Praying the Right Way
I've been religious all my life. Even when I tried on agnosticism as a teenager, I couldn't really get to Atheism. I just was never arrogant enough to try and say that God didn't exist, even if He doesn't care about us. The furthest I ever got was to say that He essentially might be another type of roughly mortal entity and we're gnats inhabiting a science experiment. I don't really believe that anymore, but the physics of the Big Bang and near death experiments never let me go any further away than that.
I believe in the power of prayer. But I also believe that God normally lets things work themselves out. If He didn't there would be no such thing as free will. I am a software engineer, and here's how I think of God and His plans for us. When I create a distributed computing system I set everything up and all of the parts do their jobs. I may go look at the systems sometimes to make sure that they're still doing what they need to, but normally I don't really look at a computer until it fails. It's why I believe that bad things happen to good people. God lets bad stuff happen until there's a real problem.
Feel free to disagree, but that's how I believe. God cares about making sure we don't fail, but is really concerned a lot more about the whole system than the individual parts. So when we aren't happy, that isn't all that important unless it's causing us to start to really fail. Even then it is only important if our failures are leading to some bigger kinks in the overall scheme.
I've been reading Kierkegaard for about a month now and just got to his treatise on prayer. It makes a lot of sense to me. He seems to think that we create a lot of our own misery because we spend so much time telling God about our problems we never stop to listen. Prayer needs to end in true silence. Until you are still and silent you can't hear anything.
And God isn't always going to tell you anything directly. You might just have to listen to the messages being put out by the rest of the system. If you pay attention though, you start to get your signals in order and figure out what you should do.
At least that's what I'm hoping. There are a lot of things that seem to be pointing to some changes in my life. I am not sure that they'll actually pan out, but I'm trying to listen. I'm trying to facilitate those changes, but really trying to not impose my own desires on the changes until I'm sure that they're what I should do.
What those changes are... well, that's still up in the air. Feel free to ask, but I'm not sure right now that I'm really ready to publish everything. I know that there's a lot of my desire built into some of these things too and I'm trying to start to actively listen.
I believe in the power of prayer. But I also believe that God normally lets things work themselves out. If He didn't there would be no such thing as free will. I am a software engineer, and here's how I think of God and His plans for us. When I create a distributed computing system I set everything up and all of the parts do their jobs. I may go look at the systems sometimes to make sure that they're still doing what they need to, but normally I don't really look at a computer until it fails. It's why I believe that bad things happen to good people. God lets bad stuff happen until there's a real problem.
Feel free to disagree, but that's how I believe. God cares about making sure we don't fail, but is really concerned a lot more about the whole system than the individual parts. So when we aren't happy, that isn't all that important unless it's causing us to start to really fail. Even then it is only important if our failures are leading to some bigger kinks in the overall scheme.
I've been reading Kierkegaard for about a month now and just got to his treatise on prayer. It makes a lot of sense to me. He seems to think that we create a lot of our own misery because we spend so much time telling God about our problems we never stop to listen. Prayer needs to end in true silence. Until you are still and silent you can't hear anything.
And God isn't always going to tell you anything directly. You might just have to listen to the messages being put out by the rest of the system. If you pay attention though, you start to get your signals in order and figure out what you should do.
At least that's what I'm hoping. There are a lot of things that seem to be pointing to some changes in my life. I am not sure that they'll actually pan out, but I'm trying to listen. I'm trying to facilitate those changes, but really trying to not impose my own desires on the changes until I'm sure that they're what I should do.
What those changes are... well, that's still up in the air. Feel free to ask, but I'm not sure right now that I'm really ready to publish everything. I know that there's a lot of my desire built into some of these things too and I'm trying to start to actively listen.