I'm Feeling: sooo happy for FRIDAY! :)
Background Noise: My Baby Loves Me by Martina McBride
So today is Friday, and yesterday was my big brother's birthday (yay!) and tomorrow is my little sister's birthday (yay!)... so that makes a Friday sandwich on birthdays! Weird, I know - but it makes me laugh. Happy Birthday to Adam and to Meg - I love you!! It's also Adam and Melissa's 4th anniversary today - yay again!!!
I'm reading this book right now called "Searching for God Knows What" by Donald Miller (the guy who wrote "Blue Like Jazz," which I also read this summer). I really like it - he has a funky writing style that sounds a lot like someone just kinda rambling at you - but he's rambling really impactful stuff. Reading books like that makes me want to write one myself, but also makes me think "I could never write a book like that..." I just really enjoy it when authors are able to make me think about something in a new way, shed some insight, make me think (as if I need any encouragement!). Here's an excerpt:
"If man was wired so that something outside himself told him who he was, and if God's presence was giving him a feeling of fulfillment, then when that relationship was broken, man would be pining for other people to tell him that he was good, right, okay with the world, and eternally secure. As I wrote earlier, we all compare ourselves to others, and none of our emotions - like jealousy and envy and lust - could exist unless man was wired so that somebody else told him who he was, and that somebody else was gone."
I don't think I ever was able to put those words to the thought before - but for me, it really does help explain the "gap" in our lives. It also convicts me about original sin - the idea that we are all born distorted - we are designed to get our identity from someone outside us (God), but that relationship was severed thousands of years ago. No one born on this earth is free from that.
Any thoughts?
6 thoughts:
Never really subscribed to the idea of "original sin" itself (it's a pretty loaded theological term), but I know what you're saying. Great quote.
I never liked the idea of original sin either - I really struggled with it, in fact. But when I think of sin as separation from God, as a disconnect in the way things were meant to be - I know for certain that no person born on this earth can escape it. It's not as though we are born having this connection with Him, and then we are first old enough to screw things up, we are sinners and have broken that. We are born distorted - it's really an interesting thought to me.
THANKS FOR THE HRAPPY BIRTHDAY WISHES. THAT SANDWICH LOOKS DELISH.
I LUB YOU.
And not to get into a theological discussion, but I actually do not believe that when we are born, we are sinful. If I believed that, I would naturally have to support the idea of infant baptism, which I don't. To me, sinning is a conscious decision that has to involve understanding, which we don't have until we grow.
I like to say that we are born into the effects of Adam's original sin, but not the guilt of it. Our free will makes us responsible for our own sin.
I think this could make my brain hurt really badly :) I'm intrigued, but don't pretend to have studied the topic nearly enough to reach any conclusion about the topic. One thing I am glad of - that these smaller theological issues don't make any impact on my salvation. Perhaps God didn't want us to be able to understand.
This is fun, though! :)
Yeah, usually I avoid theological discussions like the plague, precisely for the reason you just gave...they usually don't affect my faith and salvation! There's a couple that I've come to some conclusions on, though, so I like to sound smart (or at least opinionated) on those ones!
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