In Reply to: Re: Difficult Question posted by susie on July 19, 2006 at 18:44:58:
My mostly agnostic SGA friend just turned me on to a very interesting San Francisco writer named Anne LaMott, who publishes on a website located at <dir.salon.com> as well as hardcopy books.
She identifies herself as a left-wing Christian, and is quite well known in the Bay Area for conducting writing workshops and peaceful resistence activities that occasionally get her arrested for disturbing the peace. Go figure that one out. She's a single mother who writes about her life, offering many insightful stories about raising her son Sam, who's now an adolescent.
Anyhoo, I found this article by LaMott that you might enjoy called "God Doesn't Take Sides". In the essay, she lists "five warning signs, symptomatic feelings that indicate that God is present in our hearts (and our national priorities)." According to LaMott's version of Christianity, "we who believe that a benevolent intelligence animates our lives need to live by Jesus' command: to try to stop killing other human beings, just for today, and to act upon a total commitment to the poor, to the old and to the Earth. Watch, God said, and I don't think he meant cable news. I could be wrong. But what I think he meant was, "Watch for the warning signs of God's presence so you can remember what he said to do -- bring food to those who hunger, bring water to those who thirst, and help through love and showing up to turn despair into hope, swords into plowshares."
http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2005/04/27/gods_warning_signs/index.html