Jo Bower's Blog

There was a time when I envied your unbelief:
Your disconnection from moral obligation,
Your freedom to wake up in the morning without the need to believe,
Free from the oppressive need to be an example.
Your Sunday morning lounging in bed with the paper or spouse,
Your no’s to social interaction that lack the guilt of ‘missing an opportunity to witness.’
I envied your ability to sidestep hard questions by discounting the Bible’s integrity.

But I began realizing something.
The theorizing of the purpose of organized religion is merely about herd control.
The distraction from the question of belief by focusing on man and not God.
The picking apart the writers and culture of the ancient writers,
Insisting there is no relevance to our lives today, is avoidance.
I realized while my envy of your freedom is my way of running away,
The insistence that a post-Christian era
Has made a personal relationship with God obsolete is your form of running away.

But we’ve both avoided the question.
God is.
God’s essence is love,
God’s efforts to reveal himself to us gave us Christ coming to earth;
Love in reality, not theory.

So, the first question is CAN we believe?
Then do we want to believe,
Hang onto the forms of Christianity when obligations sometimes overshadow faith
Or continue finding things to analyze and take apart instead experiencing belief?
We can both continue our diverging paths to where faith is impossible.
My form becomes a set way of living, of being, of doing, of reacting to things,
And your questions spiral farther away from the possibility of faith.

We both need to stop.
I realize my faith is the source of my relationship with the church,
Not the church and all we do the source of my relationship with God.
In the end they go together, one strengthening the other.
And somewhere can you step back and take hold of belief separate from your questions,
And understand some questions lose importance when viewed through faith,
And some will go a different direction when viewed through faith,
And some will just fade away once we accept the gift of belief?