cop out; they become discouraged. When God allows a problem in their lives, instead of hanging in there and saying, “God, I’m not going to let go of this until you bless me, until you turn it around,” they give up and end up missing God’s best.

Whatever you do, don’t give up. There is hope. Hang in there. Be committed to getting God’s best for your life.

The third step in being changed by God is confession. The angel asked Jacob, “What is your name?” And he answered, “Jacob” (v. 27). What was the purpose of the angel’s question? It was to get Jacob to acknowledge his character by stating his name, which means “cheater” or “schemer.” Jacob remembered the heartache he had caused by his scheming against his brother Esau, so when the angel asked, “What are you really like? What’s your character?” Jacob’s reply was saying, “I am a cheater. I am a schemer.” Jacob admitted his weaknesses because even though he was a cheater and a schemer, he was also honest with himself. When he identified himself as “Jacob,” he was admitting his character flaws.

This is an important part of God’s process for changing us, because we never change until we honestly face and admit our faults, sins, weaknesses, and mistakes. God will not go to work on our problem until we first admit that we have a problem. We need to say, “Lord, I’m in a mess. I have a problem, and I admit I made it.” Then God can go to work.

If we cop out at this point we will just encounter another problem of the same nature a little farther down the line. If we don’t learn the lesson now, we will have to learn it later, because God is going to teach it to us one way or the other. We can save ourselves a lot of trouble by responding properly when the crisis first comes along.

The fourth step in being changed by God is cooperation. God began changing Jacob as soon as he admitted who he was and began to cooperate with God’s plan. Jacob called the place where he wrestled with the angel “Peniel,” meaning “the face of God” (Gen. 32:30). Jacob had come face to face with God.

Every one of us must eventually come face to face with God, and when we do that, God can change us. God said to Jacob, “Now we can get down to business. I want you to relax. Just cooperate and trust me, and I will make the changes that you want made, and I will bless you.” God didn’t say, “Jacob, try real hard and use all your willpower to become perfect.” That doesn’t work, and God knows it. Willpower simply does not make permanent changes in our lives. That is attacking the outward circumstance. It is the internal motivation that makes the permanent changes, and that is what God works on.

When Jacob began to cooperate, God started working, and the first thing he did was give Jacob a new name, a new identity. God said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel” (v. 28). After we have had a personal encounter with God, we can no longer be the same. God changed Jacob from a cheater and schemer to an Israel, a “prince of God.” God knew Jacob’s potential; he saw through Jacob’s exterior of trying to be a worldly wise tough guy. God saw all of Jacob’s weaknesses, but he also saw beneath the surface: “That’s not the real you, Jacob. You’re actually an Israel. You are a prince.” God saw the prince in Jacob, and the former cheater began to become the man after whom the entire nation of Israel would be named.

God always knows how to bring out the best in your life, and he knows how to do it better than you do. If you let him, he will use whatever is necessary to accomplish this goal, because he doesn’t want you to waste your life.

Do you want God’s blessing on your life? Take the situation that is making you miserable right now, commit it to God, and say, “God, I am going to commit it to you. I am going to hold on to you until you turn this problem around for good.” Then confess the errors that you need to confess, and cooperate with God.

Maybe you have been limiting God by making excuses, blaming other people, or rationalizing. It is hard to drop your mask and say, “God, I have a weakness. I have a problem.” Until you do this, things will just stay the same as they are now. When you do this, you are changed for the rest of your life.

The good news is this: Beneath all those things you know about yourself that you do not like, God sees an Israel. He sees the prince or princess in your life. He sees what you can become. He sees your potential, and he wants to change you from a Jacob to an Israel. Let God do his changing!

