In Reply to: Why is it? posted by Porceleindoll on February 10, 2005 at 01:15:54:
one thing that i believe i have learned about life is that it is very difficult to always recognize the forces that are at work around us. according to the scriptures, the picture that emerges is that quite often when we try to hang agency and motive on specific events , claim some thing as God's doing or the devil's handiwork, we fail to understand the true nature of things, the interplay of God's sovereignty and his decision to allow freewill, and physics, and so many other variables to play such mysteriously interconnected and sometimes paradoxical roles. the nature of reality is pretty mysterious .. "we see thru a glass darkly" paul says.
it certainly is no surprise that so many sg's decide to just jettison anything associated w/ the worldview of their youth. i also think that most fg's who do retain faith also find themselves having to jettison huge chunks of the assumptions we had made about the nature of God's relationship w/ mankind. it really doesn't easily reduce to the goofy little formulas we accepted as revelation.
but i think that the difference often may be that many fg's have had an experience with the person of jesus that cannot be easily dismissed, regardless of the wtc rubble that may have buried it in tf, (or for that matter many religious groups). as problematic as this relationship with the invisible God may be, it is impossible to deny the reality of a genuine encounter with the living God. it will take more than the 70-80 years of earthly pilgramage to in anyway fully understand the whole deal, but for a believer, that stands to reason.
"if we awake at all, we awake to mystery." annie dillard.