Room for pain

 A place for emotions to bleed out, so everythings to returns to zero. I can move from zero. I don't need to be happy, or positive. Just zero is good enough. From zero, you can choose, freely, what to do. You may not be excited about it, but you will have the ability to do. Somewhere in that zero is the chance to be good, to feel a fleeting satisfaction. What does motivation feel like? Real motivation. A conviction of something important that lasts. How do you keep choosing to move? It is now 3.30pm. In 30 mins, it will be time to leave. Can I make these 30 mins something useful to justify my day? I do not want to. Yes, let's do something with this time. At least half an hour of work. Come, let us work.

 "Come make a sacrifice of all your shame" I AM angry Lord. But I don't know who to be angry with or what to be angry about. My heart shouts at me to move move move, but it is also so full of reluctance and fear and unwillingness. Meet another student? Sort out my notes? Plan a programme? Certainly those are things that I can do, but I don't want to. I don't even want to go home because when I go home there is the wife and the kids to deal with. And I must be present there. I don't want to be present. I want to disappear. I want to stop. I want to...not exist. Yet the bible is there, calling me to reach out for hope The family is there calling me to stand up for love The job is there calling me to move on for responsibility You are there, watching.  What will you do, han min? Will you give up? will you honour me? will you love me? I gave you Jesus, what will you give me? These are the thoughts I imagine you asking me. Somehow, I know it's false. but I don...

 Blank screen blank mind blank eyes. Squeeze and wring out work. Empty words empty heart Squeeze. Wring out empathy. Busy fingers busy brain busy work Day end. What happened?

 Shall we do the unnatural? Of course we shall. We are called to be unnatural, although not in the perverse sense. We are called to be unnatural. Unnaturally good, unnaturally kind, unnaturally selfless. For what reward is there for the one who does all things according to what they wish and how they feel? Doesn't everyone do the same? To the extent that we deny ourselves - not for the sake of future indulgence or for the sake of some worldly gain like respect or wealth or public standing, but for the sake of being like Christ - to that extent we have given our life for Christ and the Gospel and to that extent and far beyond, does God see and reward. Do not disqualify your reward by grumbling against your sacrifice. "Why must I do this?" "What is this torture?" "This is rubbish!". Those are the words of a slave. The same work is done, but in the spirit of unwillingness. There is no reward. For that work, there are only wages. And wages are given accord...

 Why is the Christian God so bloodthirsty for animal sacrifice? Why does he require death - and hell - for sinners? Why can't he just forgive? People forgive each other all the time. And in the light of the great consequence - eternal suffering, isn't it only right that there is a way out? That people can be forgiven, for free? The quick retort is - well, what do you think the cross is, if not free? At least, free for us. Yes, kind of. But why is he so sadistic as to need his own son to die? That's barbaric. It does seem so. But also I think we cheat a bit when we talk like that. We tend to forget that we're human. And being human, we are constructed in ways that allow us to manage life. One of those human qualities is the ability to forget. We also tend to pull God down to our level and ask Him to treat us as equals - or rather, we imagine ourselves to be equal to God. First, forgetfulness. When we wrong each other, we say 'i forgive you' and after a while thin...

 "everything that begins to exist has a cause". Therefore, the universe has a cause because science has shown that the universe is expanding, which means it started expanding from somewhere - it has a beginning. Therefore, God exists, He must have created the universe. God is, by definition, eternal and uncaused and personal. However, science does not show that the universe begins to exist. It shows that it began to expand. Which means it could have existed eternally, but only at some point began to expand. Then again, this doesn't work. Things don't just "begin to happen" there has to be a cause. The universe cannot be in an eternal steady state and then suddenly become unstable and start moving. It has to be either eternally steady, or eternally moving (either by newton's laws of motion, which don't apply to the beginning of the universe, or by logic, which, hopefully, does). If the universe is eternally steady - God exists too, because an eternall...