From God's Answers to Life's Difficult Questions by Rick Warren

A Blessed Invasion

by Rich Wagner

A Coke bottle drops from the sky. That’s the surprising introduction to modern society that a bushman gets as he walks through the Kalahari Desert in the 1980 screwball comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy. In the film, the bushman isn’t sure what to make of a bottle falling from a passing airplane, and so he concludes that it must be a gift from the gods. After he takes it back to his tribe, together they try to figure out what to do with it. A musical instrument. A fire starter. Perhaps a cooking utensil. But in the end, they give up. Thinking the gift is more trouble than it is worth, the bushman goes on a journey across the desert to return the bottle to the gods.

All my life, I viewed joy as something like that Coke bottle. It descended unexpectedly from the heavens and fell into my world. And like the bushman, I had been puzzled my whole life about what to make of the gift. I tried various ways to mold it into something I could understand and work with. But when my dumbed-down versions of joy let me down, the whole experience became disillusioning. In my mind, God must be crazy for making the kind of promises that he does.

I became determined to shed my pidgin understanding of joy once and for all. Over the years, I’d studied various passages in the Bible that deal with joy. I probably even led a Bible study or two on the subject. But I wanted to look again at the Scriptures in light of joy and see what I had always been missing.

It’s no exaggeration to say that joy, in all its many forms, is a driving force of Scripture, being sprinkled over 350 times from Genesis through Revelation. It sweeps through the Garden of Eden, the Promised Land, Jesus’ earthly ministry, the early church, and the future second coming of Christ. “Joy is the great note all through the Bible,” seconds Oswald Chambers.

There are several Hebrew and Greek words used in the Scriptures that express joy and its derivatives, such as to rejoice and joyful. But if I summarize these various terms, I can translate joy as an “extreme delight or gladness that is outwardly expressed.” A translator may be pleased with this definition, but I wasn’t. To me, it sounded far too much like the happiness that always produced a dead end in my life.

I became convinced that there was more to the story than textual analysis alone. As I read through more of the Scriptures, it dawned on me that even in spots of the Bible that do not explicitly talk about joy, there is a clear undercurrent of joy throughout the text. I realized that if I was going to fully understand joy, then the underlying motivations of God throughout the Old and New Testaments must also be considered.

Plainly speaking, the God who is revealed in the pages of the Bible is a God of joy. He’s a loving Father, bursting at the seams, so to speak, in his desire to share his delight with the people he created. “He will rejoice over you with singing,” exclaims Zephaniah (Zephaniah 3:17). Charles Spurgeon adds, “Man was not originally made to mourn; he was made to rejoice.” Jesus Christ emphasizes this truth in John 15. After calling his followers to obedience and remaining steadfast, he concludes, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete” (v. 11). Joy emerges from Scripture as one of the primary ways in which God chooses to reveal himself, to express his amazing love to humankind, and to equip us for living in a fallen world.

Like a bolt of lightning from above, the nature of joy finally hit me, and I discovered a meaty biblical response to the pidgin joy that plagued me. Joy is something worlds apart from an emotional reaction or a smiley face. Instead, joy is nothing less than the nature of God pumped through our bloodstream. It’s a blessed invasion of the Spirit of God deep into my soul. Oswald Chambers puts it like this: “Jesus does not come to a man and say ‘Cheer up,’ he plants within a man the miracle of the joy of God’s own nature.”

I know, defining joy in this way sounds a bit mysterious. After all, there is hardly anything more mystifying in the life of a Christian than trying to grasp the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. While the particulars of what goes on inside of us may be difficult or impossible to grasp, don’t take this definition as sounding too abstract to make any practical significance for your life.

I am convinced that if we can just grab hold of the fact that joy is really the nature of God living inside of us, then our Christian walk will never be the same. Our confusion and disillusionment will start to fade away, and the “joy gap”—the crack between God’s promises of joy and our actual experience in the real world—will begin to vanish.

