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| Detail - Glory of the New Born Christ in presence of God Father and the Holy Spirit (Annakirche, Vienna) Adam and Eva are represented bellow Jesus-Christ Ceiling painting made by Daniel Gran (1694-1757). Post-processing: perspective and fade correction. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Stained glass at St John the Baptist's Anglican Church http://www.stjohnsashfield.org.au, Ashfield, New South Wales. Illustrates Jesus' description of himself "I am the Good Shepherd" (from the Gospel of John, chapter 10, verse 11). This version of the image shows the detail of his face. The memorial window is also captioned: "To the Glory of God and in Loving Memory of William Wright. Died 6th November, 1932. Aged 70 Yrs." (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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Gods Own County
Gods Own County (Photo credit: tricky (rick harrison))
The Perfect Imperfection of a Child of God
Adults forget the reality of a child like mind. We many times deal with our own childlike minds as adult without recognizing the benefit of natural curiosity. I always fear that young people grow up and stop looking and focus their minds on the mundane. They grow and cease to look beyond. The point of looking beyond is not to see down the road, but an attitude of always looking beyond.
The world is not the black and white. The confidence of youth that there is better right can be a source to drive many to seek the change the world .This is a energy that the world needs tempered with the reality that most view points on the world that teach in absolute right and wrong are lies. It is a lesson most of us learn over and over both corporately and individually over the course of our life time.
A sincere journey to know God starts, for most people, when as individuals, finally realize we can not know God wholly ever. , but chose to look for God anyway We will learn the most about God in the daily, seemingly mundane interactions with parents, lover, co-workers and friends. My spiritual quest started like for most people with my own family. My grandmother who walked as a Christian, but never overly confidently with a grace like few others I have met made me want to know the grace that she knew
. My own sister who strives to walk in my grandmother's steps in her own many always inspired me as well. She always casts aside the word by others spoken in haste and forgives easily. I will never share her world view but I respect the way she shares the love of Christ and ultimately of our universal God with others.
Many times we are timid or lack a measure of faith to not be satisfied with the open ended questions that no organized religion really ever fully answers. There are those we meet in our lives who are brave enough to keep asking away and realize that while God is never changing our ability to distinguish and understand God does. Wolf a friend of mine is the bravest person I have meet in this matter. Brave enough to drop the assumptions made in much spiritual confidence in the past, to move forward asking the same spiritual questions and getting new and truthful answers. The answers are necessary for us to seek to do the will of God in the world, but they never ever are complete and if we are honest we will always keep looking beyond them. It takes a brave soul to act on that they know is not perfect. They seek to do the will of God with an honest knowledge that all the human perceptions are
somewhat flawed and never universal.
God let's those who listen see that in so many ways we define our own realty. Yes, we can personally get a large degree of what we think we want even if it is far from the will of God for our lives. Knowing that we can so define our own reality in a positive way can help us make wiser choices in our lives and seek the will of God however, imperfectly. When we have too much faith in the validity of our created reality we can become lost and truly feel Godless in our walk in this world.
For many of us the Church is where we find that language and spiritual drama that speaks to us of the reality of God and the limits of being human in the world. Those of us, who still find comfort in the knowledge of Christ, find the Church a place for us to meet Christ as God in the flesh. We are driven towards God by our own knowledge of the reality of Christ. If we are honest we understand our reality is limited in the knowledge of God and can not define the spiritual reality for the rest of the world.
I have never met anyone who calls themselves a Christian that fully knows Christ. It has always been enough for me that Christ knows us. It seems that vanity alone makes people claim to know Christ fully. The goal of the Christian walk seems to me to be to learn to see the grace and transformative power of Christ in our own lives and the lives of others.
Christians learn about the grace and transformative power of Christ in the world in a walk that is many times slow, painful, and at moments joyful. Our entire past spiritual walk informs our moments on earth. Sometimes our greatest faith or wishful thinking is focused on our future moments on earth. This is how it should be because if we keep walking towards God we find our lives empowered by hope that God truly acts with love in world. We take solace in the hope that there is better always better than what we know as humans now. For me at the end of the day, this hope is empowered by the faith that at death we will fully see the face God. Our greatest faith is ultimately that our moments on earth matter
and we have in some way served God.
Many churches promote spiritual vanity but the individuals in the church still seek to walk in the less well defined truth of God anyway. I have an abiding love for the Anglican communion because it is broad and in its own three steps forward two steps back evolution embodies the sometimes comic reality of the Christian walk. A Mrs. Elizabeth Templeton, a church woman in Scotland said of the Anglican Communion, was an evolving life form, conspicuously unclassifiable, a kind of ecclesiastical duck-billed platypus, robustly mammal and igorously egg lying."
