Brent Roam discusses Creation vs. Evolution and what that even means.

Brent Roam opens up and tells his story.

and…why does it matter anyway?

Wow, that is an in-your-face question.  One that we might think should come included with a lightning bolt.   If God were all-powerful a lightning bolt would prove it. But there is no lightning bolt and as absent as the lightning bolt is there doesn’t seem to be much response from God.   Social injustices prevail and we wonder why is God silent.   If he has the power to do good and doesn’t do it, isn’t that just as evil as the thousands of Europeans who stood by and watched Hitler burn the Jewish masses?  They’re culpable, as well?  Right?  So how does God get off so easy?

How can we speak justly about God when we reflect on Sandra Cantu?  The 8 year old body was found stuffed into a suitcase and sunk into an irrigation pond, a couple weeks ago just a few miles from here in Tracy California.   What about her?  Playing, innocently with her Sunday school teacher, she was raped inside a church and then killed inside a church.   Now if God is so loving and so powerful why did Sandra Cantu have to die this way?  I have been asked these questions over and over.  There have been times when I have felt like Scott McClellan fielding questions for President Bush, during the Iraq War.

When I was a youth pastor (many years ago), one of the girls from the youth group came to church on a summer evening, got out of the car and was apprehended by several young gangster kids.  They all raped her repeatedly.  She practically crawled home.  Her mom showed up at the church the next morning in a rage.  She went straight to the Lead Pastor and said, “I’ve paid my tithes here for 25 years.  I’ve been faithful to prayer.  I rarely miss a church service.  I have heard you quote Psalm 91 “he will give his angels charge over you to keep you in all your ways.”  Where were those angels last night?  Huh?!?  What kind of a kind God would let my little girl scream out his name while he did nothing?”

Disclaimer.   Suffering makes no sense to me any way you cut it.   The best explanation is still an explanation.  I remember when my best friend’s dad died.  He had worked on a Navy ship with open asbestos and suffered greatly for it.  The church prayed and believed.  His dad prayed and believed, probably more than anyone.  But he died.  I had no words for my 15 year old friend.  Anything I would have said would have been cheap.  I told him I loved him.  I told him it mattered to me, that he was hurting.  But beyond that I didn’t have a good answer for his father’s untimely death.   It didn’t add up.

The best explanation doesn’t stop suffering or pain or evil.   So when Dawkins or Hitchens answer the problem of evil, they’re just as empty and tin-canish as the next guy.  Mental anguish and physical pain can’t be resolved with words.  The reality is suffering hurts on so many levels.  The fact is evil and suffering are very real.  And I don’t have the miracle answer today that will bring all debates to a ceasefire.   Candidly, I am a lot better at asking questions than answering them.   And as I get into today and make my feeble attempt at reconciling a just God and an evil world, I run the risk of reducing pain and suffering to 3 points and a poem.

The questions posited today often come from two different angles.  On the one hand, there can be the jester seeking to justify his lifestyle of godlessness.  He rolls together a couple questions like these from his playground, packs them into a mud-ball and flings them into the face of the Christian God.  He thinks that since no one can solve his riddle he has proven that the riddle cannot be solved.  He dusts off his hands with a pompous air, as if to say, “That wasn’t so hard, I have just disproved God.”  He assumes that God is proven or disproven through a riddle.  This is comforting to his godless lifestyle.  But the jester’s questions are detached from the pain and suffering.  His riddle is a slight of hand.  Where he disappears his guilty feelings and poof out comes a rebellious rabbit from his hat to the applause of his audience.

On the other hand, there is the young mother, bereft of her little girl at the hands of a drunk-driver.  Where was God?  Why did this happen?  Chloe was only 7, what did she ever do to deserve this suffering?  God why didn’t you make the driver crash into a tree a mile before he hit Chloe?  Where were you?  Where are you?  She aches and yearns for answers, but her questions are not attempts at justifying her godlessness.  She needs to know.  How could a good God allow this?  She seeks consolation to her pain?  She wants her little Chloe back.  She hurts.  She wants comfort.   One questions from a broken heart and the other from a stubborn will.

