I Have Doubts About God (but Buzzfeed helps)

Firstly, have a look at these.

http://distractify.com/culture/32-surreal-places-that-actually-exist-on-earth-i-cant-believe-this-isnt-photoshopped/

Secondly, blog.

This morning I went for a walk, and I admitted to God that in the last couple of months I’ve found myself wondering whether he’s just a figment of our collective imagination much more than I’ve ever done before. More than any time since I got baptised and got serious about Jesus, I have doubted his existence. So, that’s me admitting that.

Now, just to be clear, I really do believe in God. And the first thing I do when I realise that I’m doubting, is remember all the things that convinced me in the first place. There’s three big things:

1) Logic. Rationally I reckon there has to be something (not necessarily God like I know him) beyond the physical universe. Because the scientifically observable physical universe operates according to cause and effect. Everything that happens is caused by something that happens before it – like a chain. And we can trace that chain back to the big bang (just to clarify, I think that’s true), or maybe further to an idea of a multiverse, or an expand-and-collapse universe, but fundamentally wherever we get to, it still needs something to cause it. People say that God doesn’t help because he needs a cause too – but the thing is that if he isn’t part of the system of cause-and-effect, then he doesn’t. And if he’s beyond, apart from, the creator of, the physical cause-and-effect universe, then he could well be outside the system. Hope that made sense. Summary: the physical world is incapable of starting itself, but God is capable of just being, because he’s more than just stuff.

2) Evidence. There’s tonnes of evidence for the existence, and crucially the resurrection, of Jesus of Nazareth. I won’t go into all the details, if you’re interested in it please just drop me a message and I’d love to explain some more – but fundamentally it’s a historically established fact (it was even in an Andrew Marr programme a bit ago…) that there was a whole bunch of people who claimed that they’d seen Jesus back from the dead, who were getting no benefit out of that, gave accounts of themselves and what happened that would have been really stupid ones to make up, and got killed for it rather than say that it wasn’t true. If there might be something beyond the physical world out there, then these guys (and, controversially, women) make a pretty strong case that Jesus is something to do with it.

3) Experience. Let me tell quickly you the story of how I became a Christian.

I’ve always had trouble with believing in a God that does miracles – by which I mean, intervenes in the world and does something exceptional to the normal laws of nature. This scepticism was the big thing that held me back from getting baptised for 3 and a bit years (I started thinking about it when I was 12): the thing was, I’d heard people say that they’d had ‘experiences’ of God when they got baptised, and to be honest, I didn’t really believe them. I didn’t believe that God did that. But at the same time, I thought that if I got baptised and God didn’t do that to me, then I might become less convinced that he was real at all. So I didn’t get baptised.

But then when I was 15 I thought about it some more, and talked it through, and I decided that I was convinced by the logic and the evidence, and I should really say publically that I believed in God, because that was what it was about, not any weird supernatural occurrences or emotional hype. And I talked to my Dad about it, and I remember really clearly the car journey when we talked me through this big list of bits he’d found in the bible when people were baptised, or received the Holy Spirit, and nothing crazy or supernatural seemed to have happened. And it was such a relief for me. Such a relief. I thought, ‘Brilliant. God doesn’t necessarily do this weird stuff. I never really believed it would happen to me and now I know that it won’t and it doesn’t have to. Ideal.’

The funny thing about God, though, is that he likes to surprise us. I went to get baptised, safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have one of these weird ‘experiences’, and sure enough, I was overwhelmed by an inexplicably beautiful (and a little bit terrifying) experience of power and love. I just started weeping in this strange, joyful way. I remember it calming down as the song everyone was singing came to an end, and me thinking,
 
‘Ah, OK. It’s probably not God, it’s just that I’m nervous and the music is emotional. If it was God, why would it have stopped?’

And then it came back.

And  I ended up weeping with this strange joy through about half an hour of the service – I have this memory of getting changed into some dry clothes in the disabled toilets (I got dunked in a paddling pool) and still feeling this crazy overwhelming thing, and weeping, and just thinking, ‘God? This is crazy. You’re much more real than I thought you were.’

Now, when its someone else, its very easy to dismiss these things as delusions, as over-emotional things being misread as God. But when you’ve actually experienced it yourself, and you know how normal you were feeling before, how unimpressive the music actually was (no offence to the St. Marks Church band!), and what the experience was actually like – it gets a lot harder to explain away.

Funnily enough though, even after this, I was still sceptical about God doing stuff. It’s just pretty hard to believe, isn’t it? I still wrinkled my suspicious nose at anyone who claimed to have experienced God in church services or Christian conferences. I still thought that people who said that God healed people were probably just doing Derren Brown stuff and trying to make money. (I still think there are plenty of people out there doing that, by the way.) It just seemed unlikely. It felt a bit silly. Believing in God theoretically was acceptable, it made sense, it was rational. But believing in a God who does stuff was messy, it felt undignified, it got you associated with lunatics and conmen, or at least it did in my mind. It would surely be more sensible just not to credit any of that stuff and explain it all away as delusion or trickery. It would certainly be easier. The whole thing just felt silly.

