Dialogue with the Divine

This morning during my time of stillness and prayer I asked God to remove the nagging doubts of his existence and involvement from my mind. I said amen and then checked my email where I found this:


07/21/08
Explaining Away Light
Jill Carattini

Ballet lost some of its wonder when it was explained. It was a class that was supposed to lift my mind, lighten my spirit, and boost my grade point average. Instead it became a one-credit nightmare: a class dedicated to dissecting moves I could not duplicate, within a semester that seemed to slowly dismember my fascination with dance.

Explanations sometimes have a way of leaving us with a sense of loss. Students note this phenomenon regularly. Expounded principles of light refraction and water particles seem to explain away the rainbow, or at least some of its mystique. Air pressure, gravity, and the laws of physics deconstruct the optical mystery of the curve ball. Knowledge and experience can leave us with a sense of disappointment or disenchantment.

I recently read an article that scientifically explained the glow of a firefly. The author noted the nerves and chemical compounds that make the "fire" possible, pointing out that it is merely a signal used for mating and far from the many romantic myths that have long surrounded it. I put the article down with a sigh. And then a thought occurred to me in a manner not unlike the promise of Christ: The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.(1) Where nerves and photocytes seem to explain away the glow of the firefly, have we any more erased the miracle of light?

However accurate or inaccurate our explanations might be, they sometimes have a way of leading us to short-sided conclusions. They have also led us to outright incongruity. We have now tried with great effort to define humanity as an impersonal product of chance, an adult germ in a vast cosmic machine. We have brusquely described life as a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, only to claim this should not lead us to despair. We have declared our appetites the gods of a better religion, while insisting both God and religion to be an invention of the human psyche. We scoff at the notion of a savior who frees the captive or restores the fallen, while maintaining we live with every qualification for human dignity, distinction, and freedom. But are these even realistic applications of our own philosophies? Do the explanations warrant the conclusions?

On the contrary, we are undermining our own mines. In the words of R.C. Sproul, we are living on borrowed capital. Why should a product of chance have intrinsic value? Why would an impersonal, cosmic accident see herself as a personal, relational being worthy of dignity? What we are attempting to explain away in one sentence, we are arguing for in the next.

Explanations need not always lead us to the conclusion that all is lost. But neither should our explanations lead us to conclusions that contradict our own accounts! Thankfully, in both cases, there are times in life where we find, like Job, that we have spoken out of turn and discover there may be more to the story. After sitting through the whirlwind of God's 63 questions, Job exclaims: "I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know" (Job 42:3).

The invitation is before us. "Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and hidden things that you have not known" (Jeremiah 33:3). God’s presence can be overlooked, but it cannot be explained away; the effort is as futile as the attempt to explain away the miracle of light.

Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Black Holes

A black hole, in astronomy, is a celestial object of such extremely intense gravity that it attracts everything near it and prevents everything, including light, from escaping. This accurately describes the state of my emotions the past three months. Two months ago things in general went south...I mean really far south...like Antarctica and the North Face has yet to make a jacket containing enough down feathers to insulate a person from a situation this icy.
As anyone who is acquainted with me or has read this blog knows my wife and two boys and I moved to Tempe, AZ in January of this year. What you might not know is that we took someone with us. We met Bill (not his real name) in October of last year. Bill had been a youth minister for close to seven years and had recently parted ways with the church. We immediately took a liking to Bill because he had all the airs of someone who had been wounded by the machine that can be the church machine. Josalyne and I are so merciful when we see someone licking their wounds we dive tongue first into helping them. So we took Bill under our wing and not only helped him get and keep his job with us at Outback but we encouraged him to come to Arizona with us and start a new life. In retrospect it now seems like the wrong idea and we've been told as much by friends and family but at the time I felt like a giddy prospector blazing a trail for the land of gold and in my excitement wanted to share the wealth with someone down on their luck.
Our first month in AZ should have served as a giant billboard warning us to jettison Bill. We were assured by Bill before we ever even packed the first pair of underwear that he had secured employment and had saved enough to carry him until he received his first paycheck. But, after having to exhaust more of our savings on gas, food, and lodging than we had originally accounted for we arrived practically in the hole. We all needed to start working immediately. The very next day Bill turned down the position he had been offered because he had "a bad feeling about it". This led to over a month of what he called "looking for work" and what we called "sleeping until eleven and then goofing around online until mid-afternoon". We tried to be gracious and understanding but our first priority was to provide for our little boys and so after waking him up every morning and doing everything short of showering and dressing him I got him out of the house and on the job trail.
I have been told that I am long-winded and that if words were people my writing's would be China. In the interest of the reader I will work towards something more like Iceland even though there are enough details following Bill finally finding and starting his job I could easily populate one hundred pages. You're welcome.
We agreed before leaving that Bill would use our car with the caveat that he would handle the monthly payments and the insurance. We were told at the end of each of the three months we were there that those items had been handled and we believed and trusted that it was the truth. At the end of April I was at the coffee shop where I worked when Josalyne called me. She had herself just received a call. A friend and adversary at the bank called Jos to warn her that they were coming to repossess the car. Josalyne told them there must be some mistake because Bill had been making the payments. She called Bill and he assured her that he had made every payment on time and he would fax a copy of the checks over to our bank as proof. Josalyne called the bank back and told them what was going on. The whole time I was feeling a persistent and nagging doubt and so I confronted Bill. He admitted that he hadn't made the first payment.
From there things snowballed as we discovered item after item that Bill had lied about "handling". We should have known that he wasn't "handling" any bills when package after package after package from ebay started pouring in. Later conversations would reveal that Bill had chosen to buy baseball bats, tomahawks, wallets, pants, shirts, coats, posters, guitars (he already had five), and so on rather than honor any of his financial obligations. Its hard to describe how betrayed we felt. We included Bill in our dream for a fresh start, allowed him to use our much needed car, bought all of the groceries (and made dinner with them every night), kept the apartment clean, involved him in everything we did as a family and with our families when they came to visit, (I) confided in him intensely personal things, etc. etc. etc. We were gutted. As if stealing and leeching off of a struggling young family wasn't bad enough, after we extended to him a second chance he threw it in our faces. We gave him the green light to leave his friends house (where he'd been staying) and return to the apartment with the condition that he start paying us a little bit back at a time every Friday. Thursday night he was back and Friday night he was right back out. He refused to surrender even one out of the almost three thousand dollars that he owed us.
Every detail has been painful, tedious, awkward, and infuriating from the police having to get involved in the recovery of the car to Josalyne having to load all of our belongings onto a storage POD by herself to having to leave our jobs behind to receiving threats from Bills family (Bill convinced his family that we had done to him everything that he had done to us) to getting letters from the complex demanding that we come up with almost four grand to cover the mess Bill created to leaving behind a wonderful new life that had taken us five years to achieve.
Back in Georgia it was hard to know what to say to people. It was harder to muster the energy to keep retelling the story (which is why I am doing it here) when every retelling just rekindled our anger and pain. I kept apologizing to people for my complex range of emotions. I would say, "there's always someone worse off like a wife with five children who just lost her husband or orphans rummaging through garbage in Guatamala". But its all relative isn't it? I mean, if I was that wife or that child would it be wrong of me to say, "this sucks"? I don't think so and this situation that we are still climbing out of on hands and knees definitely does suck. Its impossible to leave the emotional element out of the equation. It would be like explaining how rain works (and I have a three year old so believe me, that's like a daily thing) but leaving the water part out of it.
Bill wiped us out financially and wounded us to the point where it will be a task to trust anyone like that again. This situation has left us questioning God and wondering what the next step might be. Our cars are still in Arizona and we don't have to money to go and get them. All of our belongings are in a storage POD in Arizona and we don't have a place to put them. We are borrowing a car so Jos can work at Outback and I am caring for my mentally retarded brother and the boys full time. My mom and step-dad have been very gracious in letting us live in their basement in exchange for his care but at some point we have to move on. Right now we just don't know which direction to move and it sucks.

Why we love our church

This is why we love our church. I hope all is well with all our friends and family back in GA. I will be blogging more in the near future. In the meantime there is this... http://www.azcentral.com/community/tempe/articles/0322Praxis.html