Have you ever felt like you were separated from someone? Like... you should have them in your life but they're not there. And you feel something about it but then sometimes you don't think about them and don't care.
For example, I never really met my grandparents before they passed away. I actually only met one of them when he was aged and there was this language barrier and I only saw him for maybe two weeks one summer. I have heard my friends talk about their grandparents and the things they do together on the weekends, or after school. So I know that I am missing them in my life. My parents have talked about my grandparents, so I know about them. I know some of the things they did and have some idea of what their personality was like. But I don't actually know them. I don't have a relationship with them, no shared experiences, nothing. I don't even know what they look like. I've seen photos but I don't know all their expressions and I don't have a picture in my head when I think about them. And most days I don't miss them. There's nothing to miss, really... I never had anything to begin with right? So I don't know what I would be missing... other than perhaps a similar experience to that of what my friends talk about? I'm not quite sure what you're supposed to do with an old person anyway. Would we laugh together? Would they tell me exciting stories of their past? Would they give me advice about how to go about life and pass on some wisdom?
So I think about this. My grandparents and I, we've been separated by death. I'm not really sad. On a day to day basis, I feel fine. I can live life without them and I feel like any other human being. I don't even think about them until someone starts talking about their grandparents, or when family members talk about their past. But when I do think about my grandparents, I have this feeling inside me somewhere that is a little bit like an abyss. Just some dark empty space that provokes some sort of emotion in me. I'm not sure how to feel. Acceptance? That's all I can do now anyway. Life is life. People live, people die.
And I grow up learning that there is this God. That the first human beings (Adam and Eve) used to live with God, and they lived in a paradise of some sort, the Garden of Eden. They knew who God was - they had a relationship with him. They could talk to him, they could be with him. But then this thing happened where they were tempted by Satan and sinned, acting in disobedience to God. And since God is perfect - without sin (because he can't disobey himself) then he couldn't be with Adam and Eve any more. They had to be separated because of sin. So Adam and Eve were thrown out of the paradise and their children grew up in a world corrupted by sin.
They grow up away from God. Occasionally, someone would be able to talk to God. God would appear in a burning bush, or express his thoughts through dreams and the people who genuinely tried to find him did. They were able to converse with him through prayer, dreams, visions, and in other ways that weren't in as physical a sense as if it were you and I. And God would do things to show that he loves and cares about his people by doing miracles like parting the Red Sea, or bringing plagues to captors, and giving people the strength and courage to accomplish things like freeing their people, or winning a battle. All the while, there were people who would forget about God and about his power because they couldn't see him. Or maybe because they didn't have a personal relationship with him. So they didn't really know who he was, but only knew about him. They didn't get to live in paradise, so they don't know what life was meant to be like. These were the people born into a corrupted world, so they would do things that were corrupted too. They would build idols of gold and worship them. They would envy and steal from each other, they would hurt each other for personal gains. Then someone would tell them, "Hey, God doesn't want us to hurt each other. Don't you trust him? Don't you know that he will take care of us?". Time and time again, as generations passed from ones who were alive to witness the things God did for them, to the ones who only heard about it from their parents, fewer and fewer people knew God personally.
So what can we do? How are we supposed to fix this? How can we be unseparated so that we can be with God in paradise again? How do we remove this sin barrier, how can we fill this gaping hole? How can we know God......? We don't even know what he looks like, and I'm not sure what to picture in my head either when I think about God. A bright white light surrounding some sort of human-shaped mass???
God sent his son, Jesus to earth. Jesus lived a life sin-free. He obeyed all of God's rules and commandments and loved everyone. Then he died when we killed him and hung him on a cross. But that's the physical body that died. When he died, he volunteered himself to be the sacrifice that could connect us back to God again. His death as a sin-free person was enough to justify our freedom from the punishment of sin. Then he came back to life, defeating death in his spiritual body, and went to be with God (in church, the act of baptism is a symbol of a human dying with Jesus to our life in sin and being revived to a new life, one where we can be with God).
I met a nice lady on the greyhound on my way back to Ottawa one time. She offered me part of her granola bar and that's when we started our conversation. She was from Saudi Arabia and wore a full burqua. After I asked her about what life was like in Saudi Arabia, she asked me if I believed in any religion, and eventually we started talking about the differences between Islam and Christianity. When we got to the problem of sin, she told me that she felt that it wasn't fair that Jesus was allowed to take the punishment of sin for us. She felt that each person should bear the consequences of their own actions and that's that. There was no, "PLEASE, take me instead!!" She said that there was a difference between major and minor sins. For major sins, they were less forgivable and I don't remember what she said about how you could recover from that kind of sin [This website gives the rankings of the major sins, there are 70, but I can't find anything on how to be forgiven for this- let me know if you have the answer]. For minor sins, you could waive the punishment by doing enough good deeds and by repenting (feeling remorse and regret for your actions, and making a conscious effort to stop doing it).
