“Looking In All The Wrong Places”

The question in the subject line of the email caught my eye, “Looking for answers, hope, and encouragement?”  A moment before I had been reading an observation that the medical model of illness and the legal model of sin were inadequate to respond to man’s needs. 

Despite all of man’s accomplishments, still the questions are vastly greater in number than the answers, hopeless often out-darkens hope, and courage has been dissected out of encouragement.  The specifics might change but the difficulties remain.  It is as another (H.G Wells) noted, man is played out.  A prudent look at man and mankind will suggest that there is an end, a limit, a point of the exhaustion of man and mankind’s time, talent, and treasure. Such is the plight of one who lives in a closed system!

However, there is another view that though discredited by many has withstood time and thus demonstrates its veracity.  Unlike much science, sociology, psychology, religion, anthropology, etc., it has time after time demonstrated its authenticity. 

It is this.  Man and mankind do not live in a closed system but a system in which, as one termed it there is a Divine gas station attendant who is always at work putting energy into the system!  Now ask, who or what is it that answers the unanswerable questions of science?

Curious isn’t it when the non-religious skeptic is asked those questions his answer often introduces time into the question.  When true science stressed the unsustainability of evolutionary theory, time was introduced.  When man, possessed of the notion of a closed system, does not have an answer he add the time element—given enough time man will find and provide the answers.

Now for the simple question.  Would it not be easier to leave God in the picture rather than doing the secular dance around all that points to His existence and involvement in the affairs of man and the affairs of life in general? 

Indeed when I open the system to an all powerful, all knowing, all loving, ever present God I open the possibilities for answers in the confusion of life.  Hope in the darkness is now possible.  The courage of encouragement may be mine when all that is around me is failing. 

When I accept that God is trustworthy then life becomes a matter of building my belief upon and my confidence in His care—even when such is beyond my capacity to understand and explain.  Such is completely possible in the midst of a very confusing world but only as I completely abandon myself to Him.  It is then that I find that which we all desire in the deeper place, peace, contentment, and fulfillment.