The existence of God

Over President's Day weekend, our family made the trek to Indiana to visit with some dear cousins.

Along the way, there was a great deal of traffic.  In one situation I was about to pass a truck when he put his blinkers on.  I could have sped past, but decided to cancel my cruise control, slow down, and let him over.  He hesitated, but when I waved him in, he took me up on the offer.

We have just witnessed a proof for the existence of God.

The presence of what we called morality is a challenge to materialism (the belief that all there is is the physical and nothing else).  Let's assume for a moment that evolution is a real thing.  As Darwin argued, the only motive for the actions of all beings is "survival of the fittest," meaning that all living things seek to protect their existence and propagate their genes.  This makes sense only in a purely materialistic worldview.

Certainly, a lot of our actions can be categorized by survival: eating, dressing, working, rearing children, even mating.  However, while the drive to "do what we do" can be explained by survival (or materialism, as it were), it cannot account sufficiently for "what we ought to do." 

Stealing from others might be a very good survival skill, but not a moral one.  Cutting in line may help you be the 'fittest', but not a moral one.  On the flip side, helping a sick person is not good for survival.  It takes your time, effort, and energy, and exposes you to illness.  Animals don't help their sick.  But we feel that we "ought" to help a sick person.

Where does this sense of "ought to" originate?  I doesn't seem to be located in our physical body or brain.  It suggests that there is something outside of ourselves where such values exist, whether we like them or not. 

Values like justice, compassion, and kindness must come from something.  It seems to make sense to

more specifically say they come from someone, a being that holds these characteristics and has decided to plant those values deep inside every human being. 

So, when I slowed down my van to let the truck driver over into my lane, it would appear God was poking his head into my everyday life yet again.

Is it chance or God?

Often I will attribute some great event (safety driving, a break-up that led to someone dating a better
person, a random encounter that changes someone's life, or even a snow day) to the providence of God. 

But, then, aren't these things just chance? 

Don't they happen to people who don't believe in God too?

I found the following quote from Frederick Buechner, an author, to be insightful on this subject.

"The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God's things because, of course, they are both at once.  There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak--even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere.  He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys.  

We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music.  Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement...."for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."  He says he is with us on our journeys.  He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began.  Listen for him.  Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him."

Frederick Buechner Sacred Journeys

A Swimsuit Issue of Men?

By now, if you are around the news at all, even via Yahoo,  you've probably heard about, or at least seen, the cover of  Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue.  Some of you may even have a copy lying on the coffee table at home.  I do not, but the controversy surrounding the latest cover is quite interesting.  One particularly frustrated reaction about the cover came in a CNN article titled: "Why no Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue of Men?"


Interesting question.  Why don't they have a swimsuit issue with guys in swimwear?

The intellectuals out there are so bothered by this!  People with graduate degrees in Gender Studies raise their arms in dismay!

Yet...my grandmother, who never graced the door of a college or maybe even a high school, could tell you the answer.  Men are aroused visually to a degree incomparable to women. 

Yes, women appreciate a good-looking man, but most adult women don't get turned on by seeing the leg of a random dude.  A guy wearing a small bathing suit would be cause for chuckles, not awe. 

As Jesus-followers we have had a long history of granting saint-status to women's mode of attraction.  They are lured by a whole person, a person with a story.  That's why romance novels and romantic comedies are so alluring to them.  They might enjoy a picture of some hot famous man, but not typically by an anonymous one.  They like a specific guy with a story.

Are they better?  Are women better able to reflect God this way?  Are men just more sinful because they get turned on by visual means so easily?

I would suggest that God made both men and women different and both are valid. 

Both sexes have to fight their natures.  Men have to fight their sex drives so that it doesn't harm others and that it is channeled toward an honest, loving relationship (ultimately marriage). 

But women have their fight too against their nature.  Women are prone to be overly emotional, to
think with feelings instead of reason, to manipulate relationships, and to have outbursts (I'm being general of course.  There are always exceptions).  They too have to learn to restrain their bad sides and to channel their emotional energies in healthy ways.

Women are often given a pass and instead, too often, men's sexual designs are vilified.  The author of the CNN article illustrates this when she asks, "If the point (of the SI Swimsuit Edition) is to objectify women, and subvert them in some way, then why isn't there a similar model for men?"

This charge is often leveled at men: they just "objectify" women.  They turn them into sex objects.

I used to make this argument as well.  But what does it mean?  Here is what I think "they" mean: men are turned on by looks, and when they are, they see (read "value") women only as objects for sexual desire and nothing else. 

I would like to stand up and pronounce what most (of course there are bad men, just as there are bad women) men have known for centuries: Men can walk and chew gum at the same time. 

A man can find a woman utterly attractive and alluring, and...(are you ready for this?)...ALSO recognize her as smart, intelligent, professional, capable, competent, even a genius. 