My disclaimer is this.  To both of these people there is no rational reason for a good God allowing evil.  Even if the riddle could be solved, and the skeptic was caught in his smoke and mirrors, the problem is much deeper than the riddle.  The jester doesn’t want God.  And if he doesn’t want God, then God in his love will not forcibly prove himself to the jester and compromise freewill.  Now to the mother, no words will ever equal the weight of her Chloe.   Anything you say, may end up sounding clichéd and flat.   A quick discussion of the problem of evil in the world won’t bring back Chloe.   Mom, wants comfort.  Jester doesn’t want God.  Both of them want something different.

There is a third person, maybe part skeptical who looks for a reason to believe, or part believer who looks for a faith that makes sense.  To this third person I direct my musings and thoughts.

Theodicy.  Theodicy comes from two words:  God (theos) and justice (dike).  It wishes to speak justly about God precisely at the points of suffering.   Last week I shared my heart, opened up and got gut real with the whole Jesus thing.  If you weren’t here, go online and get the podcast.  In it I established my immense love for Jesus Christ.  I am biased.  I shared how I came to be biased.   Today, I want to be real with you.  I love Jesus.  My love for Jesus informs much of my response to this question.   For those of you who could careless about my love and want a real philosophical discussion I will indulge you at one point.  But lets get serious.  Jesus is about a faith.  Jesus is about a relationship.  This isn’t a nifty religion with brain-numbing exercises and monotonous rituals.  It’s a trust.  And trust, by its very nature, implies risk and improvable realities.   I cannot prove to my wife that I will be faithful to her.  I don’t have a picture of us at 80 rocking on a porch.   She trusts me.  We both have free will.  She could leave me today.  I am not a robot.  She doesn’t punch in a code and get an automated response.  I freely chose each day whether or not I will love her.  Its what makes our relationship real.  And candidly, some days its sweeter than other days.  But we trust.

Evil and suffering isn’t evidence against God.  Part of the fallacious premise of this assumption is that because evil appears pointless to me it must be pointless.  But who of us knows all things?  Who among the human race can prove that evil proves God doesn’t exist.  Or even that he doesn’t love?   Here’s a question: why do we as humans assume that human suffering is central to a definition of God?   Could suffering be one of those gaps in our understanding of God?  A mystery that will be unveiled in glorious colors and beautiful tastes in the existence beyond the here?  What if the life beyond the here and now, the existence in tomorrowland derives its value and weightiness though suffering?  What if the sufferings of this present time hold an incalculable value?  I don’t know.  Neither do you.  Again, to assume that suffering or pain has no value is to assume that we know everything.  In the Christian narrative suffering has tremendous value.   One early follower of Jesus said, “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”  Another man who walked with Jesus said, “trials are much more precious than gold, which perishes.”

My final preface remarks, the question of God and suffering is not a new invention.  It’s not a postmodern after thought.  It wasn’t even discovered during the enlightenment.  This question is as old as man.  And this question, more than any other, has forced people to think about God and life and has been the crossroads of many indecisive souls in their commitment to a trusting relationship with God.  I don’t have a new answer, in fact I consulted Irenaeus and Origen; Kierkegaard and Niebuhr; Clement and Thomas Aquinas, Augustine; Tertullian and Erasmus; Hermas, Luther and Hegel, Cyprian, Victor Frankl and Bonheoffer.  It seems every serious student of God and humanity wrestles with this question.  And I have benefited from their musings and thoughts on this subject.  I have sat at the feet of recent authors as well, Timothy Keller, Gregory Boyd, C.S. Lewis, and Thomas Oden.  And then there are my friends.   There is Brent the Rhodes Scholar and Marcus the Existential Wanderer, Brian the young theologian and Jason the apologist, Raymond the professor and Aaron the Anglican thinker, Dale the San Diego Smart Guy and Toby the Alaskan Pastor,  Kevin the Sports Almanac, and Mark the Newark Pastor.   I’ve talked with Rose, Aaron, Rachel and Brandon and Amanda.  You get the idea.

