Religion & Bondage

Sometimes I get a slap on the wrist from other Christians if I call my faith "my religion." As the expression goes which we often repeat, "it's not a religion - it's a relationship with Christ." That's the absolute truth. All human rituals and superstitions are dissolved by Christ's sacrifice on the cross and we can have a personal relationship with God the Father through Him and His atoning death and resurrection. And, I suppose another reason Christians don't like for Christianity to be called a religion is due to the world's habit of lumping all beliefs in all deities of any kind or source into one big hasty pile called "religion." God is holy, a word meaning set apart; I can certainly understand, in that respect, why my brothers and sisters in Christ may wince at our faith being added to the pile of religion.

But for me personally, I hope to be religious in the most literal and spiritual sense. The word religion means "bondage." I yearn to be, as Paul was called, "a bondservant of Christ." I want to be fettered to Him with chains I couldn't break if I tried - and I do try, all day and all night sometimes, to break "the ties that bind" Him to me. My natural self craves things harmful to me and others, and harmful to my relationship with God; so my flesh claws at the chains that keep me attached to Jesus. And though it is an "easy yoke, a light burden," He strengthens the shackles for my own good.

I want to be a slave of Jesus Christ, my heart fettered to His.

Thank God for these bonds! The fleshly, worldly mind would object, "I don't want to be a slave! I want to have freedom in my own thoughts, my own desires! What about what I want?"
I'm scared to death of my own thoughts and desires. I'm such a rotten and wretched man without Christ and His Scripture that any thought or deed I've done apart from Him, anything I've done or said in which I had to run from Him with an unsteady, shackled trot, has been selfish, greedy, lustful, bitter, hateful, bigoted, racist, arrogant. All the things Christ despises, all the things He died to cleanse me from. My imagination is one of my worst enemies.

When humankind is left to its own devices, we come up with the most miserable and vile things we can imagine. We murder, rape, torture, bicker, hate, fight, covet, exploit, abuse, turn a blind eye to injustice and want, indulge in the safety of ignorance, and find a hollow solace in the thought that we're following our own course, the course of human history, governed by humankind's own majestic imagination.

I don't want that. The rest of the world can have its freedom, but I want to find my liberty and peace on the narrow way described by Jesus. It's not fun - it's gritty, it's painful, it's boring, it invites criticism and humiliation. But I would desperately rather be a slave to what is good than a free subject of sin, leaving a wake of hurt and despair wherever I roam.

The most frightening thing God can to do someone is to let them have what they want.

Lord, chain me to Your heart!

Amarillo City Transit Blues / My Homeless Future?

I have a thought. It's not a vision, and I'm not yet convinced enough to call it a revelation. It's just a thought, albeit a heavy one that hasn't left me since the day it first came. The thought is that someday, somehow, I will lose my disability benefits, my Medicare, my medications, my apartment, and will eventually become a mentally ill homeless man. Just like the kind you see all over the city.

If my thought ever comes true, and I become a crazy derelict, if I ever join that unwanted street parade, a walking, breathing city ordinance violation, have some patience and salt toward me.
There's a man who rides my bus - we'll call him "Chad" - he lifts up his t-shirt, talks to his chest and feet, looks up and waves goodbye to someone only he can see, and talks almost non-stop to who I can only assume is the same phantom to whom he bids farewell. Chad makes any newbies who may happen to be on the bus uncomfortable, especially when he flicks on his lighter and holds it dangerously close to his palm. Every time he gets off the bus at his stop near the resource center downtown, I sigh like every living feeling I've ever had is coming out of me. I've been tense the whole bus ride, worried Chad is going to burn himself or the contents of his garbage bag, tense because of the tenseness of the other passengers, fear that one of them will say something stupid and cause a situation, and hopeless knowing there's nothing I can do for him.