But recently, and I’m finally getting to the point here, things have started to get even more incredible. In both senses of the word. Let me explain briefly.

That distractify.com thing at the top with the crazy places – that was in fact relevant to the blog. There are some amazing pictures – but the thing I find interesting is, that the really incredible ones are literally incredible – they are hard to believe! The one with the sand dune in the background really does look like a surrealist bit of photoshopping until you see the explanation and you think, ‘Sheesh, that’s a real place. I want to go there.’ The more incredible something is, the harder it is to believe.

And this is the thing that’s happened to me this term – the more mind-blowing stuff I see God doing, the harder it is to believe what I’m seeing. And that’s ridiculous in a way, because this is stuff happening that is pretty serious evidence that God is real. Stuff that is really hard to explain without him. But it makes it harder for me to believe in God at all, because the more incredible it gets, the harder my sceptical instinct squirms, and tries to close my eyes and shove its fingers in my ears. Tries to tell me that the whole thing is a mistake, that none of it can be what I think it is. Because it’s really, really weird.

But I’m trying to take my fingers out of my ears, stop squirming so much, and have a look at these things honestly, and see if they are really just coincidences, or the placebo effect, or the product of over-active imaginations, or whether when you combine them with all those other things I was talking about earlier, God might actually be the best explanation. I was going to try and tell you all these different stories of crazy/cool things myself, but then I realised it would be much more fun if I asked the people who they’re about to tell them for themselves! So the next few blogs will be stories from people many of you will know, about being healed, about hearing God speak to them, about their hands buzzing like a mobile phone on vibrate… (OK, actually that last one is mine, but I might tell that story too.)  

The weirdness will probably put you off a bit – it puts me off as I’ve just said – but I hope you’ll find them interesting anyway. I will leave you with a link to another one of these marvellous procrastination tools, and another one that has incredible bits in it. Enjoy!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/77-facts-that-sound-like-huge-lies-but-are-completely-true

me and rachael and the art of doing something

Last week I went to visit Rachael Leeson (who is, somewhat remarkably, my girlfriend) at uni in Exeter. I had a really, really, really nice time. This blog should probably have an ‘extreme soppiness’ warning label on it, so feel free to look away now, but hopefully it won’t be too nauseating. So here’s a little chain of thoughts about why it’s so fun being with Rachael – last week and these days in general…

thing one: we had good times with just the two of us.
This one is pretty obvious, but still, it’s true so I thought I’d include it. We went to the beach on Tuesday, even though it was forecast to rain, and it was tres amusant, as they say en Francais. We missed the train and so we had our picnic in the station, and we walked along the beach, and collected pretty shells, and went to look at the big lifeboat, and we had banoffee ice cream (inside, because it was too cold) and we went up to the top of a cliff and played hopscotch, and saw a bee fly into it’s burrow (who knew that bees had burrows?) and had an entertaining encounter with a dog trying to fetch a stick that was too fat for its face, and talked about all sorts of things, and missed the train on the way back as well and ate some butter crinkle biscuits. Good times.

but this was combined with thing two: we spent good time with other people too.
This one is still quite obvious, but less so. One of my favourite things about going to Exeter is getting to spend time with Rachael and her friends. They are legends and I love them, but the best thing is that they are Rachael’s friends, and now they’re my friends too. That we get to share love for them. It’s also fun because it means Rachael doesn’t have to have two lives (and same for me when she comes to Cambridge) – one which is with me, and one which is with them – and then she just switches awkwardly between them. Instead, she has one life, and I am a part of it. And when we skype I know who she’s talking about and I actually care as well, which is always good.

and thing two happens because of thing three: we are doing something together.
What I mean by this is something that has changed in our relationship since we started going out: we used to just want to be with each other, but now we’ve started to do something together. I think that a lot of the time we kind of assume that the only way to get to know someone better is to sit there and take turns to talk about yourselves, or maybe just to gaze deeply into one another’s eyes; but we’ve realised in the last couple of years that there’s only so much you can get to know someone like that. Mixed in with that, what really does the job, is doing things together. Maybe climbing a mountain (haven’t tried this with Rachael yet, but there are plans…), or maybe baking a chicken and mushroom pie (New Years Eve twenty-twelve all the way), or making loads of toasties and then giving them to people and talking about Jesus (last time she came to visit) – whatever it is, doing things together is an awesome may to be closer to each other without just spending all our time tying ourselves in emotional knots for the fun of it. And it’s a deeper sort of knowing too, a real kind of friendship, a trust, a companionship, because we’re companions on a journey together. I apologise for the pretentiousness of that last sentence, but my point stands. But there’s also a bigger thing going on here. What we’re fundamentally doing in our relationship has changed, because what we’re doing with both of our lives has changed. The way it is now, the way we want it to stay is this, and it’s pretty simple: Both of us are spending our lives loving Jesus, and loving people because he loves them, and hoping we can show them that, so that they can love him back. Sometimes we do that separately, and then when we’re together, we do it together. And in all sorts of wonderful ways Rachael helps me to do that better, and loving her is one of my favourite parts of that whole plan, and I hope that the same is true the other way round: but the liberating, glorious thing about it is that it means our relationship is not about us. The epic paradox of the whole thing being that the less it is about us, the more beautiful it is for us.

and as you can see, thing three flows out of thing four: we prefer Jesus.
This, to be honest, is the real cornerstone of why I love being with Rachael so much, it’s the river that flows through the heart of everything and keeps stuff alive – simply that we love Jesus more than we love each other. I remember this incredibly beautiful evening that we spent together back when I was in Torquay on my gap yaaah, and we were talking about some stuff I’d just read by Henri Nouwen. He’s this great Christian writer, and he was speaking about relationships and he said two things that changed a lot. Firstly he said that often we make relationships like hands clasped together with the fingers interlocked. 

