Tag Archives: LGBT

Don’t Put Limits on God

It’s natural that our comprehension of God is limited by our imagination. That’s why scientists get rankled at the notion that science takes the wonder out of the world. An astronomer spends her life wrapping her mind around the biggest, and wondrous, concepts in the universe, a biologist spends his life wrapping his mind around the most intricate, and wondrous, details of the universe, and so on.

Often, scientists are agnostic. Their concept of the natural world is so amazing, the supernatural holds no attraction for them.

But many of these intellectual types do have spiritual, and even religious, beliefs. And, as a result of the mind-expanding concepts they deal with on a daily basis, their concept of God (by any name) is HUGE. They are mystified by the conflicts about keeping Christ in Christmas, keeping God in schools, whether or not God blesses America, who gets married, and whether our national pledge also affirms God. And that’s the American perspective. They are equally mystified that God cares whether men wear beards, women drive, or a religious figure is depicted in a picture.

From that perspective, God doesn’t have a country. He doesn’t even have a planet. Earth is a mote of dust in a mote of dust in a mote of dust in a mote of dust in God’s full creation. He doesn’t have a holiday…in fact the whole of human history is an eye-blink in His creation. God is present in school and Christmas and a foxhole because God is everywhere and everywhen to an unfathomable degree, not because of national policy.

You don’t have to be a scientist yourself to understand this, but anyone reading this has a responsibility to keep a proper sense of perspective. If you really realize the grandeur of His creation, you can’t help but glimpse that these conflicts are insignificant. Irrelevant. Petty. Needlessly fearful.

If you’re worried about whether God is in…anything…you’ve forgotten Who you’re talking about.

Still think God cares about who the US president is? ...what's printed on US currency? ...what's on the lawn at city hall?

Simple genius doesn’t come from playing mental chess

My friend Stephen Yoder posted the following on FaceBook today:

This morning I made my son laugh while he accompanied me on my morning commute. My elder boy asked (in the thick of traffic–i had no time for a planned answer) “dad, what do you think about gays and lesbians?” I said, quickly, “good people, son. They just use their privates differently than I do.”

I am utterly unsurprised by his opinion. I am, however, in awe of the brilliant simplicity with which he expressed it. I think most of us are too aware of the controversy not to struggle over how to craft the answer that is most likely to impress upon our children what we believe on this important subject. He eschewed this mental chess playing and thus rendered the best answer. I love him for it.

Can we all share this, retweet it, like it, give it a +1, repeat it to our children, shout it in the streets, write it in the sky, affix it to carrier pigeons, insert it into ocean-going bottles, and write it in giant letters of fire on a planet at the end of the universe?