Category Archives: Evolution is the journey from fear to understanding.
Questions for Believers
What is the difference between saved and loved? Does being saved mean being finished? Is the Bible the Word of God or is Jesus the Word of God fleshed out for us?
Was Jesus making choices to love more and more people other than his own religion and nationality, even the Roman enemy, a major part of Being the Word of God? Is the WAY of Jesus’ life and willingness to love even those that killed him supposed to be the WAY of Christian’s lives? Did Jesus love unconditionally? Does God love unconditionally? Do we?
What is the difference between need and love?
Could our life journey from the neediness of a baby be a process of becoming able to love unconditionally? Does loving our neighbor mean only loving others whom we know and who are like us? Does loving Jesus mean we get to be rich? What did Jesus say about the rich man? Are our heroes rich? Are they kind? Are they like Jesus?
If, as he was dying, Hitler recognized the horrors he had caused and was stricken with sorrow and regret, would God forgive him?
Is our Spiritual journey more than following a set of ten rules basic to the survival of humans living together? In fact, are the Beatitudes the challenges that Jesus gave us for our adult Spiritual journey to loving BOTH ourselves AND others unconditionally, because Jesus fleshed out the unconditional love of God for all?
Do you love all your children even when they fail, hurt you, and abandon you?
Does God?
Have you ever failed God?
Empathy, the Key to Love
No one has all the truth and nothing but the truth even with the Holy Spirit. That would make us equal to God and that’s what in the creation story got Adam and Even into big trouble from the beginning. We are physically vulnerable and sentient creatures desperately wanting the safety of power. And knowledge is power. And power almost always corrupts and get’s misused. Jesus had knowledge and power! He could have used it for himself or just his own people. What did Jesus have that made him use it differently.
He had empathy.
When foreigners, sinners, turncoat Jewish tax collectors, the lepers of his time society, and even the enemy Roman soldier came to him in need, he saw them as fellow human beings, fragile, imperfect, frightened and in pain. Ultimately he even saw the self-righteous religious leaders who got him tortured and killed with empathy.
“Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”
This came even after the terror of foreseeing his own suffering made him sweat blood and plead for there being an easier way.
Acceptance came not through faith, but through empathy which frees us to love the unlovable. It freed him to love even his best friends who denied and abandoned him. Jesus had empathy, the gift of understanding even those without empathy. He understood those different from him both inside and outside.
Empathy for others involves a dying to self, to the limits of our own ways of seeing and understanding, to our own values and way of being in the world. Empathy frees us to understand not just those like us, but even those whose ways of seeing and being in the world are totally different from ours.
Empathy doesn’t make us see the world the same way, but it allows us to understand and forgive and to care.
And that is LOVE.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 