I believe that a little over half of my own generation (myself included) is made up of self-righteous dilettantes whose world views are based eighty percent on sentiment and anger, with only fifteen percent rooted in experience (the other five percent is a mixture of statistics and faulty math). I know I sound like every old person ever, but that's just how I feel. My feelings aren't rooted in some bitter notion I've inherited or been taught by former generations who were just as smug and self-assured; my feelings are rooted in one simple thing: the bus. The Amarillo City Transit, a combination VFW meeting, social worker's waiting room, Pentecostal church, underfunded mental hospital, and racist clubhouse on wheels. Riding the bus has opened my eyes to how entitled I am, how oblivious I am to the struggles of the world - they're very different when you see them up close, not through the lenses of memes and Facebook posts. If you ride the bus enough, you'll encounter many people who will humble you and make you feel downright ashamed for buying a $6 latte that morning instead of giving $6 to the High Plains Food Bank - just once, that morning. Maybe twice a week, $12 to the High Plains Food Bank. Maybe Wednesdays and Thursdays you can drink the nasty stuff they have at work instead.
Shame is not of the Holy Spirit, but humility is. If you spend enough time with people who have little, you'll realize that your zealous protest of the FCC's repeal of net neutrality is the stuff of outer space down there in the real world. I'm sorry you may have to pay $15 extra to your internet service provider for the social media package, or $20 extra for the porn package. But try telling that to the guy sitting across from you on the Amarillo City Transit, the most alert and coherent among them. He'll tell you he's got gangrene in his leg, $8 to his name until next month, needs new glasses, and he's been out all day looking for enough cigarette butts to make him feel like he smoked a whole one.

I feel guilty. I feel sinful for having a well-fed gut, a smart phone, clean socks, and an mp3 player that keeps me from hearing this guy's life story, or hearing what Chad is saying to the specter only he can see. If you're reading this and you're chubby like me, you can feel the way you want about your weight - this isn't some decree about overweight people, except for myself - but I don't feel good about my weight. Not because I think I'm unattractive, or because I'm in any poor physical health, but because there are people I encounter on the bus who haven't eaten since the day before yesterday. It just seems wrong that I'm fat in their presence. I'm no socialist, but it just doesn't seem right, and it embarrasses me every time I step on board the miserable mystery tour.

But, having said that, I ask of you one thing: if and when I become dissociated and dirty beyond recognition, when you see me and begin to feel uncomfortable, whether you recognize me or not, please don't inflict upon yourself the same self-loathing and guilt as I have. Again, shame is not a fruit of the Spirit. Keep your heart open to conviction from God, whether He tells you to give me a $5 bill or not, whether He tells you to buy me some socks, or to use that money to help someone else, or even to use it for that morning latte. It's no sin. Pay attention to convictions, delight and be glad that He convicts you, but remember God does not want us to hate ourselves, even if, like me, we've warped ourselves into thinking it's a "righteous" self-hatred, some pretentious morally heroic stance. Hate is hate, and it's wrong for me to despise myself because I have something someone else doesn't.

One's blessings only become gluttony when they're not shared or used for good. But this must be action and not mere sentiment, like a rich rock star pleading with those on whom he relies to buy his albums to "imagine no possessions."

Most people who know me know I hate "Mental Health Awareness Month," which is May. I hate it because it doesn't do enough to show what mental illness really looks like, the depths these sicknesses truly reach. Social media takes on the job of promoting "mental health awareness," showing black and white Instagram pictures of a girl (or angel/fairy wearing a black corset for some reason) looking sad with the generic caption that "not all scars can be seen" or some other such easy cliches. What you're not going to see during Mental Health Awareness Month is people like Chad, his shirt rolled up, talking to no one, his teeth broken, face unwashed, legs covered in scabs. That's not romantic. That's not quirky. And that's what Mental Health Awareness Month is about. Maybe it wasn't intended that way, but that's what social media and compulsively shared posts have made it.
If you want to leave your ideological bunker, if you want to see what mental illness looks like, if you want to be as aware of mental illness as you can get without a trip to Big Spring State Hospital, that rotten place I hope burns to the ground someday, go downtown and spend some time on the bus. Try to talk to the woman who wears a plastic garbage bag as if it were a scarf, who eyes everyone and curses them before she pulls the cord to get off at a random stop. Try to cram her into some feminist/socialist/liberal/conservative/capitalist box and see how well she fits. Try to put her in line with your talking points and the hashtags and catch-phrases you learned from your news feed. She won't fit as well as if you try to fit her face over yours in the mirror. You could be her someday; someone has to take her place in the street parade.