The only place in Scripture where suffering was absent was Eden.  From the fall forward suffering and evil are in every story and each line.  Heroes and Heroines alike suffer, struggle, face darkness and yes, die.  Suffering and death, evil and the brevity of life are certain.  And whereas on the one hand we can read about Joseph’s suffering and how it brought him to power in Egypt, we read about Abel’s suffering and there isn’t any apparent good that benefited him.  Or we read of Jacob struggling and struggling with God and the beauty that comes of his life but then read of Job and what justice comes to his children who die?  Yeah all of us get encouraged or strengthened by the story but Job’s kids are an illustration.  That being the case, in Scripture God takes suffering and works it into art.  He craft beauty out of ugly.   I have seen him do it.  I know he can.

Philosophical  Musings.

So I now redirect us back to the question.  why do we as humans assume that human suffering is central to a definition of God?   C.S. Lewis early on rejected the idea of God because of the cruelty of life.  But then he realized that evil was even more problematic for his new atheism.  In the end, he realized that suffering provided a better argument for God’s existence than one against it.

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust.  But how had I got this idea of “just” and “unjust”? . . . What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? . . . . Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own.  But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies . . . . . consequently Atheism turns out to be too simple.”

My friend Brent the Rhodes scholar says , “the person asking this question, ‘if God is good why is there so much bad in the world’ uses the words ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ as in “If God is good . . . why is there so much bad?” It seems to me that if there is no God, the objective concepts of good and bad more or less evaporate.  I think (though I’m not certain) that one loses the authority to call things objectively good or objectively bad when one denies the existence of God.  In other words, when the author of the question uses the word “bad,” he/she likely means famine, disease, earthquakes, hurricanes, violence, abuse, rape, murder, etc.  However, if God does not exist, on what grounds does one call those events “bad”?  Within the framework of a non-theistic random universe, these events merely represent the inevitable accidents of nature—they are neither bad, nor good. They involve meaningless collisions of energy and matter that have no moral quality whatsoever.  So, it appears that the question presumes that bad and good exist, a presumption, which perhaps implies a universal or objective moral law, a law which must have originated with a law-giver . . . you see where this is headed!”

See, the modern rejections of God are based on a sense of fair play and justice.  “People, we believe, ought not to suffer.” But where do we get this sense of people shouldn’t suffer?  Especially if we are atheist.   On what basis does the atheist judge the natural world to be wrong and unjust?  Atheism holds to the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection, where death, destruction, and violence cull out the weak and this deselecting of the weak is natural.

If there were no God, if we just evolved, could there really be such a horrifying thing as wickedness?  If we are nothing more than a higher developed primate who arrived at this stage of evolution by screening out the weak and preying on the vulnerable then why are we appalled when small children and the elderly assisted  are mistreated?  Why do we defend weaker tribes when they are oppressed by the stronger tribes?  Why do we care for the mentally challenged? A natural selection view of life has no place for genuine moral obligation.  The fact that we believe that Darfur and Dachau and 911 were horrible evils is a powerful argument for a just God.  A God who is good and made us in his image to be good.  And an image, that though broken into fragments and pieces still reflects a sense of morality and justice.   Natural selection doesn’t make me want to go out and risk my neck and health with Doctors without Borders.  Atheism has no good answer for why we have a sense of morality and justice in us.   The Judeo Christian story says, that because there are broken remnants of a just God floating around in me, I am angered when people are mistreated.  And because those pieces are broken I contribute to the injustices.

See the problem of suffering and evil is a problem for everyone.  Dawkins and Hitchens have no real answer to the question.  They fling mud at the Christian God, but are left with muddy hands and clothes as to why there is suffering.  They think that abandoning God makes the problem of suffering easier to handle.   But then they are left with the problem of justice and mercy.  Where do these come from if we are animals moving through a chronos of natural selection?

This bring us to the next logical question:  So what?  So evil and suffering cannot disprove God.  I’m still angry.  All your talking in circles doesn’t change thing for me.  All this evil and suffering doesn’t get the Christian God off the hook.  Not that easy.   Philosopher Peter Kreeft points out that “the Christian God came to earth to deliberately put himself on the hook of human suffering.”

So why does a loving God allow evil and suffering?

