Apr 09

More Than You Can Handle

“God will never give you more than you can handle.”

What a crock of….!

Have you ever been in the depths of despair and had a friend feed you this line? As if to make things better, they contend that God would never give you more than you can handle (you strong individual you)! Yet, if He never gave us more than we could handle, what reason would we have to call on Him?

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” -Matthew 11:28 (NIV)

What burden would we need rest from if God would never give us more than we can handle?

Have you ever been in the dire straights of hopelessness? Have you ever felt true, utter despair? Hoplessness felt? When you are at the end of your emotional rope, the last thing you want to hear is that you can get through this (on your own). You want helpful advice, a helping hand, or just plain help period. You do not want regurgitated, baseless chatter.

“And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.” -1 Corinthians 10:13b

So the line may not be entirely baseless, but the (mis)interpretation of the verse is where the error lies; read it again: ‘he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.’ If you read further, you read the request to ‘flee from idolatry’. The Bible says that He will not let you be tempted more than you can handle, not that He will not give you more than you can handle. We are not meant to be able to handle everything; God is. We are meant to give our burdens over to Him. We are meant to call on Him. We are meant to resist temptation, but we are never guaranteed to be given only what we can handle.

I am never encouraged by those words; it never makes me feel better to hear that ‘God will never give you more than you can handle’ because it has always felt like a cop-out.

“A righteous man may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all.” -Psalm 34:19

God will never give you more than He can handle. The caveat to that though is that He can handle anything. He wants us to call on Him; He wants us to lean on Him. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

Jan 14

Why Evil?

In light of the Sandy Hook Elementary horror, among the many questions we ask include ‘where was God‘, ‘how could someone do this‘, and ‘why‘. Why did God allow this? How could someone be so evil? Why is there evil? As if to know the answers to these questions will settle our hearts and minds, we seek an answer to why someone would commit such a horrific act. As if to finally have confirmation that there is no God, we question the Deity we are trying to deny: where was He?

The baby Christian says that we must have evil to know good and therefor, in order for there to be a loving God, there must be an opposite evil force. Absolute good cannot exist without absolute evil. Evil must be so that we can be free.

The Christian prays.

Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.

The Christian reads his bible fumbling through the pages to find any reference that will justify a baby slain. A life taken too soon is God calling his babies home; innocence lost is a part of God’s overall plan. Jesus wept.
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Dec 11

Life Meaning

As if we have to have a meaning to live, we question at times what the meaning of life is. Not to take away from the fact that life is only produced out of procreation and a natural cycle that enables existence (obviously), but many, if not all, people want to know what our purpose here is.

Some mean to ask our purpose as a group of people whereas others mean it personally to say what is my individual purpose for existing. We of course know how we came to be and literally why, but we find ourselves questioning what we, the named individuals that we are, are meant to do with our lives.
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Dec 04

Reason

**Note: This will jump around. I can’t spit this word vomit out in any other way that makes sense right now because I can’t make sense of it in my head. I can’t make sense of it so I must write it out as I think it. Perhaps I will come back to it and modify it to a better flow, but for now, pure word vomit is all I can offer.**

More than once recently I have heard it said that “everything happens for a reason.” I’m still not sure where I stand on the issue. In discussing the idea of “free will vs fate/determinism”, I have run into this concept before.

I can’t seem to wrap my head around what I think because it always seems to create a paradox in my mind. I run in circles right back to start. I can reconcile that we are the effects of a first cause, but not that our effects are with an effectual purpose/reason.
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Oct 25

In God We Trusted

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

The US Currency (including the updated version) has the words ‘In God We Trust’.
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Jun 08

I’m Not An Atheist

I have the mind of an atheist, but Jesus lives in my heart. =]

I do understand the concept of not believing in anything; I understand that the idea of a ‘Creator’ may not be the most logical, scientific approach to the world. I understand that science just may be able to answer all the questions of the world better than ‘God’ can. I understand that religion is riddled with more questions than answers. If I didn’t have a heart for Jesus, I might be able to convince myself that we exist merely to exist.
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