My favorite Bible verse is John 21:18, in which Jesus tells Peter that he'll someday be martyred for his faith: "Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." This verse gives me such strange comfort in its surety of suffering. I keep this verse in mind when I feel any hardship coming, whether it be personal heartbreak or the disaster that awaits the Texas panhandle this summer if the current drought continues. I know God promises me I'll suffer, but that nothing He allows is for no reason, nothing is in the random, and He will strengthen, refine, and ordain me as a herald of His Son, in any situation, no matter how bleak and ugly. And I know that I can't stop it; it's as if it were already a memory, and that I must take my part in it.
Someday I may be clothed by another, a clueless teenage kid handing out faded t-shirts from the Salvation Army at the park, instead of Walmart's finest Oxford button-down shirts that I'm accustomed to; carried where I do not want to go, by exhaustion and numbness, to my night's home on the sidewalk on 6th avenue, outside the empty bar that used to be Sassy's.

If that happens, don't be ashamed to stare, so you'll be truly aware of what mental illness looks like, and what it does because of what we don't do; and if you can't help, don't hate yourself for it - if I'm destined for the street parade, and you for the comfort of a roof and a bed, it's been ordained by a far wiser Power than you or me.

"The world is nothing more than all the tiny things you've left behind."

PS If this ever comes true, and you see me loitering somewhere, please don't snap a picture to post with some sociopolitical analysis about class division and the one percent or whoever else you're blaming for my plight - instead, sell your camera and use the money to feed me, clothe me, or buy my medicine.

Poem: "Novelty"

The cops ditch their cusses
in trash cans behind the house
so they don't mess up their case
Somebody reads the news and
cringes every way you can
Others read it and puke air and jokes
Novelty
Like a hula girl on a dashboard
a window decal of a cartoon t-rex
eating a stick figure family
It's a novelty story -
"Dog Drives Car"
"Elvis Dead at 42"
"Stain Shaped Like Virgin Mary"
It's a novelty story
Forget about it Goodnight

Inspiration:

http://mountpleasant.dailyvoice.com/news/case-of-incest-leads-to-four-deaths-one-in-hudson-valley/735660/

http://www.heraldcourier.com/news/national/connecticut-killer-in-incest-case-alerted-daughter-s-adoptive-family/article_47411199-4535-5f43-9473-abc5db16e926.html

The King's Signature

(Edit, 4-17-26: We learn something new every day. Sometimes we learn something we should have learned when reading about a former king of Belgium we praised in a blog written eight years ago. Today I learned King Baudouin was complicit in the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Baudouin had knowledge of the plan to kill Lumumba by political opponents of the latter, but did nothing to interfere. Rather than delete this blog lauding Baudouin's action in 1990, I've chosen to leave it up, with this edit, to remind readers that being anti-abortion does not make a person truly pro-life.) 

"St. Wolfgang and the Devil" by Michael Pacher

In 1990, a bill was approved by the Belgian Parliament that would legalize abortion. The king at the time, King Baudouin, morally opposed the bill. But as with most monarchies in modern times, a king or queen's approval is basically formality with little or no consequence. So, given his firm stance against abortion, and not having the power to simply quash the proposed legislation, King Baudouin asked the government to declare him "unable to govern" for twenty-four hours so that he'd have no part in the bill and would not have to sign it, though his signature would have only been formality.

King Baudouin's integrity made me think of how we as Christians should avoid evil even in its "formalities," so to speak - the king so despised what he felt to be wrong that he gave up his powers, however limited and formal, to avoid even putting pen to the paper that represented it. 

I wish I had those kinds of guts. I wish I could stand so firmly in my convictions that I refuse to be linked to evil even in a form so small as my signature: "Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?"

"Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God." -James 4:4

Anti Gun Control Arguments Addressed By Rambling Mental Patient With No GED

Unfortunately, many people address the gun issue as if there are only two sides, two extremes: those whose view of guns makes them Amish, and those whose love of guns makes them Ted Nugent. Many speak and react to these arguments as if there is no in-between, and that's one of the factors that leads to words without reason, discussion that turns to strife and argument rather than dialogue. I believe you should be able to own a gun, but I also believe the gun should not be the ungodly idol we've made it; when we have idols, we can't see the good and the bad in them. A gun should be seen as a tool, but a weapon in only extreme cases of self-defense or lawful, sanctioned warfare. 

Its owners should not appoint themselves as God with the right to take life in just any circumstance, or even take humankind's laws into their own hands. The gun must not be worshiped. 