From The Myth of Happiness by Rich Wagner

The Tumbling Nativity

by Chonda Pierce

Let me tell you what happened to our family just a few Christmases ago. We inherited a nativity set. That sounds like a strange thing to inherit, but my brother was moving out of town, and he had one of those nearly life-size sets—the entire set: Mary, Joseph, Jesus in the manger, all three wise men, two camels, and a sheep. They were big and plastic and painted in bright colors and each one burned a single 40-watt bulb. That’s 360 watts when fully lit. We built a stable from scraps of wood and brought in a bale of straw, and the whole grouping was quite nice. Very Christmasy.

Then a few days before Christmas, I had one of those days when the Christmas spirit just left me. I wasn’t feeling it. In fact, I was a scrooge—snapping and barking. Maybe you’ve been there? I shouldn’t have been surprised at how I felt because it was the same old Christmas craziness: everyone seemed rushed, everything seemed so expensive, traffic was too slow, It’s a Wonderful Life had shown eighteen times already and so far I’d missed every single showing. I guess the last straw was when we came home from the mall late one night. It was wet and cold and windy and—did I mention that all the players of our nativity scene were hollow plastic and quite lightweight? It doesn’t take much of a breeze to tip one over and just a bit more to send them off sailing.

We pulled up in time to watch part of the tumbling show. David called out their names as they passed through the car’s headlights: “Mary! Joseph! Jesus!” In a blink, our lovely family had been scattered all over the neighborhood. Wise men were upended in the ditches. A camel grazed in a holly bush. And the worst thing of all was having to knock on the neighbor’s door late at night and ask for Jesus back. And after I’d pressed the neighbor so hard at Easter too. He just rolled his eyes and said, “Make up your mind, will you?”

Yeah, that pretty much killed the Christmas spirit for me. So what did we do? We regrouped, literally. First, we rescued all the nativity players and placed at least one good brick in the base of each figure. We discovered that the tumble had pretty much knocked out all the bulbs, but the good news was that David had some spare bulbs in the garage.

Now that the figures were better anchored and more than fully lit, David plugged in the nativity set and—whoa!—heaven came down and rested in our front yard! And just like that, the Christmas spirit was back.

So what do I do when the spiritual meter points to the low end? I just do. I listen to praise music, I sing praise music, I read my Joyce Myers and Beth Moore books, I read my Bibles (NIV, NASB, Living, King James, and the Message). If I depend on emotion, emotion will let me down. So I do what I know. And the funny thing about feeling spiritual is that if you just do what you know, just be spiritual, eventually that feeling will return. That’s when a smattering of laughter becomes rollicking guffaws, a quiet reverence becomes Hallelujah! And plastic nativity characters light up the neighborhood with at least 900 watts of brilliant white. Seems we were out of 40-watt bulbs, so David used 100s—nine of them. Now that’s the spirit!

From Roadkill on the Highway to Heaven by Chonda Pierce

A Conversation with a Skeptic

by Miroslav Volf

“Do you really believe all that stuff you’ve written about [in Free of Charge]?” an acquaintance asked me.

“Stuff!? What stuff?”

“You know, all this stuff about God the giver, about how you are supposed to give as God gives, and especially that when we give it’s really God giving through us. You say that Christ forgives through us, that human beings are sacred dwelling places of God, that they become fulfilled when they resonate with God’s love. It seems so . . . unreal, like a religious fairy tale!”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘stuff ’,” I answered defensively.

“I don’t mean to dis it. It’s beautiful, of course, what your parents did, forgiving that soldier. It sounds beautiful to tend a single rose like the Little Prince did, and even see the stars differently as a result. Your vision of a life of generosity and forgiveness is beautiful . . .”

“It’s not mine, you know.”

“But it’s beautiful as dreams are beautiful – beautifully unreal. Remember the movie Life Is Beautiful? In it, there was a kid in a concentration camp, Giosue, whose father created for him an illusion of living a normal life by pretending that the whole thing was an elaborate game. The life you describe is beautiful in that way, as an ingenious ruse.”

“I think I know what you mean, but . . .”

