Pay $10,000 to feel stupid.....

That's kinda how i feel about my first year at seminary. I think i was under some false pretenses that i would be able to better defend my faith, would better understand God, and be more certain of the big questions i have in life. Instead, I feel like I am more sure of the fact i don't know anything, I am more afraid of the fact that if someone thinks i know something about God I will be made to look like a fool. And I have even more questions about my life then i ever have had before. Regardless life continues to move forward and I am trying to figure out what the heck is happening.

I think all of those points actually have made me more of an idiot. For example I had to write a paper on Faith. Simple right. Faith. A very simple, very "christian", very biblical term. Well i found out that the actual word faith doesn't really ever get used in Genesis, instead they talk about "walking with the Lord", or being obedient....and basically that gets credited to them as righteousness. And you see this in the lives of many many people like Abel (who gets killed by his bro), Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph to name a few....plus the women like Rehab who is a whore, and Sarah who laughs at God. And this is when i started to get confused. These are the people that are considered the most righteous in the book of Hebrews and yet if you read there stories the bad seems to far outweigh the good.

Well to make a long story short, I stayed up till 4am on Wednesday night working on it and I actually never turned in the paper.....because it sucked so much. So as i laid in my bed pissed at wasson because he bought me a monster energy drink that kept me awake, and even more pissed at the fact that my paper was a piece of crap, i realized i cant even really define 'faith' in the context that i am supposed to. I guess i should be able to ,right ,being a seminary student but it just doesn't seem all that easy to define anymore. So i have really been wrestling with it these past couple days. I know that God credited these men and women with righteousness because of their belief or obedience but it just seemed more than that, it just seemed like the obedience was so limited to the disobedience displayed throughout the rest of the stories. As a result i have a 10 page paper written pretty poorly that says probably all the right things but doesn't really make much sense to me.....

But i got to thinking about it a little more and realized the fact that faith really isn't much different today. We have all acted in obedience in some way in following God but if we were honest with ourselves are much more rebellious than we would like to admit. And then i realized it, that no matter how obedient or right we are in relationship to God it is minor and insignificant to how faithful he is to us as his children. One of the commentators i was reading for the paper just says that as you read (obviously i am paraphrasing a very dumbed down version, very very dumbed down version) through the OT scriptures you can not ignore the fact that every human act of obedience is utterly subordinate to the faithfulness and promises of God.

So as i thought my present life, my crappy 10 page paper, and faith i realized that faith though requiring my obedience has far more to do with God and his faithfulness to me. And if.....if i truly believe that, my life and my orientation to him will be a lot different than it is today......It is in my understanding of the fact that despite myself and my greatest failures God will not fail me. Through that understanding it makes it far easier to be obedient, because it is truly the only response.

So I watched a movie....

I dont know if you have ever seen the movie Into the Wild, but I had been told by some random cuban lady on a plane back from Miami that i needed to watch it. So when I got home from I decided it would be a good time to go check out some movies. Me and Wass went and picked up about 4 films since it is our Spring Break. I dont want to ruin the movie for you but the whole premise is that this kid just graduated college and had been accepted into Law School at Harvard but instead decided to leave it all behind and go out alone living off of as little as possible and doing some pretty cool things along the way. Ultimately his goal is to get to Alaska where he will live alone in the wild away from all the impurities and frusterations of society. He ends up meeting these 2 hippies that basically become his closest friends. He spends some considerable time with them. As they begin to talk and get to know eachother they continue to question why he is doing what he is doing. Christopher McCandless the main character makes this statement. "Rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth." I started to think about what that means in the context of the movie and also in the context of my life. I found it ironic that Christopher, who is convinced that he does not need people to be happy, is so focused and driven to find what is true.

You need to watch the rest of the movie to kind of see how that statement plays out, but I believe that his quote has it right. In Christopher's desire to be counterculture he did stumble upon the fact that we live in a world that would much rather have the love, money, faith, fame, and fairness......then the truth. But then again, this is no secret. History atest to it, society screams it, and burried deep into my heart there is a quiet struggle to keep it in its right order.