Here are a few (what I hope are) reasonable rebuttals to many who do just that.

"Abortions kill 730,000 a year! Guns only kill 15,000!"
I'm against abortion, but I know that it's impossible for a woman to enter a school and abort twenty-six people in less than five minutes. The two are completely different and must be looked at and assessed differently. Social media posts using the "other things kill people too" argument also use cancer deaths, suicide rates, car accidents, and drug overdoses, comparing the numbers with those of gun deaths, and implying that gun violence should not be such a concern because abortion deaths are higher in numbers. 

This is flawed logic, and an example of "whataboutism." By this argument's own admission, cancer isn't as serious as abortion because there are fewer cancer deaths than abortions; likewise, suicide shouldn't be such a concern because there are less suicides than cancer deaths, at least according to the skewed use of such numbers.
One such post used the Bath School Disaster as its example; in 1927, a madman named Andrew Kehoe blew up a school in Bath Township, Michigan, killing a total of 44 people (38 of them children) and injuring at least 50 more; "not one gun was used!" the image boasted, thereby implying that, because people can use other things than guns to kill people, gun control must be nonsense. But, in 2017, Stephen Paddock used guns to kill 58 people and injure hundreds in Las Vegas. So, by the above logic, Paddock's rampage via gun somehow negates Kehoe's murders via dynamite, again making guns a more serious issue than bombs, and proving gun control is not nonsense.
Of course, that's a flawed way to look at the situation; each tragedy by any means must be looked at in its own context, its own circumstances, its environment and surroundings, etc. They should not be compared to other unrelated tragedies - like car accidents - as ways to dodge the issue.

"This isn't a gun issue - it's a mental health issue!"
Mental illness is absolutely a serious and poorly addressed issue in the United States. But, before you shift the blame to bad mental healthcare, don't use your vote and voice to endorse politicians or parties whose budgets slash mental health funding, as was done by President Trump just last month. And, unfortunately, many politicians whose voting records reflect this are also politicians whose voices for 2nd amendment rights are loud clear; perhaps if those voices were just as loud for better mental health funding, things would be different.

"It's violent video games!"
In 1949 in Camden, New Jersey, Howard Unruh shot and killed a dozen people; in 1966 in Austin, Texas, Charles Whitman shot nearly 50 people. Both rampages were pre-GTA. Both rampages were even pre-Pong. 

"It's violent movies and TV!"
Unless Charles Whitman was motivated by a particularly bloody episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, this makes as much sense as the video game argument.

image by Donna Grethen

"The Founding Fathers would want us to have guns!"
I'm sure they would. Even I want people to be "allowed to have guns." But in Washington's day, it took several minutes to load and fire a single shot from a musket. These men would not be impressed with an AK-47 or an AR-15 - they would be scared out of their minds. Thomas Jefferson would have wet his pantaloons at the blast of a semi-automatic rifle, while Paul Revere would have cried, "'Tis witchcraft! Everyone flee!" (As long as we're imposing what we insist the Founding Fathers "would have" done or said, based on our own various beliefs.)


"It's disrespectful to the victims if we politicize shootings!"
That's not quite the mindset every time a Muslim fanatic drives a car into a crowd of people. Incidents like that become an instant source of argument for stricter immigration laws. We also don't mind "politicizing" the issue of abortion. (But, I suppose that's a bit of whataboutism, which always puts any health discussion to a grinding halt.) Also, the issue of gun control is not a political issue, at least until it becomes distorted into one by politicians. A political issue is a proposed railroad tariff or a trade deal with Portugal. Public safety, ignorance, and murder are human issues, dehumanized when canned rhetoric from politicians makes the victims an afterthought and all logic and reason follows.
If I die of something completely preventable, you have my permission to "politicize" it if your voice and actions could prevent it from happening to someone else.

"We don't blame the knife when someone is stabbed to death, so why blame the gun?"
I don't know any gun law reformers who "blame the gun." The words "blaming the gun" don't apply to the majority of people who are zealous for new gun laws. What they "blame" is the irresponsibility, negligence, and sheer foolishness that has allowed such weapons to be used in these killings.

"What about my hunting rights?"
Weapons like ones used by modern infantry or in the Rambo sequels shouldn't figure into a "hunter's" argument, unless the game they're hunting is a giant mutant deer high on PCP.