“When I look at how we actually live,” he continued, “when I think about how we are wired to live, all that talk about unselfish generosity and forgiveness makes no sense. We play a game of giving and forgiving, but the game was designed to mask a harsh reality that we are afraid to look at unadorned. We all just strive to maximize our ‘profits’, by whatever means society will let us get away with. We ‘give’ to get; we ‘forgive’ when it’s in our interest. That’s all there is –our profit, our interest, our insatiable egos. We are bundles of sophisticated, complex matter, each bundle hustling to survive and thrive, sometimes with others’ help, but mostly at others’ expense. And then we cover the tracks of our selfishness by ‘giving’ and ‘forgiving’.”

“You’ve stripped us naked, and with our clothes off, we’re not a pretty sight,” I said.

“But that’s the way we are! What you write in this book is one long, comforting, beautiful lie.”

“Lie? A strong word . . .”

“ . . . needed to hide the brutal reality.”

“I confess,” I continued, speaking half to myself and half to him, “I do wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, surrounded by the darkness, and think, ‘We’re all a bunch of egoists, some more pleasant than others, some smart enough to be short-term altruists, but we’re just stuffing ourselves and puffing ourselves up. Maybe no love has created us, no love dwells in our deceitful hearts, and no world of love will ever be given to us. We come out of inchoate darkness, and we return to inchoate darkness, and in the brief period we are alive, we are black holes of self-absorption.’ ”

“Now you’re talking. So why did you write the book? To put yourself back to sleep and return with a good conscience to your dream world? You can’t exorcise cruel reality with a pleasant dream!”

“When the dawn comes,” I continued with more conviction, “and I see the huge orange ball rising over Long Island Sound, I realize that, awake in the middle of the night, I was tempted by the voices of darkness! Do you know what happens when my son Aaron climbs into my bed, looks at me with those big doe eyes of his, when he gives me one of his unforgettable smiles, mischievous and tender at the same time, when he tells me ‘I love you’ as he burrows his head into the pillow next to mine? Do you know what happens then? I think, ‘That smile – and my failure to get angry with him for having awoken me from a short night’s sleep at 5:30 a.m.! – doesn’t quite fit into the story of our bottomless egotism.’ ”

“It’s touching that you love your son and that your son loves you. But as you know, that ‘love’ can be explained . . .”

“ . . . with one of those explanations that reduce complex human experiences to simple underlying causes,” I said, a bit irritated. “Yes, I know such reductive explanations well. If you are smart enough and armed with a vivid imagination, you can reduce anything to anything else – well, almost anything. Marx reduced religion to the ‘sigh of the oppressed creature’, Nietzsche reduced morality to resentment of the weak, Freud reduced . . .”

“ . . . you’re talking about pseudo-science . . .”

“There’s a difference, I agree. But hard sciences also offer reductive explanations. They are right and immensely useful in their own domains, but once they leave those domains, they distort reality. . .”

“ . . . they don’t distort. They explain and describe without fuzzy fluff!”

“After the hard sciences are done with their explaining, Aaron’s smile will be gone as if it were wiped off his face. Of course, if, armed with scientific explanations, you took a photo of his face looking at me, it would still look exactly the same as if he were smiling, only that he wouldn’t be smiling. The same facial grimace would be there, but the smile would be gone. A genuine smile is infused with a whole universe of meaning that the hard sciences cannot get at. The reality of that smile says to me that the world can’t just be there on its own, a surd fact of matter’s strange complexification, located between the Big Bang with which this universe started and the Big Whimper with which it is likely to end.”

“Was that supposed to be proof of God’s existence!? Aaron smiles, therefore God exists! One fine argument! It will go down in the books as ‘Volf ’s proof of God’s existence’!”

“You missed my point. No, nothing like proof of God’s existence. I am inclined to think God’s existence cannot be proven. Aaron’s smile is more like a crack in the naturalist’s ‘reality’. And besides, it illustrates that what you referred to as ‘fuzzy fluff ’ is sometimes the very best of what life is made of – a crack as a window into the true nature of reality.”

