One day I will be able to write an entire post in French and it will make sense.
Anyways, today I read through the entire book of Crazy Love by Francis Chan. I think one of his bigger points of the book is that you're either all in or all out. I don't usually like this way of thinking because sometimes life has its gray areas. However, with God, you're either a follower of Him or you're not. You can't decide only to give Him 50% of your life. He died for us and did so much more, yet a large majority of Christians can't even allow their life to be up to God.
What position am I in? I don't know. I'm definitely not entirely all in, but not all out either. There are a few decisions I have made this year based on a calling from God that people question, but I'm very strongly convicted that these are the things God wants me to do. Any other path makes me feel a bit squeamish or just entirely disinterests me. My soul was not made to be stationary - if I want an adventurously fulfilling life and a life in motion - which I believe is one of God's calling for me to do, I need to follow His beckoning. I don't feel a conviction to give to the poor or donate a large part of my money, and if I do decide to do those I'd be merely doing it for show. I'll admit though, I do in some sense care for the less fortunate and I love the feeling of giving to people, just probably not as much as God would like me to. If I were completely break away from the conventional, I'd just entirely decide not to study accounting anymore. That subject honestly bores me to death even though I can understand it. Even in my earliest years I've been fascinated with languages and I definitely think that means something; and so do other Christians.
Another one of Francis Chan's points is the mortality of life. We live everyday as if we're going to live forever. We have plans for tomorrow, next week, next year, and what to do in our retirement years. In other words, we act as if life is predictable. Life on this Earth really is just a passing point. The illusions of storing up for this world without preparing for the riches of the the real world is deceiving and advertised all over the place - yet why do I still do it? I remember the time two years ago and had those thoughts of death - I wasn't afraid of it. I'm still not afraid of it, as death is as natural as life itself. Death actually shouldn't have a negative connotation to it all - just the process of dying may be frightening. I saw this artwork once where Life asked Death, 'Why do people like me but don't like you?' and Death replied "Because you are a beautiful lie, and I am a painful truth". Yet as much as I'm not afraid of death, shouldn't I be living as if I knew my time was short? Would I be ready to stand at the gates of Heaven and not be nervous about whether I'd be able to enter through the gates or not? People are always saying "Nah, it won't happen to me in a while". Really? What about the Connecticut shooting? Or the theatre shooting that occurred earlier this year? They definitely didn't see it coming. Granted, regarding the CT shooting at least, I bet quite a handful of the children who passed were very innocent and were living their lives to the fullest anyways with all their youth, so hopefully they've joined God in Heaven (but again, I don't really know). And bringing up this whole Mayan apocalypse jazz - what if the world really had ended yesterday? I bet a lot of us would not have been ready to end our lives here. I personally don't want to be on my deathbed thinking about all the numbers I looked over as an accountant. When you're dead, no one will care about what grades you got, what college you went to, what your salary was, or what kind of car you drove. And if your funeral goes horrible, well you don't really care either because you're dead. I'd like to live a life that is storing up riches for Heaven.
And probably the biggest points of Chan's book is simply love itself, which I have emphasized again and again is an extremely abstract concept for me to grab hold of. He, however, gave an example of looking forward to going home everyday to his children who run into his arms before he even steps out of his car and I sort of understood that, and wish I had that kind of feeling somehow in my life. I know that the love of God is not only crazy, but furious. His love can perform miracles, cast out demons, and give us comfort. As I try to understand spiritual warfare and how to deal with it, I'm also trying to fathom God's love. I'd like to think that God's love is too great to fathom but honestly I don't even understand many levels of love among humans so I don't think the immensity and intensity of such a feeling is the problem.
Chan also glossed over the topic of preaching hellfire, or essentially threatening us that if we don't follow God, we'll go to hell. A lot of people don't like this kind of teaching, me included. It's true though, that only Jesus is the bridge to Heaven and any other path will lead you straight to hell. I think any other true follower of Christ would agree that it's not really appropriate to scare people into believing into Jesus most of the time, but this fear and threatening of descending to hell is somewhat necessary. Chan says that imagine if God didn't put in The Word that if we didn't follow Him, we'd go to hell. Then, we would blame God for being an unloving God for not warning us in the first place. So in a sense, it's kind of for our own good, like what a parent telling a child certain things they don't want the child to do; and that's part of God's identity - a parent.
Chan said something about God having his own identity crisis. I don't really remember what he said but I guess this is just a reminder for me to look into this more... Well it's more of Jesus having an identity crisis, as when the Holy Spirit took the form of a human being and experienced human feelings - and every human has some sort of identity crisis - a major or subtle one. Strangely, Avatar the last airbender helped me understand the action of the Holy Spirit taking human form (because the spirit of the avatar took the form of humans to further love and understand them... except the Holy Spirit doesn't reincarnate). That is probably one of the biggest reasons why I love that show, haha.
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Speaking of spiritual warfare again, I skimmed through the first half of a book discussing spiritual warfare. I've read things about recognizing that we are covered by the blood of Jesus, and that is an important armor against spiritual warfare. That fact kind of disgusted me - only because it's blood and blood grosses me out. But the blood of Jesus is different and I have to remember that - it is pure and holy and just the mention of even the name of Jesus or the blood of Jesus sends the devil and his demons away.
I really wonder, though, a lot of the other 'fellow fallen angels' (demons) were tricked by the devil into following him - do they regret it? It's sad, knowing that there's no way back for them and so they're dragging as many souls that they can to join them in the bottomless pit.
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Oh one more thing I'd like to add is that Chan also talked briefly about individuality through Christ. He gave an example of an aspiring basketball player and people asking him things like are you going to be the next Michael Jordan or the next Kobe (something like that)? And that athlete was like nope I'm just going to be the first me. There is no one like you but you. If you decide to change just to fit in somewhere, then you are definitely not unique anymore and diversity is definitely something that makes the world go round. There aren't only 16 types of personality types based on Jung, 9 personalities based on the enneagram - there are 7 billion personalities and counting.
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I definitely do want to read a lot more of the books in the Christian Life section at Barnes and Noble.
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