So in both cases, you would sin. Then you would repent. In Christianity, when you repent, you are asking Jesus to take your punishments for you - and there is no difference in level of sin (to God, sin is sin, whether big or small). You still feel remorse and regret for your actions but you also know that Jesus is there to pay the price for what you did. As for the lady, she believed that after you do good deeds and repent then the sin just disappears and the punishment is waived. So there would be no need for Jesus.
I believe that once your sins have been paid for, you have a clean slate. The barrier between you and God is removed, thanks to Jesus. "So if everyone just relied on Jesus to pay the price, then what stops people from sinning more and then repenting?", she asked. I told her that people who knew God wouldn't want to sin anymore. After I realized that God loves me and accepted the offer of Jesus' death in my place for my sins, I didn't want to be separated anymore. I wanted to be closer to him, to know more of who my creator is. I want him to be here in my life, to show me things and teach me how to love people. I wanted to find what my purpose in life is, and to give me the courage to follow that path regardless of what the people who don't know him say. So if sinning means that I would be separated from God, then I wouldn't want to sin, and the fact that Jesus is willing to pay the price for my sin doesn't mean that I want to abuse it. I know that I am not perfect, and even after accepting Jesus as my saviour (saving me from an eternity of separation from God), I will still do things that are harmful to others, and be tempted by the corruption in the world we live in (or, Satan). But instead of living in fear that I missed a prayer or didn't do enough good deeds to outweigh the bad, I am driven by love to live a life worthy of someone that God loves. When I do sin, Jesus is there for me and by strengthening my relationship with God, I can learn to be someone who sins less and loves more.
So for the people who don't know God, he is there. He is real, and there is this broken relationship between you and him. But he loves you, so he wants it to be fixed. He wants you to know him personally - not just to know about him. He wants to be reconciled with you so that you can live with him forever after life in this physical earthly body. I believe that we have a soul (the conscience/essence of me? still working this out), a spiritual body and that our physical bodies are just a shell.
Sometimes when I think about all the new people I meet when I move every four months for school and coop, I wonder about how much time I should invest in getting to know them. If we won't keep in contact eventually after I leave and if we just drift apart then what's the point? Why bother? I will only feel sad and miss them when I leave. But you know, when I think of life in a bigger perspective, when I remember that they also know God and are saved by Jesus, then I have peace in knowing that one day I will see them again. So I try my best to get to know them and develop a relationship that is supportive, loving, and good. Then when we leave our shells and go to where ever God is, we will see God and each other again. We will all be reunited.
Thanks for reading again!
For example, I never really met my grandparents before they passed away. I actually only met one of them when he was aged and there was this language barrier and I only saw him for maybe two weeks one summer. I have heard my friends talk about their grandparents and the things they do together on the weekends, or after school. So I know that I am missing them in my life. My parents have talked about my grandparents, so I know about them. I know some of the things they did and have some idea of what their personality was like. But I don't actually know them. I don't have a relationship with them, no shared experiences, nothing. I don't even know what they look like. I've seen photos but I don't know all their expressions and I don't have a picture in my head when I think about them. And most days I don't miss them. There's nothing to miss, really... I never had anything to begin with right? So I don't know what I would be missing... other than perhaps a similar experience to that of what my friends talk about? I'm not quite sure what you're supposed to do with an old person anyway. Would we laugh together? Would they tell me exciting stories of their past? Would they give me advice about how to go about life and pass on some wisdom?
So I think about this. My grandparents and I, we've been separated by death. I'm not really sad. On a day to day basis, I feel fine. I can live life without them and I feel like any other human being. I don't even think about them until someone starts talking about their grandparents, or when family members talk about their past. But when I do think about my grandparents, I have this feeling inside me somewhere that is a little bit like an abyss. Just some dark empty space that provokes some sort of emotion in me. I'm not sure how to feel. Acceptance? That's all I can do now anyway. Life is life. People live, people die.
And I grow up learning that there is this God. That the first human beings (Adam and Eve) used to live with God, and they lived in a paradise of some sort, the Garden of Eden. They knew who God was - they had a relationship with him. They could talk to him, they could be with him. But then this thing happened where they were tempted by Satan and sinned, acting in disobedience to God. And since God is perfect - without sin (because he can't disobey himself) then he couldn't be with Adam and Eve any more. They had to be separated because of sin. So Adam and Eve were thrown out of the paradise and their children grew up in a world corrupted by sin.
They grow up away from God. Occasionally, someone would be able to talk to God. God would appear in a burning bush, or express his thoughts through dreams and the people who genuinely tried to find him did. They were able to converse with him through prayer, dreams, visions, and in other ways that weren't in as physical a sense as if it were you and I. And God would do things to show that he loves and cares about his people by doing miracles like parting the Red Sea, or bringing plagues to captors, and giving people the strength and courage to accomplish things like freeing their people, or winning a battle. All the while, there were people who would forget about God and about his power because they couldn't see him. Or maybe because they didn't have a personal relationship with him. So they didn't really know who he was, but only knew about him. They didn't get to live in paradise, so they don't know what life was meant to be like. These were the people born into a corrupted world, so they would do things that were corrupted too. They would build idols of gold and worship them. They would envy and steal from each other, they would hurt each other for personal gains. Then someone would tell them, "Hey, God doesn't want us to hurt each other. Don't you trust him? Don't you know that he will take care of us?". Time and time again, as generations passed from ones who were alive to witness the things God did for them, to the ones who only heard about it from their parents, fewer and fewer people knew God personally.
