It's Sunday, and the woman who just received her passing scores from her ordination exams is preaching.
As always, I took notes, and found in them some way to approach both the day's readings and the week before me.
Faith: It's a gift, not a decision
It’s no kindness to exhort people to “have faith” if that’s precisely what they lack. Believing that someone is utterly right is not faith; even Abraham, who believed God could do anything He said, and would do anything He promised, had only righteousness, and so great that “it was reckoned as faith.” So there’s more to being faithful than to being right, although being absolutely correct about believing what men say is impossible is close enough to faith that God credits it.
I chewed on this for a while. Faith, says Christian faith, is a spiritual gift. I can’t earn it and I can’t will it. I can’t, therefore, judge anyone for not having it, since I got it as a gift. It's not like I went to the local supermarket and bought it.
Knowledge can come of effort and ability, but faith comes because something has called me first. I had to find the Name of what called me. Thanks to the limits of my vision, I can’t see all the disguises, and thanks to my untutored tongue, I can’t say all the names. So I find it helpful to remember that knowledge is good, but reliance on human knowledge means I'm not letting in light that I can’t generate myself.
This is what I made of the sermon that pointed out God chose to manifest in a very humble form—leaving power, privilege, and pride behind. Abandoning these things enables humans to be together and for God to be with them even though God does not abide in sin. “When we abandon shining like a star,” said the woman who passed her finals for holy orders, “we don’t shine like the sun. We shine like the moon, in reflected glory. We are called to shine like the moon, and the moon, unlike the star, does not burn out.”
Burnout. I studied the rainbow prisms on the floor again. What do I really want? And how is faith a part of it?
Faith and Asperges
I believe that being aspie is no reflection on God’s love. “God saw what He had made, and it was very good.” God hates nothing that he has made. But some people work very hard to convince that not only is there something wrong with us, but that it’s both our responsibility and our capability to “fix” it.
What I want is a safe place to be what I am, to set down the burden of wearing a disguise. When people build boxes for other people, God will break those boxes, whether they’re cages, or cities, or beliefs. God is patient, and we suffer during the strife; the suffering does not prove we are wrong, or bad, or evil. It only proves that some are not letting in the light while others are opening the blinds.
It certainly does offer some help to have practice talking to people not like me. But it does not help to have those people start from the premise that if I only tried hard enough, I could “just do it.” Whatever "it" means, that day.
"Just do it" doesn’t do it. Some essentials are the building blocks of identity itself. They are not subject to human will. They are the deep truths of a rightness akin to faith. Faith sees truth and reveals it.
It would be easy to confuse this with self-justification, if a faith were so absolute about its rightness that it denied the light of truth.
Convictions, however, come from a law that I, for one, was freed from because it was too hard. (Your mileage may vary.) I believe God lived as a man to reconcile me to God, despite my human nature. I cannot be better than myself. No matter how hard I try to do right, I cannot help but do wrong. But God does love me, and He didn’t require me to change my gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or my mental wiring. God loves me as I am. I can trust that.
As always, I took notes, and found in them some way to approach both the day's readings and the week before me.
Faith: It's a gift, not a decision
It’s no kindness to exhort people to “have faith” if that’s precisely what they lack. Believing that someone is utterly right is not faith; even Abraham, who believed God could do anything He said, and would do anything He promised, had only righteousness, and so great that “it was reckoned as faith.” So there’s more to being faithful than to being right, although being absolutely correct about believing what men say is impossible is close enough to faith that God credits it.
I chewed on this for a while. Faith, says Christian faith, is a spiritual gift. I can’t earn it and I can’t will it. I can’t, therefore, judge anyone for not having it, since I got it as a gift. It's not like I went to the local supermarket and bought it.
Knowledge can come of effort and ability, but faith comes because something has called me first. I had to find the Name of what called me. Thanks to the limits of my vision, I can’t see all the disguises, and thanks to my untutored tongue, I can’t say all the names. So I find it helpful to remember that knowledge is good, but reliance on human knowledge means I'm not letting in light that I can’t generate myself.
This is what I made of the sermon that pointed out God chose to manifest in a very humble form—leaving power, privilege, and pride behind. Abandoning these things enables humans to be together and for God to be with them even though God does not abide in sin. “When we abandon shining like a star,” said the woman who passed her finals for holy orders, “we don’t shine like the sun. We shine like the moon, in reflected glory. We are called to shine like the moon, and the moon, unlike the star, does not burn out.”
Burnout. I studied the rainbow prisms on the floor again. What do I really want? And how is faith a part of it?
Faith and Asperges
I believe that being aspie is no reflection on God’s love. “God saw what He had made, and it was very good.” God hates nothing that he has made. But some people work very hard to convince that not only is there something wrong with us, but that it’s both our responsibility and our capability to “fix” it.
What I want is a safe place to be what I am, to set down the burden of wearing a disguise. When people build boxes for other people, God will break those boxes, whether they’re cages, or cities, or beliefs. God is patient, and we suffer during the strife; the suffering does not prove we are wrong, or bad, or evil. It only proves that some are not letting in the light while others are opening the blinds.
It certainly does offer some help to have practice talking to people not like me. But it does not help to have those people start from the premise that if I only tried hard enough, I could “just do it.” Whatever "it" means, that day.
"Just do it" doesn’t do it. Some essentials are the building blocks of identity itself. They are not subject to human will. They are the deep truths of a rightness akin to faith. Faith sees truth and reveals it.
It would be easy to confuse this with self-justification, if a faith were so absolute about its rightness that it denied the light of truth.
Convictions, however, come from a law that I, for one, was freed from because it was too hard. (Your mileage may vary.) I believe God lived as a man to reconcile me to God, despite my human nature. I cannot be better than myself. No matter how hard I try to do right, I cannot help but do wrong. But God does love me, and He didn’t require me to change my gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or my mental wiring. God loves me as I am. I can trust that.