"Arm the teachers! Arm the citizens!"
Having a gun does not make a human being any less prone to error, bad judgment, bad aim, mental illness (since that's the true issue here, remember?), or just generally being an evil person, and it certainly doesn't make them a hero. In fact, the armed resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida didn't even enter the school for several minutes during the shooting. He resigned his position afterward. "All it takes to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun!" Unless that "good guy" is, like I would have been in the situation, incompetent and scared.

(Edit, 5-28-22: This past week's massacre of 19 children at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas saw 19 police officers inside the school fail to stop the shooter for 45 minutes before he was finally killed. In fact, a young girl inside the school called 9-1-1 several times, despite officials being just outside and apparently doing little to nothing to stop the shooter.)

"Then we won't arm people with criminal records!"
Many of the deadliest or most notorious mass shooters in United States history have had no criminal record. If they did, many of them were minor or misdemeanor offenses. This includes the aforementioned Unruh and Whitman, as well as James Huberty (shot and killed 21 people at a San Ysidro, California McDonald's restaurant in 1984), Patrick Sherrill (shot and killed 14 coworkers at a post office in Edmond, Oklahoma in 1986), George Hennard (shot and killed 23 people at Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, Texas in 1991), Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (shot and killed 13 people at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999), Seung-Hui Cho (shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia in 2007), Nidal Hasan (shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009), James Holmes (shot and killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in 2012), and Adam Lanza (shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut).
Lindsay Lohan has a longer rap sheet than all of these men combined.
(EDIT, 3-7-18: It is worth noting, however, that Huberty and Whitman had histories of domestic violence; Huberty's wife even filed a report after an incident, though Whitman's wife did not.)

New gun laws, no matter how well written and reformed, will not stop gun violence. But the right legislation and proper dialogue on the matter can greatly reduce these killings. We have no right to do little or nothing simply because the problem will never go away. The problem, at its core, is human beings and the evil of which we're capable. But because there is no solution to this does not give us license to be idle, to beat our breasts but do nothing. Mortality itself has no solution, but we still care for our bodies and our health - though with the way we've put off this discussion and dismissed the blood of the victims, our inaction belies that we care for anyone's well-being at all.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results."

"There is No God, Because Bad Things Happen"

It's going to be a long night. There's a dog in the apartment above me whose owner leaves it alone for extended periods of time, leaving it to whine and cry for the entire complex to hear. I'm not the biggest fan of dogs, but I hate to hear or see any animal in pain. It tears me up inside, like some sort of Achilles' heel in my gut. I've left two messages with the apartment office, and I'm calling the Humane Society when they open in the morning.

This lonesome, tearful dog that no one hears led me to think of those among us who dismiss God because bad things happen and no one seems to care. (I'm not addressing those who say there's no God "because science"; I'm a high school dropout Creationist who takes a lot of psychiatric medication; any scientific diatribe on my part would be absurd; I already know that my baking soda volcano could not compete with Bill Nye's; mine would, at best, look like your mom's drunk boyfriend Randy - the one who listens to the Fabulous Thunderbirds, like a lot - helped me make it after a case of Keystone and a big fat joint; so, my surrender to the Richard Dawkinseses of the world is signed immediately.)

Anyway, I suppose it's a bit facetious and crude for me to describe them as "people who don't believe in God 'because bad things happen.'" It would be more apt to say: they don't believe in God because of centuries of barbaric wars that have left countless dead, mutilated, orphaned, and impoverished, because of millions of Jews gassed and incinerated at the orders of deluded madmen, because of teenage Armenian girls crucified in an attack on their race, because of atomic bombs dropped on Japan, because of children slain in cold blood at their schools, because of politicians void of conscience and full of Christian bunkum, because all these horrors go on day after day and no loving god stops it.