We intertwine ourselves as tightly as we can with the other person, so there’s loads of contact, but if either of us moves, there’s lots of friction, and it’s really painful to pull ourselves apart, even for a short time, because we’re so tightly wrapped up in each other. Nouwen suggested that we try having a relationship like a pair of praying hands.

They are touching, there is contact everywhere, they are together. But instead of being completely entangled with each other they are pressed together, pointing in the same direction. They are free to move, and while they can feel each other moving they don’t lock each other in place. There is less friction, instead its a willing, peaceful, togetherness. He puts it better than I can: “This relationship is no longer a fearful clinging to each other but a free dance”. And the other thing he said was this: “mutual love is experienced as a participation in a greater and earlier love to which it points”. I remember sitting with Rachael and the two of us realising that our love for each other was a metaphor (I do love my metaphors) – that it was a part, it was a picture, of a “greater and earlier love”, that God gives it to us as a way to show us how deep and beautiful his love for us is, and how much he longs for us to share it with him. And I remember the two of us praying about that and just this incredible joy that came with it. Realising that God loves Rachael so much more and so much better than I do, but he lets me join in. That he loves me, so much more and so much better than Rachael does, but he uses her to give me a taste of it. And that together, he makes us a glimpse of his love to other people. 

And that’s why I love it when Rachael comes to stay, and she sleeps on my mate Joanna’s floor, and I get a call at 10am and she says they only just got up because they were up until three chatting about Chicken Run and the rest of their lives and Jesus. I love it because that’s part of the thing we’re doing together – loving Jesus and loving people because he loves them. I love it because I love sharing the brilliance of Rachael with other people – just like Jesus and the Father, they love each other so intensely, and they are utterly faithful to one another, but they open out that love and include us in it. I could go on about all this stuff for a very long time, but basically all I’m trying to do is publicly thank Jesus for Rachael, and what he’s done to the two of us. Because since we started loving Jesus more than each other, we love each other so much more and so much better. Because the more I love him the more I love her, and the more she loves him the more it is an honour and a delight to be near her. I promise I am not exaggerating. It is not perfect, and it is not always easy (especially living five hours apart most of the time), but it is always good. Probably because it’s not about us, it’s about Him – and he’s not always easy, but he is always good.

Your Story

I’m getting ready at the moment to tell stories for a couple of hours at an event we’re doing in college on Saturday night, which means I get to find all my favourite stories and read them again. And I think this one is my absolute favourite. I know I’m a softy, but I genuinely couldn’t read it at the end through the tears. Because it’s true.

It’s really just a story that Jesus told, reset in the modern world by Phillip Yancey in his book “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” (which, by the way, is crackin’). Anyway, I hope you like it.

A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. One night, after an argument, her Dad knocks on the door of her room and she screams, “I hate you!” That night she acts on a plan she’s rehearsed in her head a hundred times. She runs away.

She’s been to Detroit once before, on a school trip. The newspapers always talk about the gangs, the drugs, and the violence in downtown Detroit, so she thinks that it’s the last place her parents would look for her. California, maybe, but not Detroit.

On her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt before. She was right, she decides; her parents were keeping her from all the fun.

The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car teaches her a few things that men like. She’s underage, so they pay a premium. She lives in a penthouse, orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about her folks back home, but their lives seem so boring and provincial now, she can hardly believe she grew up there.

She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the words “Have you seen this child?” But she’s got blonde hair now, and with the makeup and the piercings she doesn’t look like a child.

After a year the first sallow sings of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. “These days, we can’t mess around,” he growls, and before she knows it she’s out on the street with nothing. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don’t pay much, and the money goes to support her habit. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. Although “sleeping” is the wrong word – a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.

One night she’s lying awake, listening for footsteps, and she doesn’t feel like woman of the world anymore. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She whimpers, softly. She’s hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she’s pulled on top of her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.

God, why did I leave, she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She’s sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.

Three times it rings through to the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two, but the third time she says, “Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.”

It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and in that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if here parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them? Even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them time to overcome the shock.

The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit the pavement rubbed worn by thousands of tires, and the asphalt steams. She’s forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. Oh, God.

When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, “Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.” Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smoothes her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips and wonders if her parents will notice. If they’re there.

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They’re all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a huge banner that reads “Welcome home!”

Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, “Dad, I’m sorry. I know…”

He interrupts her. “Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. There’s a banquet waiting for you at home.”

I don’t really know what to say at the end here except that I’ve never run away from my literal home, but I cry when I read this because this really is my story. And I tell it because I believe it could be your story too.