Or what excuse does the Bible make?  One of the Bible’s oldest books spends its entire discourse addressing the problem of pain.  A man loses all his possessions, his children die in horrible disasters, and his wife walks out on him.  Then he gets deathly sick.  His friends come to his aid, pelting him with questions and accusations.  As the grown men banter back and forth as to why Job is suffering.  One says its Job’s fault, some hidden sin.  His wife says, “curse God and die  Its God’s fault.”  All of them sit their and shake their heads at him.  After 40 chapters of these wise guys guessing at the problem of pain, God speaks. His response to Job is, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?  Have you seen death’s gate?  Where were you when the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?  In the end God puts the questions to Job, questions he cannot answer.  And God never answers the question of why is there suffering.  The mystery’s intact.  Instead of giving Job an explanation.  He gives himself.  He wouldn’t be that much of a God if we could understand it all. Fredrick Bruechner says, “For God to try to explain to Job the kinds of things Job wants explained would be like Einstein explaining relativity to a Littleneck Clam.”

But lets take a philosophical stab at why God allows suffering.  The greatest thinkers of Christianity usually begin with human freewill.   Ultimately, all the evil in the world doesn’t come from God.  It comes from the free will of others.  To assume that God is responsible for our evil is to assume that we are nothing more than robots.  If love, real love, is a possibility, then hate, evil, suffering, are also possibilities.  People have a choice.  So why doesn’t God intervene every time someone misuses his/her freedom?  Well, then it wouldn’t be freedom.  And if there isn’t freedom, then there can’t be love.  So why does a loving God allow evil and suffering?  Well, it’s not evil and suffering that God is allowing, it’s freewill.  Freewill, by its very nature opens the door to evil and suffering, but it’s a door that swings open to goodness and love as well.

The skeptic Edward Boyd argued though, that the risk of freedom and all the hurt and all the pain that is caused by human freewill isn’t really worth it.  Gregory Boyd gave four responses to this:  (1) the same potential freedom for evil is an equal potential for good.  Yes there are the Hitlers and Stalins, but there are also the Mother Theresa’s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s.  (2) We don’t cry at funerals of people we never loved.  If you remove the pain out of life, you take with it the love.   Someday my kids will stand by my casket, shed a tear, and heave a deep sigh.  Why?  Because they love me.  If they have no relationship with me and never love me, I can’t hurt them.  The same is true of God on a cosmic scale.  “To refuse to create a world where love was possible because the risk was too great seems to be beneath God.  Love is really the only reason worth creating!”  (3) Therefore God risked a great deal in creating the world.  He has suffered rejection.  In the book of Hosea he portrays himself as a husband, who is deeply in love with, a wife who will not be faithful.  She harms herself, her husband, and her children by prostituting herself.  So, with a great deal of pain, God continually attempts to call His people, His bride, back to a faithful relationship with him.  (4) From the broadest possible perspective, the Christian faith speaks of a heaven and an eternity, and these two realities mean that freedom was really worth it.

So the Christian story says suffering is here, because we are in a pro-choice world.    We can choose to do evil or do good.   What about famine?  What about natural disasters?  The Christian story says the entire earth is under a curse because of man’s choice for evil.  We destroy everything beautiful and good.  With our knowledge we create nuclear bombs.  With our negligence we create cars and industrial factories that spew their toxins into the environment, melting polar ice caps and causing flooding.  And as far as famines go, did you know there is more than enough food to feed the world.  But evil men and greedy people don’t share, and that’s the reason for starvation.  Civil war and refugees fleeing their homes are the main causes of starvation.  Its choices that we make that cause the ecosystem to suffer, people.  And this freedom to choose affects everything.  The cosmos is affected by our choices.  The earth is under the curse of evil because of our choices.  We destroy the ozone layer.  And the earth is flooding, polar caps are melting, the ecosystem is suffering.  So as long as there is freewill there will be suffering.

So why believe in Jesus?  Why love Jesus?  Why do I embrace Jesus Christ?