A friend of mine, a Christian indeed, expressed to me his temptation to ask "why bother believing in God?" and doing good when faced with all of this seemingly unchecked human carnage and gluttony. I likened it to shining light in a very dark place; a single candle is all the more strangely beautiful when it's the only one that flickers in a blackened room. Society, culture, are too far gone, too sick to someday give birth to peace and harmony. If there is intelligent life on planets other than our own, they've long ago made up their minds to stay far away from us, the only race who has an entire genre of jokes called "dead baby jokes."
My mother's favorite song was "What a Wonderful World." Whoever wrote that song was David Spade levels of sarcastic, because it's a horrible world, and it's a dirty lie to tell people anything different. But, although society is screwed, you and I have responsibilities as individuals to do good. As odd as it sounds, we can have wonderful lives in a horrible world. We have been given a duty to shine light for those who are in too much pain to give a toss about our existential crisis; people who are too hungry, their legs too ridden with Khe Sanh shrapnel, their tent cities taken down by heartless city ordinances, to give a second thought to Nietzsche vs. Lewis. They're too busy throwing up and struggling to breathe.

That's who you and I should be helping. The human race will never turn itself into a legion of light. So you and I have to be the tiny candles in the countless darkened rooms of the world.

It's easy for me to say that in an abstract and broad manner of speaking. But what about when those individuals, those children who could grow up to help just one person, become prey not to the twisted human race, but to one twisted human - who God did not stop?

I can give you the perfect example. This is a true story. It's the worst thing I've ever heard in my life. My head has been buried in books about serial killers, cannibals, wars, plagues, corruption, but somehow, this story tops them all. When I read it, I was completely numbed; I'd never heard anything like it before. Imagine a little girl in 1975. Her name was Suzanne. Her mother's new husband was Franklin Floyd, a career criminal who'd been convicted of child molestation. One day, Floyd disappeared with his four new step-children - Suzanne, her two younger sisters, and an infant brother named Philip. The two sisters were later found to have been dropped off at a church; the fate of the infant Philip remains unknown to this day. Their mother tried to file kidnapping charges, but officials told her that because he was their stepfather, Franklin Floyd had a legal right to take them.
Franklin Floyd and young Suzanne wound up in Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia, and Florida, with Floyd raising her and passing her off as his daughter "Sharon," and sexually abusing her the entire time, even documenting it with photos that were found later. By 1990, Suzanne was going by the alias "Tonya" and, once again relocated, was now being passed off as Floyd's wife, and working as a stripper. She gave birth to a son named Michael. Not long after, she decided to run away with a young man she'd been seeing. But before she could, she was killed, just 21 years old, the victim of an apparent hit-and-run. Floyd was the main suspect; he was also the main suspect in the murder of a coworker of Suzanne's a year earlier.
After Suzanne's murder, Floyd put her son Michael into foster care and fled again. During one family's adoption process, it was determined that Michael was not Floyd's biological son with his stepdaughter. This prevented Floyd from legally reclaiming custody of the child in 1994. So he kidnapped Michael at gunpoint from his school and disappeared with him. The boy's whereabouts, or remains, have never been determined. Floyd has given many different statements as to what happened to the child, though as recently as 2015, he admitted to killing him.

God did not rescue Suzanne, Michael, or Philip.

Franklin Floyd, now 74, is currently on death row in Florida.

If there was ever a story that could make someone question God, to ask Him why, to even demand an answer and accuse God of wrong, as Job did, that's the one.

But first, my question to those whose disbelief and disdain for God is based on the suffering in the world, is: on what are you basing your criteria?
Why is God obligated to rescue from hardship? To whom has He made that promise? Why does the genuineness of His love depend on how much or how little pain He allows you to experience?
If one's perception or idea of God is not based on any specific text or doctrine, then those expectations of God are arbitrary and self-concocted - they mean nothing. They're an incomplete contract, written and agreed upon by only one party. If I decided that you are, because I say so, obligated to give me half of your weekly earnings, and you have not agreed to this, what wrong do you do by withholding money from me? What contract have you broken? What hate have you shown me? What right have I to call you evil, let alone declare you to be non-existent because of rules devised by me and me alone?

But, let's suppose one's ideas of God have been built on the Christian Bible. (I don't speak for any other God - there are a wealth of deities, spirits, constellations, trees, goats, fairies, and dictators worshiped in the world, and they're none of my business. But I do speak for the one true God. "What blithering madman is this who claims to be a spokesman for God?"
"the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." -Revelation 19:10.
Christians are called to be about our Father's business.)

