A Good Week

It's amazing how quickly things can change. Last week I was upset about things, not looking forward to where things were about to go with several situations. And this week has been completely different. I started off the week with a lunch-meeting with a guy from my church. He's a genuine guy, and it was simply refreshing to have a guy understand all that I'm going through. As I questioned last week about the "point of the Bible", I have found new meaning to that question through a Bible study that I had last night with my father.

Me and my father had decided last week to start a Bible study where we actually read the Bible and studied the Word, and dug deeper into what it had to say...something that I had unsuccessfully done on a few occasions throughout my life. Before I started reading anything, I prayed for my mind and heart to be silent, and that I would be able to comprehend the Bible like never before. What proceeded was nothing short of "ask and it will be given, knock and the door will be answered" occasion. What I had previously thought of as a simple creation story and something that I thought I already knew everything that I needed to know, unraveled into a study of a well-known passage into something beyond anything I've done before. I read the passage and got more out of it than I ever have from the Bible in my life. Going into the reading, all that was on my mind was the question "how does evolution fit into the creation story that we know?" It was nothing short of amazing to find that throughout the whole creation story, there is proof that the world is 8 billion years old (like anti-creationist, evolutionists believe). There's enough in that passage to prove that dinosaurs existed and died off however many hundreds of millions of years ago. That there was in fact an Ice Age, or several. That in fact the world started as just rocks and ground, and that over millions of years it turned into single-cell organisms, and over a few more million years evolved into the luscious ecosystem that we think of it today. So long have I heard that creation and evolution could not exist together. I read one of Brian McLaren's books entitled "The Story We Find Ourselves In" which talks about the concept of creation and evolution coexisting, but not until I read the passage just last night did I find all that evolutionists say could in fact fit within the Christian's creation story. It gave me new hope in what the Bible has to offer. As I read the passage (Genesis 1:1-2:3) by myself, I wrote two pages of notes of my thoughts on what I was thinking while reading. If any of you know me personally, you will know that I write incredibly small, and that two pages of my writing could easily be five or six of someone else's writing. Then after this my father came and we talked about the passage for over an hour and a half. He then took me to an even deeper level, educating me on some of what the Hebrew originally meant. But all this to say, even without my father's vast education within religion, there is an easy way to say that evolution and creation can coexist. Kind of like Rob Bell's pen..."is it creation or evolution? Yep." Now some of you may want to dispute this claim, in which I will welcomely send you my notes on the passage, and we can discuss it further. I would be glad to. But all of this was just a breath of fresh air from the Bible, and it was done because, before I even started reading, I asked God to let me see a Bible that I had not read before. A book that I had almost written off for having any real meaning, and now all of a sudden I want to read more of it.

Today, I went to church with a clean slate on Christianity. I went to a service where the pastor's sermon series' title is "Monopolife"...speaking about finances. It hit incredibly close to home, even as a teenager, as just last night I spent $75 on clothes from Express (especially since if I hadn't had coupons, it would have been $130). And what was refreshing was that it wasn't one of these guilt-trips about how I need to give more money to that church. The pastor in fact didn't even pull it all together at the end and challenged us to give more to the church, like so many churches do. A point that he made, that really got me thinking is to "define the vision that God has for your life" but then to ask "are finances getting in the way of fulfilling that vision?" Wow. That's a pretty incredible thing to think about. I started looking at how to become more of a person of God, and that giving is something that fits in that persona. I decided to give a tithe to the church, something that I had not done to a church in over a year and a half (and back then I only gave a few times). Not from guilt, but from a personal desire to become a better follower of Christ.

I left the church a few hours ago, with my nerves completely shot. The only thing I can compare it to is when you almost get into a car accident, and the feeling you have afterward. All of your nerves are completely gone, and you are physically shaking. You can't stop it, and I was simply somewhere else for about a half-hour after the service. The whole ride home I couldn't put words into what was happening to me. What I think it is now, is that for the past week, I've had a better representation, and a better outlook on faith and Christianity, and have been closer to God, and have been closer to his presence than I have been in the past year. I'm excited about reading the Bible, and going to church. I have a desire to give, and become a better person. I want to stop doing things that do nothing but bring me down. I have hope in where I am going spiritually. The past year I've been confused with no goal in sight. Anger, depression, annoyance, frustration were all things I felt. But hope and excitement were not things I felt until this week. I'm excited and even now as I write this, I've got that feeling of my nerves being shot. It's a good feeling.