Jesus loves me.  His love, suffered for us.  I understand this answer doesn’t make sense to someone who wants to argue philosophically about God’s existence and anthropologically about the creation of God.  But if you were to ask me, Jeff, why do you keep believing God even though you’ve suffered and seen suffering in the world I would say, “I reconcile suffering and a loving God, because of Jesus Christ. “  I believe in Jesus because he is believable, he isn’t an idea, he’s a human.  Touched by Thomas, and touching the lepers.  Eating at Matthews house and breaking bread for 5,000.  I believe in Jesus, a flesh and blood, Jewish male, raised in the village of Nazareth during the early part of the first century.  But that’s only part of how I reconcile suffering with a loving God.  See, there’s more to Jesus than what was touched, seen, heard, and experienced.  He is more than a teacher, revolutionizing the masses.  He is more than a humanitarian feeding the hungry.  He is more than a Social reformer defending the oppressed.  He is more than an underdog taking on the elitist and movers and shakers of his day.  He is more than prophet speaking on behalf of God.  He is more than a priest leading the people to God. Jesus Christ is more than a martyr suffering for a good cause.  Jesus is more.  Jesus is God The same God who gave us free-will, freely gave himself over to our free-will.  And we made him suffer.    Jesus is God loving us.   “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.”

How can I reconcile a loving God and a suffering world?  The other guys don’t have an answer that comes close to the comfort I have when I look at the cross and see Jesus suffering with us.  God suffers an injustice.  God suffers Rejection.  Persecution.  Naked Humiliation.  God is flogged.  Imprisoned.  Falsely accused.  Wrongfully condemned.  Bearing a cross.  Abandoned by friends.  Nailed.  Crucified.  Behold the suffering of God.  This is what love will do.  Call me foolish, call me crazy, call me duped by the Great Christian Myth.  But tonight when I lay me down to rest, I will sleep in the comfort that my life is in the hands of a nail-scarred God

So why doesn’t God do something with his power like stop starvation in Africa?  Jesus resurrection is the justice of God doing something good with suffering.  Jesus resurrection is God taking the evil of suffering and turning it into something beautiful.  See, we all want a hope that says that our sufferings are not in vain and the resurrection of Jesus Christ shows us that suffering is not in vain.   Atheism has nothing to hope in.  Annihilation and cessation of existence?  You call this hope?  Agnosticism has nothing to hope in.  Their mantra is  “Life’s a beep and then we die!”  We suffer.  The world suffers.  And then our awareness and existence vanishes into cosmic dust.  Eastern religions believe we lose our individuality and return to the great Allsoul, we are gone forever.  Even religions like Islam who believe in Paradise, believe it is just a Great Consolation for the losses and pains of this life and all the joys that might have been.   But Jesus resurrection says, “I suffered.  I died.  And yet, I live.”  It says, suffering doesn’t win.  It says suffering doesn’t merely cease.  Jesus resurrection says, there won’t merely be a consolation, but a restoration of life to the fullest, something un-experienced.

Remember in Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee discovers that his friend Gandalf was not dead (as he thought) but alive.  He cries, “I thought you were dead!  But then I thought that I was dead myself!  Is everything sad going to come untrue?”  “The answer of Christianity is– yes!    Everything sad is going to come untrue and will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost.”  Timothy Keller.

Dostoevsky

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity,  of all the blood that  they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

A Disciples Apologetic.

The best apologetic to this question of theodicy is not philosophical. Neither is it a debate on the historicity of Jesus Christ.  As I stated last week, the greatest apologetic is you.  Last week we triangulated the first angle of a Johannine apologetic for authentic followership.  And we said it was the disciple’s love for Jesus.  It was abiding and resting in the bosom of God.  Dancing with God like no one was watching.  Staring into the eyes of God with reckless love.  We read John 8, which said, “You are my disciples if you abide in my Word.”

Here is what I believe disciples should focus on as they look to live out the teachings of Jesus in the face of the tough questions of theodicy.  I believe the disciples answer to the question of “If God is as good as Christians say, why is there so much bad? If he is powerful and all, why not do something really good with his power, like wipe out starvation? Should be much more than words.

In John 13 Jesus brings his entourage together for a final meal.  His suffering and pain is about to begin. He reflects on his final moments with his friends.  He knows its over.  Crucifixion in the morning.  He knows that men will question the authenticity of his disciples’ claims once he dies.  In fact, the critics and skeptics alike will scrutinize everything that is about to happen.  How will the world know that what his disciples has is legitimate? What will convince the world that even though he’s gone, he’s still there?  And what will distinguish them the rest of the pack?  He then says, “By this will all men know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

This second angle is simple: love others.  Jesus does not say you are the real deal if you join a certain church or are part of a particular denomination.  He does not say you are the real deal if you sign your name to the Apostles Creed.  He says, everyone will know you are real when you love.  Authentic community is the best apologetic for reconciling suffering with a loving God.

