So, since I'm jobless (not by choice) and have no life going on right now, I watch a lot of TV :). Last weekend, I think it was Saturday night--remember, no life right now--I was watching the Terminator II. I thought it was pretty cool, you know, seeing Arnold in action again. Well, I didn't think much of it until Sunday when I was at church.
I went to this different church than I normally do to try it out and to see if I wanted to be a regular attender. It was okay, but one thing that really struck me was during the sermon when the pastor was talking about how he became a Christian.
Now, if you're reading this you may not know the exact definition of a Christian the way it's meant to be lived--it often gets lost in this jumbledness of the world. A Christian is a person looking to Christ as his or her personal savior and dedicating one's life to following God in his or her life. A Christian is not a person who's parents were Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, etc. A Christian is not a person who attends church on Sundays, even Bible studies on Wednesdays, or even church functions any other day. Christ defines the Christian--not the person.
Anyways, the pastor was talking about the veil that covers our eyes--the one that separates us from knowing God and Christ for who They are and for what They've done. He was talking about how Satan is the one who holds this veil over eyes until enough is done that this veil is tore down and everything suddenly, makes sense. Well, I thought that was interesting and then all of a sudden, the Terminator starts playing in my mind--awesome. haha
What was kind of interesting was the way God was helping me to visualize this idea. The movie has this cyborg dude who is made of some type of pretty awesome liquid metal/mercury type deal that makes him unstoppable. When you shoot the dude, homeboy just morphs back into his little human front while barely even slowing down. He just keeps coming back--it almost seems impossible to stop him!
Well, at the end of the movie, good ol' Arnie has this huge shotgun that he's using to blast this dude. Every time he shoots him, the guy stumbles back just a little bit at a time and his human-like appearance is shattered more and more. But here's the thing, there is a huge cauldron of molten metal at the edge of this platform that the cyborg is inching towards each time he's shot. Right when he's getting ready to go over the edge, one more shot would obviously do it, Arnie runs out of ammo. Ah shoot! The mom, kid, and Arnie thought they were defeated until someone (I honestly can't remember who) pulls out a gun and shoots the dude to make him plunge to his ultimate demise. Game over. He doesn't come crawling back on this one. He's dead. Defeated. Gone.
This is EXACTLY how it is when we share the love of Christ with strangers, family members, friends, co-workers, whomever. We keep shooting at the veil, that cover that shields their eyes from knowing Christ for who He truly is. We get to a point where we feel defeated because it seems like it's impenetrable, an unstoppable force that we just cannot seem to kill once and for all. It is a process, it is something that we have to keep shooting at, keep speaking truth into that veil to make it burn until it is no more. I tell you, it is not impossible. It is not unstoppable. It is not impenetrable. Don't give up hope, don't lose sight, and for the love of God never stop sharing the best thing that ever happened to you!
August 13, 2009
August 07, 2009
The Invisible Universe
So, being the nerd that I am, I spent a couple hours the other night watching a show on the History channel about the universe. I was so amazed, haha!
I couldn’t help but be in awe of how absolutely STUNNING all of existence is! The placement that we have in our galaxy is so that we are far enough from the center that we aren’t much affected by the enormous gravitational field of the black hole that lives there, but we are so close to the edge that we are able to see so many of the other galaxies out there. We are in an amazing place for survival and for discovery.
I couldn’t help but laugh when one of the scientists even said that most all of our universe is invisible. That’s nuts! Only 20% of the universe is made up of planets, stars, asteroids, and whatever else we see—80% is made up of “invisible” or “black” matter. Most of this matter is so small that we cannot even see it with the finest microscopes—-some smaller than atoms! We are completely surrounded not only by gases from our atmosphere and other dust, but we’re also surrounded by subatomic particles and even possible mini black holes from our own universe and even other universes thousands of light years away. That’s part of what they’re trying to find by use of the Large Hadron Collider (the particle accelerator) in Switzerland.
I also had to laugh when they talked about how weird so many things were. Things that occurred without real rhyme or reason but just because it could, I suppose. For example, there is an asteroid called Toutatis that orbits in the asteroid belt and it doesn’t rotate around any of its major axes, it just tumbles. There’s no reason why the asteroid should randomly tumble rather than rotate around one or both of its axes, but it does and it has a huge impact on our very galaxy and even our planet. It’s the asteroid that came 100,000 miles from hitting the earth in 2004 because it has a more elliptical orbit that puts it in an orbital path that intersects that of earth.
This is just a scratch at the surface of what goes on all around us! So many times people don’t want to believe in God because He is not visible to us here on earth…more than the majority of our very makeup in the sense of our universe is not visible to us! We see the results of these particles and gases and phenomena to realize that they do in fact exist, do we not? When was the last time you saw wind? Nope. You saw those leaves move because the wind caused them to move; you didn’t see it. When was the last time you saw air? Consciousness? Gravity? Your mind? Now ask yourself, when was the last time you saw God?
We see through our experiences, through our experiments even. We see the effects and for us that has to be good enough because our eyes are just not equipped to see 80% of our universe and better yet, a perfect God. We trust the unseen out of faith everyday, that's no excuse to not trust God.
I couldn’t help but be in awe of how absolutely STUNNING all of existence is! The placement that we have in our galaxy is so that we are far enough from the center that we aren’t much affected by the enormous gravitational field of the black hole that lives there, but we are so close to the edge that we are able to see so many of the other galaxies out there. We are in an amazing place for survival and for discovery.
I couldn’t help but laugh when one of the scientists even said that most all of our universe is invisible. That’s nuts! Only 20% of the universe is made up of planets, stars, asteroids, and whatever else we see—80% is made up of “invisible” or “black” matter. Most of this matter is so small that we cannot even see it with the finest microscopes—-some smaller than atoms! We are completely surrounded not only by gases from our atmosphere and other dust, but we’re also surrounded by subatomic particles and even possible mini black holes from our own universe and even other universes thousands of light years away. That’s part of what they’re trying to find by use of the Large Hadron Collider (the particle accelerator) in Switzerland.
I also had to laugh when they talked about how weird so many things were. Things that occurred without real rhyme or reason but just because it could, I suppose. For example, there is an asteroid called Toutatis that orbits in the asteroid belt and it doesn’t rotate around any of its major axes, it just tumbles. There’s no reason why the asteroid should randomly tumble rather than rotate around one or both of its axes, but it does and it has a huge impact on our very galaxy and even our planet. It’s the asteroid that came 100,000 miles from hitting the earth in 2004 because it has a more elliptical orbit that puts it in an orbital path that intersects that of earth.
This is just a scratch at the surface of what goes on all around us! So many times people don’t want to believe in God because He is not visible to us here on earth…more than the majority of our very makeup in the sense of our universe is not visible to us! We see the results of these particles and gases and phenomena to realize that they do in fact exist, do we not? When was the last time you saw wind? Nope. You saw those leaves move because the wind caused them to move; you didn’t see it. When was the last time you saw air? Consciousness? Gravity? Your mind? Now ask yourself, when was the last time you saw God?
We see through our experiences, through our experiments even. We see the effects and for us that has to be good enough because our eyes are just not equipped to see 80% of our universe and better yet, a perfect God. We trust the unseen out of faith everyday, that's no excuse to not trust God.
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