Starting with what I know

I know that God exists. I cannot say that I exactly know who God is, or the nature of God. I believe that I can be fairly certain in ascribing certain attributes to God. These would be: “intelligent”, “personal” and “having a will”. 

I can also be certain of that there is some kind of unseen spiritual reality. What this reality is exactly, I again cannot know.

These things I’ve seen enough evidence of in my own life, to be certain of. I know that I can’t prove them to anyone. Or that God exists at all. But from personal experience, I can know this for myself. I’m not asking anyone to take my word for it. But with a bit of openness, I believe that anyone can find proof that God exists. Just not the kind of proof that can be tested in a laboratory or be objectively verified in any other way. 

I can also see the truth of what Jesus taught. I have no idea when it comes to historical claims. I simply wasn’t there. It doesn’t mean that they are unimportant or that there is no way of at least determine probability. The resurrection, for example, is believed in by many scholars, because of the amount of witnesses, and certain circumstances around how it was told and who the witnesses were. 

I’ll might look more closely into this and other claims in the Bible later in my life. Probably. 

But what I want to get at, is that the more I look into what Jesus taught, the more struck I become by how hard it is to live by, not because of what it demands of our bodies or intellects, but because of the humility it demands. And also how easy life would be if we could live by it. All we have to do is to swallow our pride.

So why is this so hard? As an example: I’ve been tricked into buying crappy cars three times in my life. Once for me. Once for me and my wife and once for my wife’s son (sidenote: when writing this, I realised that all three times, I wanted something to happen fast. Don’t ever let your decisions be governed by wanting something to happen fast!). If I want to seriously follow Christ, I need to pray for these sellers and do my best to feel no grudge towards them. 

Or, me and my wife were tricked into a rental contract of five year for a machine for our company, that had a forced insurance that made the monthly payment twice as expensive. Also in this case, I will need to do my best to love my enemy and turn the other cheek. At the times when this happened I didn’t think this way though. In fact, I said loads of angry things about these people. I can even still get angry sometimes, since we’re still paying the penalty fee for breaking the contract with the company. And at the fact that there are dishonest people in the world in general. And so on. But none of this changes the facts of my life or of the world. 

I could give more examples. But what this amounts to is to a large extent acceptance. Lack thereof. And pride. “These things happen, but they shouldn’t happen to me, because I’m so great…” 

Jesus taught humility and acceptance. And looking at these examples and numerous others, it’s easy to see ho much easier life would be if we practiced these things. And that we really have nothing to lose from doing so. But we don’t. If we did, our lives would be very different. We would feel different. A huge burden would lift from our shoulders. But we prefer to be angry because circumstances aren’t the way that we think that they ought to be.

These are some of the things that I do know. Things that I think that I could work with.