Jesus didn’t want his disciples to argue and debate the existence of God with words but with acts of mercy and works of kindness.

When people say they have rejected God, ask them what kind of God was it that they rejected.  You’ll be surprised.  They will begin describing a God of hate, bigotry . . . in fact they begin describing some Christians that I know.  Why?  Because they is the only image of God they see.  Reverse this and what do you get?  If people were loving each other, caring for each other, including each other, they would see a God that accepts them!  Embraces them.  Loves them.

Donald Miller tells the story in Blue Like Jazz of protesting the World Bank in Seattle one year with Andrew the protestor.  “Andrew’s sign read STOP America’s Terroism” –he spelled terrorism wrong.  I felt empowered in the sea of people most of whom were chanting against corporations who were making slave laborers out of Third World Countries.  We were waiting for the President to show up.  I felt Bush was supporting the World Bank and was largely responsible for what was happening in Argentina.  When the President finally showed, things got heated.  The police mounted horses, charged into the crowd.  WE shouted that the horses weren’t weapons, they didn’t listen.  The president’s limo turned the corner so fast, where they shuttled him into the back door.  I was holding my sign very high in case he looked our way.  I started wondering if we had accomplished anything.  I started wondering whether we could change the world.  I mean of course we could—we could change our buying habits, elect socially conscious reps and that sort of thing, but I honestly don’t believe we would be solving the greater human conflict with our efforts.   The problem isn’t legislation or politicians. The problem is the same that it has always been.  I am the problem.  I think every conscious person has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself.  This is the hardest principle within Christian spirituality for me to deal with.  The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest.  The thing I realized on the day we protested was that it did me no good to protest America’s responsibility to global poverty when I wasn’t even giving money to my church, which has a terrific homeless ministry.  I started feeling like a hypocrite.  Did I really want social justice for the oppressed or do I just want to be known as a socially active person?  I spend 95% of my time thinking about me.   I don’t have to watch the evening news to see that the world is bad, I just need to look at me.  I am only saying that true change, true life-giving, God-honoring change would have to start with the individual.  I was the problem I had been protesting.  I wanted to make a sign that read “I AM THE PROBLEM.”

Here’s what I want to say to everyone here today that is serious about following Jesus Christ.  God’s answer to today’s suffering and tomorrow’s evil, is, get ready for this:  YOU.  We can sit around all day long, getting heady and brainy, babbling about philosophy and theology.  But Jesus showed us better than that.  Jesus came to be the solution to the problem of suffering.  Jesus said, “you want to be my disciples?  Then love, love one another.”  At another point when someone asked him the greatest commandment he said, “Love the Lord your God and Love your neighbor as yourself.”  When the legalist, looking for a loophole, asked “But who is my neighbor?”  Jesus told him the story of the Good Samaritan.  And said, “Go and do like him.  Your neighbor is anyone in need.”  God’s solution to the problem of suffering wasn’t a website called “sufferingsucks.com”  it wasn’t an NGO or a protest, its not forcing the world to think like you, its love.  Love people.

So Lighthouse.   I have decided that I’m “all in.”  I’m betting all my chips my hand of love that God has dealt me.  I decided that I am not going to sit on the sidelines, make excuses, shift blame and point fingers.  I am going to love.  When I am asked why doesn’t God do something with his power like help starving people.  I am going to say, he is, he is motivating me to share the food I have with meals on heels and Beodekker Park.  When they say, there is no God.  I will smile and think to myself, “there has to be because I am not this good on my own.  I am a selfish person living selflessly.”

I have decided I to get so busy loving people that I don’t have time to judge them.  I have decided to quit trying to argue every apologetic question and start being the answer.   Jesus said, Let your light so shine before men, that they would see your good works and glorify your Father in heave.”  I have decided that there are more important things in life than arguing that I am right.  And those things are living right.