From the Bible, one can gather no other portrait of life on Earth than that of an ugly, uncaring, unfeeling world where murderers and thieves are rampant, liars who aid them are abundant, and the cries of those who have been hurt by them seem to fall on deaf ears. The very authors of this Book we came to call the Holy Scriptures complained in howls of bone-chilling agony of the very same things of which we complain - we, who declare God to be a myth because none of us is placed in cosmic bubble wrap.
Even if one uses the Bible as evidence against the God it proclaims, our accusations come to nothing and our own words become a snare to our case, for in it we'll not find that God has promised deliverance for every person from every trial; He has not even reserved special exceptions for the most wonderful people from the most gut-wrenching trials.

God has promised us nothing as it relates to deliverance from the never-ending suffering on this planet. He promises us strength and bravery and the guts to love in the midst of such ugliness, but not deliverance. (Though, being that some would attribute faith and hope and love to mere madness and "viruses of the mind," as Dawkins coined, insanity is a deliverance to some extent.)
What kind of pitiful, pathetic existence we would live if we were exempt and immune from the violence and the slander of this world. Life would be an episode of the Teletubbies and God would be an absentee landlord who couldn't care less about the unfolding of the story of His people and His creation. It wouldn't be a story worth telling.
I'd rather be in danger in a real world than catatonic in a fairy tale world. I have more peace knowing I'm prone to murder, to a tire iron striking the back of my skull for the $17 in my wallet, a menial and unimpressive end, than in a life where I don't have to choose love, to choose to do right. What miserable deeds would our "good deeds" be if they were robotic and compulsive, rather than borne of the choice and the struggle to love and overcome hate and the spewing of venom so that light may prevail.

Gloria Copeland (bluh) was in the news recently for claiming, "If you have Jesus, you don't need a flu shot." Mrs. Copeland does not speak a Biblical truth. Contrary to the prosperity peddling of the Joel Osteens of the world, Jesus did not die to keep you free from ailments; He died to give you eternal life that outlasts a fallen world's mortality, to be a Light in you that outshines the darkness that does not comprehend Him. His blood was shed so that we could be made anew and forgiven for the wretched things we do, things that make the world such a dark place, ugly things we choose to do, just like the killers and politicians, and blame them on an absence of God.
God does not promise us carefree or pain-free lives (if that can be called living). Rather, God promises us eternal life through His Son Jesus, who was abandoned on the cross by the same God we accuse of apathy, all to give us life - not mere existence - peace and joy in His life, His suffering, and in His resurrection. And that life outshines all of the darkness of mere existence. 
Life hurts, but it's worth it. Existence is fleeting. Life is eternal.

If all of that truth meets your ire and disgust, then maybe this God isn't the God for you. I know that sounds pessimistic on my part, and I'd give anything for just one person to believe, but what else can I say? Should I blaspheme and make false promises to you on God's behalf of a life of sunsets and puppies? Should I burst out in tears and beg you to believe in Him? Should I stay up nights highlighting the best Ravi Zacharias quotes? Believe me, if I thought it would bring you to Jesus Christ, I'd carve my prayers for you in the skin of my forearms. But I know it wouldn't lead you to believe. Nothing I can do or say can make a believer in Christ. To think such would be vanity and idolatry. That's a matter between you and the Holy Spirit. My raving about darkness and light is to you like Samson dancing blind before the Philistines. God didn't put me here to serve apologetic theology.

Why, then, did He put me here? To glorify Him, surely, but what else? Who knows? Maybe to be murdered. As grim as that sounds, it is not absurd to think that maybe God has pre-ordained that someday I'll be murdered. Maybe He's used my suffering in the years leading up to my death to soften my heart for the moments after I'm struck, so that I can gasp to my killer that I forgive him as I collapse in a pool of blood. Even if my dying forgiveness did nothing for the killer's repentance and rehabilitation, but fell on a stony heart.
If that's the case, so be it - God owes me no explanation. He owes me no deliverance. He owes me no eternal life, but in His love and grace, and in His own unimaginable suffering on the cross, eternal life has been given to me. And He's given me the audacity, the nerve, the guts to believe.

But before I meet my end by blunt force trauma to the head during a petty robbery, I've got a dog to help.

-with love and anger,
Bud.

"But for him who is joined to all the living there is hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion." -Ecclesiastes 9:4

Poem: "Kids"

You're weird. You talk to imaginary friends.

You whine and make messes. Your parents are hippies.

But when you became a tearless, wordless teddy bear 

taped to a little pink cross,

minding your manners in horrible silence,

I stole away and died a little death.