“You certainly see a lot in that smile . . .”

“You’d be surprised by what you can see in a single smile if you know how to look. If you look really carefully, and if you look with the eyes of the heart, you might even ‘see’ God. God is smiling at me in Aaron’s smile. God is shining in that large orange ball just rising over the horizon.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“But you like the God who gives and forgives as a character, as an image, as a vision, right?”

“It’s a pretty good god as gods go, the only trouble being that I can’t believe in any of them.”

“You don’t need to believe in God before you can embark upon this way of life.”

“What!?” he exclaimed. “I thought that everything in that way of life depended on God. God gives and forgives, and so should we. God gives and forgives – and so can we, not in our own right but by echoing God’s giving and forgiving. Take God away and everything collapses. I got this right, didn’t I?

“You did. Everything does depend on God – just not on our belief in God. It depends on God’s presence in our life. And God is present to us whether we believe or not.”

“How inconsiderate of God! Doesn’t God know anything about privacy, about being left alone when you want to be alone?”

“God has an excuse. God didn’t grow up in an upper-middleclass family with a bedroom of his own . . . Seriously, try not to think of it as being disrespectful of your wishes but as being kind – like a lover who doesn’t give up on the beloved, even though he has been betrayed, but keeps sending her a rose, or a poem, or whatever.”

“But a lover should leave her alone if she writes him a note that she would rather live without his advances. And it seems to me that my belief that God doesn’t exist counts as such a note.”

“Does it? At any rate, God is a peculiar kind of lover . . .”

“Very peculiar . . .”

“God is by definition present everywhere, which makes it difficult for God to leave non-believers to themselves, to be absent from their lives. God is not like a human being, a discrete individual located in one place at any given time, a place that can be marked as distinct from any place you and I, along with everyone else in the world, find ourselves. Moreover, you and I wouldn’t even be there to occupy this or that space, to believe or not to believe, if it were not for God being present in us, giving us life, one breath after another, one heartbeat after another.”

“Heavy stuff!”

“You don’t want a plain and uncomplicated God. I guarantee you, it’ll turn out being an idol.”

“Still, it seems strange as a nonbeliever to take up a way of life that only makes sense if you believe in God. It’s like slipping into somebody else’s shoes.”

“Milan Kundera, a Czech dissident writer who now lives in Paris, wrote a book three decades ago titled Laughable Loves. Do you know it? It doesn’t matter if you don’t. It’s about ‘weight’ and ‘lightness’ in our lives, the kind of stuff he explored in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Edward, the hero of one part of the book, longed for something essential, that he could take truly seriously, and he couldn’t find it ‘in his love affairs, or in his teaching, or in his thoughts. That’s why he longed for God.’ ”

“I can’t say that I long for God.”

“But you seem to long for a beautiful life – you’re the one who brought up the phrase. And you also suggested between the lines that it is a life that only God can give. In any case, I don’t want to compare what you want with what Kundera’s Edward wanted, though the two of you may be closer than you appear to be. Edward occasionally sat in church and looked thoughtfully at the cupola. ‘Let us take leave of him,’ writes Kundera at the end of the book, ‘at just such a time. It is afternoon, the church is quiet and empty. Edward is sitting in a pew tormented with sorrow, because God does not exist. But just at this moment his sorrow is so great that suddenly from its depth emerges the genuine living face of God.’ ”

“Kundera is playing on Nietzsche’s famous comment about the death of God and the churches as sepulchers of God, isn’t he?”

“I think that’s right. But I didn’t mean for us to discuss Kundera’s relation to Nietzsche . . .”

“You want me to go and sit in a church?”

“I want you to slip into a way of life you say you like, as you might slip into a church building. I want you to sit in it, or rather, walk around inside it for a while. There, you just might discover a living God – not at the end of an argument, but in the midst of a life well lived.”

From Free of Charge by Miroslav Volf