The Gratefulness Paradox-Part I

God is showing me that I need to be willing to submit every aspect of my childhood to Him so He can heal me completely, by which I mean that I need to be able to be grateful for the childhood that God gave me. This is something I've struggled with for a very long time, and it's something I've known for a long time that I need to be able to do. I just haven't been able to pull it off.

I've gotten to the point where I can be grateful for one particular aspect of my childhood, and that's the fact that what I went through reminds me on a daily basis of my sinfulness before God. I'm not sure why that's so, but it is. The problem is, there was so much more to my childhood than just that, even though that's pretty important. And if I stay where I'm at right now? I don't think so. I'm stuck right now I know it's my own fault that I'm stuck and it's quite a predicament, but I don't know how to get out of it. The simple answer is that I need to seek God, but that feels more simplistic than simple. 

This whole thing is a large lesson about laying down my life and taking up my cross to follow Christ, and it's a hard lesson to learn. If I take up the cross of being grateful for absolutely every aspect of my childhood, then I have to be grateful that Harry raped me God only knows how many times. I have to be thankful that he perpetrated a gang rape on me when I was three years old. I have to be appreciative for the fact that he forced me to eat my own feces at various times. I have to thank God that he told me everytime he abused me that he had to do it because God hated me, and that he told me everytime he abused me that I was as ugly as if someone had thrown acid on my face. There's SOOO very MUCH!!

I don't know how in the world I'm supposed to do this! I know I can't do it without God's help, that's for sure, and for the life of me, I can't understand how I can or why I have to be grateful for all that terrible, horrific stuff. It's changed and affected every aspect of my whole life drastically. 

I want more than anything to follow God and to please Him, and if this is what I have to do to accomplish that, then I have to figure out how. Like I said previously, I know I can't do it without God's help, but the problem is that I don't even know how to go about getting that, or what His help will look like.

So I'm faced with a conundrum, and since I'm clueless about how to get out of it, I'll just have to leave it in God's hands. Having to do that makes me feel anxious, but I don't really have a choice, so I'll have to do it and also leave the anxiety in His hands as well. 

Harrumph!!

God Is Dead, But He's Not REALLY Dead, or It Depends On Who You Talk to...

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the whole idea of man--a created being--killing off God--his Creator. The idea apparently originated with Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882 and is stated as follows:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?                               

       ~~Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125

I find this whole concept to be incredibly odd and arrogant. The idea that God, who exists independently of any other beings or causes, and is completely self-sufficient and needing no one, could be killed by some one of His creatures is absolutely ludicrous. To me it's on the same level as Lucifer's rebellion and fall from Heaven. I think the only reason man is allowed to get away with it, even for awhile is because of God's grace and mercy. Angels, including Lucifer, have a free will, but they can't repent and get forgiven if they blow it as man can. There is no redemption for an angel who screws up. So when Lucifer rebelled and tried to exalt himself above the throne of God there was no second chance for him, no forgiveness, no redemption. There was only Hell and eternal damnation and a name change (from Lucifer to Satan), plus all the angels who participated in the attempted coup  following along down to the abyss. Man, on the other hand, gets a second chance. He can ask for forgiveness, and redemption is possible if he believes in Jesus Christ.

I wonder if what the God-is-dead-ers are killing is not God-Maker-of-Heaven-and-Earth-Ancient-of-Days-First-Person-of-the-Trinity-God, because it's not possible to do that. I wonder if instead they're killing their faith that God exists, or maybe their ideal of who God is, the concept of God in their minds, so that to them He is dead, but He's not REALLY dead.

What I find especially interesting about this is that Nietzsche came up with this idea in 1882, and in 1889 he went insane and remained that way until his death in 1900. The cause of his mental illness is unknown, though there is some speculation: at first it was thought that he had syphilis, and later it was decided that his symptoms were a better match with the symptoms of brain cancer. When I was a child I had a great-uncle who started out as a missionary, and after he came back from the mission field he wrote a book called Other Christs. After he wrote that book he got brain cancer and died. I've often wondered if there was a connection between that book and his cancer in terms of God's judgment, and I wonder the same thing about Nietzsche's insanity/brain cancer and his declaration that God was dead. He was a very well known philosopher who influenced millions of people for generations with that one idea, and that concept is STILL influencing generations of people.

I don't think I'm done writing this post, but I'm done for now, I guess, so I'm going to publish it. I'll come back later and revise it. That's the cool thing about keeping a blog. You can come back and edit a posting and completely change it around if you decide you don't like it. I doubt I'll change this very much. There's just a few thoughts I'd like to flesh out, but I don't have time to do it now, considering it's about 2 a.m. Sunday morning, and I have to get up and go to church because we're having a really cool guest preacher.