Most grown-up men do not have a problem with this.  God bless the man who marries a woman that he respects as a competent, intelligent person, but also sees her as a delightful source of sexual and relational pleasure.  Isn't this what we all long for? 

I recently heard a man talk about his parents who died a few years ago.  He remarked that his mom kept herself looking sexy (we usually say 'attractive') for her husband until she was 89 years old (In the last year of her life, she was hospitalized and unable to tend to her appearance).  His mom was not subjugating herself or falling into some male scheme of being objectified; she understood how the man she loved was attracted and she strove to bless him, just as in the same way he reached out to the ways she was attracted.  That is what marriage does.  We don't marry a twin.  We marry someone different and we long to meet each other's needs, even when they are different from our own.

In closing, I do want to acknowledge that the SI cover is hyper-sexual and there are moral issues to address as to whether it should grace the cover of such a publication that ends up, in many cases, on the coffee tables of many households for children to behold.  My point in this post was not to address that, but to use it as a springboard to recognize the God-designed differences of male and female sexuality.

Oh, and check out Proverbs 5:18-19.  It shows that the Bible has something to say about this subject too!

love is inconvenient

You know that look you give when someone asks you to do something for them and you don't want
to do it? 

We get that look when we ask our kids to clean the playroom up. 

And before I point my fingers at them, I give it often too.

Other people are inconvenient. 

Often love is quite inconvenient. 

Frederick Buechner wrote in a book about a time he was about to have a nice dinner with his parents when a friend called who was in a sudden serious emotional catastrophe.  He asked Frederick if he would come to be with him before his plane left.  Frederick was annoyed, but tried to hide it.  He really didn't want to go and, though it turned out that eventually he didn't need to go, Frederick realized how reluctant he often was to reach out to others when it didn't suit him.  Through this he came to the following conclusion:

"The shattering revelation of that moment was that true peace, the high and bidding peace that passeth all understanding, is to be had not in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of the battle.  To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake--even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death--that little by little we start to come alive.  It was not a conclusion that I came to in time.  It was a conclusion from beyond time that came to me.  God knows I have never been any good at following the road it pointed me to, but at least, by grace, I glimpsed the road and saw that it is the only one worth traveling."
-Frederick Buechner, Sacred Journey 107

OMG! Oh my God!

I always thought the third commandment in Exodus 20 was there to tell us not say things like, "God, did I have a rough day!" or "Oh, my God!" and things like that.  More and more, though, as I have heard people think this through I have found that this interpretation is problematic.  The following video gives one of the more accurate takes on it. 

I do want to acknowledge that the speaker is Jewish and therefore, at least in this case, holds a different view of God's forgiveness than I as a Christian do.  Still his points in general are valid.

Hearing God with Muppets

We finally watched The Muppets: Most Wanted! with all the kids the other day.  It was awesome.  I
grew up on the Muppets and so I love seeing them kept alive for our kids too!

Plus, and most importantly, they did several albums with John Denver.  That raises anyone to awesome status.

In the movie Kermit is imprisoned and replaced by a Russian imposter known as Constantine.  All the other muppets think it is Kermit with a cold.  I kept thinking, "How can they miss the fact that he has an "out-of-nowhere" Russian accent?! 

Ok, it's a Muppet movie, right?  So, you have to suspend some reality.

But here's where it was even more nonsensical: The imposter Kermit not only didn't sound like Kermit, but he didn't act like him either.  He kept saying "Vatever you want!" and "I can give you vhat you vant!"  He was rude, mean, and snarky.  If the Muppets didn't catch the accent, how did they miss how oddly Kermit was acting?

This is what it's like when trying to hear God.  When you know him, it's not so hard to recognize what he's like when he's interacting with you. 

So, when you're trying to determine if God is telling you something, ask yourself, "Is this how my Father would act toward me?" 

For example, if I have an impression that I should do something, but it makes me feel frightened or threatened if I don't, then I know it's not my Father.  He knows how to motivate me and those are not ways that work.  Instead, when it's him I find I am excited to a degree, even if it's something that seems intimidating.  Somehow I feel courage that I didn't expect.

I also know my Father isn't pushy.  Like the father in the prodigal son is patient, so is my Dad.  If I'm unsure about something he might be asking me to do, I know that if I put it off, I can trust that he'll keep nudging me gently, if it's what he wants.

So, keep getting to know your Shepherd.  As you learn his heart and how he works with you, you can begin to find out how to hear his voice more clearly.

Entering the Twitter Zone!

I have made the jump, my friends...onto Twitter.  Scary, I know.  Please follow me!  I go by "maechnermusings".  If you follow me, I'll tweet every time I put up a new blog post here.  Plus, I'll occasionally put quotes that I think are cool.  Follow me!  Follow me!