So what can we do? How are we supposed to fix this? How can we be unseparated so that we can be with God in paradise again? How do we remove this sin barrier, how can we fill this gaping hole? How can we know God......? We don't even know what he looks like, and I'm not sure what to picture in my head either when I think about God. A bright white light surrounding some sort of human-shaped mass???
God sent his son, Jesus to earth. Jesus lived a life sin-free. He obeyed all of God's rules and commandments and loved everyone. Then he died when we killed him and hung him on a cross. But that's the physical body that died. When he died, he volunteered himself to be the sacrifice that could connect us back to God again. His death as a sin-free person was enough to justify our freedom from the punishment of sin. Then he came back to life, defeating death in his spiritual body, and went to be with God (in church, the act of baptism is a symbol of a human dying with Jesus to our life in sin and being revived to a new life, one where we can be with God).
I met a nice lady on the greyhound on my way back to Ottawa one time. She offered me part of her granola bar and that's when we started our conversation. She was from Saudi Arabia and wore a full burqua. After I asked her about what life was like in Saudi Arabia, she asked me if I believed in any religion, and eventually we started talking about the differences between Islam and Christianity. When we got to the problem of sin, she told me that she felt that it wasn't fair that Jesus was allowed to take the punishment of sin for us. She felt that each person should bear the consequences of their own actions and that's that. There was no, "PLEASE, take me instead!!" She said that there was a difference between major and minor sins. For major sins, they were less forgivable and I don't remember what she said about how you could recover from that kind of sin [This website gives the rankings of the major sins, there are 70, but I can't find anything on how to be forgiven for this- let me know if you have the answer]. For minor sins, you could waive the punishment by doing enough good deeds and by repenting (feeling remorse and regret for your actions, and making a conscious effort to stop doing it).
So in both cases, you would sin. Then you would repent. In Christianity, when you repent, you are asking Jesus to take your punishments for you - and there is no difference in level of sin (to God, sin is sin, whether big or small). You still feel remorse and regret for your actions but you also know that Jesus is there to pay the price for what you did. As for the lady, she believed that after you do good deeds and repent then the sin just disappears and the punishment is waived. So there would be no need for Jesus.
I believe that once your sins have been paid for, you have a clean slate. The barrier between you and God is removed, thanks to Jesus. "So if everyone just relied on Jesus to pay the price, then what stops people from sinning more and then repenting?", she asked. I told her that people who knew God wouldn't want to sin anymore. After I realized that God loves me and accepted the offer of Jesus' death in my place for my sins, I didn't want to be separated anymore. I wanted to be closer to him, to know more of who my creator is. I want him to be here in my life, to show me things and teach me how to love people. I wanted to find what my purpose in life is, and to give me the courage to follow that path regardless of what the people who don't know him say. So if sinning means that I would be separated from God, then I wouldn't want to sin, and the fact that Jesus is willing to pay the price for my sin doesn't mean that I want to abuse it. I know that I am not perfect, and even after accepting Jesus as my saviour (saving me from an eternity of separation from God), I will still do things that are harmful to others, and be tempted by the corruption in the world we live in (or, Satan). But instead of living in fear that I missed a prayer or didn't do enough good deeds to outweigh the bad, I am driven by love to live a life worthy of someone that God loves. When I do sin, Jesus is there for me and by strengthening my relationship with God, I can learn to be someone who sins less and loves more.
So for the people who don't know God, he is there. He is real, and there is this broken relationship between you and him. But he loves you, so he wants it to be fixed. He wants you to know him personally - not just to know about him. He wants to be reconciled with you so that you can live with him forever after life in this physical earthly body. I believe that we have a soul (the conscience/essence of me? still working this out), a spiritual body and that our physical bodies are just a shell.
Sometimes when I think about all the new people I meet when I move every four months for school and coop, I wonder about how much time I should invest in getting to know them. If we won't keep in contact eventually after I leave and if we just drift apart then what's the point? Why bother? I will only feel sad and miss them when I leave. But you know, when I think of life in a bigger perspective, when I remember that they also know God and are saved by Jesus, then I have peace in knowing that one day I will see them again. So I try my best to get to know them and develop a relationship that is supportive, loving, and good. Then when we leave our shells and go to where ever God is, we will see God and each other again. We will all be reunited.
The following two videos explain the separation from God and how to fix it. The top is done in the form of typography, the one on the bottom is a rap/spoken word piece if you prefer. Hopefully gives a better picture of what I'm trying to say...
This one is a rap by the guy above with a similar theme to some of the stuff I mentioned in this post. Lyrics here
Thanks for reading again!
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