a story I want you to read

One day a woman who didn't believe in Jesus Christ walked into church.  The band was playing, the people were dancing and singing, there was great rejoicing.  The woman couldn't understand it. Why did these people actually look happy? She found church boring.  She found Jesus to be beyond understanding, a possibly mythical man who wasn't even interesting in the first place.

I was that woman.  Like many, I was an unbeliever.   I sought security in philosophies and theories...anything from Atheism, Agnosticism, Taoism, Buddhism, Sufism, and New Age spirituality.  But one day, I met someone (her name is Ching and she blogs from everyday sunday) who forced me to look seriously into the claims of Christianity.  Here was a Christian who was so unlike the other self-proclaimed Christians I meet.  I found in her joy even in the midst of our daily stresses in the office. I saw in her a compassion that went beyond my understanding of what was supposed to be "fair". I didn't agree with her worldview. In fact, I constantly challenged it. But I couldn't deny reality...where did she get  the hope that I was desperately seeking in my theories and philosophies?  What was the source of this hope that I wanted?

When this woman pointed me to Jesus Christ, I had to investigate.  As I got to know Jesus better through the Bible and by attending a Bible-based church, I saw in Him the picture of a powerful, loving, and just God. Jesus gave me hope that my fallen world -- me included -- could be truly transformed. At the same time, I found in the Bible (which the Literature major in me once considered as myth) a logical, coherent human history. I found it incredible that the Bible could be so logical and coherent when the books were written by different people living in different time periods.  I also found in the Bible the most precise understanding of the human condition and our human tendencies. Who else could understand us in such a precise way but the One who created us?

It wasn't an easy journey. I had many questions, and I still do.  But every time I feel lost or run away, God seeks me and exceeds expectations. He proves, as He has proven over and over again in the Bible, that even in our doubts, He remains unchanging, faithful, and trustworthy.

There are still so many things in me that needs changing. Our spiritual crosses are not easy to bear alone. Thankfully, I know many people who are so genuinely sold out on their faith.  Someone who declares himself a God must be mad or made-up.  But if He was either, why did the Christians who led me to Him seem so real?    What was it about Him that made them so joyful? What was it about Jesus that transformed the hopeless into the hopeful? What was it about these Christians that drew me even when I didn't believe?

This cross was very heavy and hurt my shoulder  To think that this was only 1/3 the actual weight of the historical cross that Jesus bore!  I am grateful that I had someone to help me though I only carried this a few steps.  

I am grateful, because when I talk to these people, I don't merely see them as friends.  I see the Jesus of the bible -- compassionate, non-compromising, loving. Admittedly, they are not perfect, but I know that God is helping them in their own personal journeys.

Jethro - an encourager and mentor

Like my fellow believers, I am not perfect. But I hold on the promise of the bible that I am being perfected into Christ-likeness by the transforming power of Jesus Christ.

So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord--who is the Spirit--makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image. - 2 Cor 3:18

There are times when people fail me.  There are times when my own intellect, emotions, and even people  I love and admire fail me. The message of the cross is simple -- we fail, but God still loves us. He gave the perfect sacrifice, so ALL our sins (past, present, and future) can be forgiven and we can be reconciled to Him.

Because He is holy and just, God had to punish us for our sins.  But because He is also merciful and loving, He found a way out of our punishment.  He sent His only Son to take our sins, become sin, and take our punishment for Himself.

 Because of Jesus' death on the cross, we don't have to reap the consequence of sin which is death.  The sacrifice is done.  The prophecies have been fulfilled. Jesus, victorious over sin and death, was raised from the dead and reigns forever! IT IS FINISHED.

We don't have to scourge ourselves anymore and feel insecure about our future! The gift of eternal life is offered to all those who believe.We only have to accept the gift for our own sins to be nailed on the cross. This gift is what we call grace -- it is undeserved and unmerited...but it is freely given.

If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.  For it is with your heart that you believe, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved ~ Romans 10:9-10

The message of the cross is either a grand story that man created to explain away the things he couldn't understand.

Or....it could be real.

It could bring repentance.  

It could bring reconciliation. 

 It could bring healing. 

It could bring hope.

It could bring love.

Because of how God transformed my life, denying Him would be the most untruthful thing I could do.  I can't imagine myself going back to being an atheist or agnostic when I've encountered God in such a transformative way. God is not memorized prayers or the rituals we are asked to perform. Nor is He the rules that seem to enslave.  God is our Creator, Provider, Strength, Deliverer, Friend and all the wonderful things we can attribute to God.  By believing in Jesus, I can have a direct relationship with Him.

When I reflect about all that God has done for me, I am given strength and hope for the future. When I let go of my selfish desires and focus on pleasing Him, I find myself complete and at my most joyful. I have more that I can give to others. My blessings and even my pains are given a sense of purpose -- they are all for the glory of God. Life is given meaning. Life is not wasted. Life is a delight when I live it for God.

My God is alive! He is a great friend.   He is faithful even when I am not.  He always comes through.  And I know, I am not alone.

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If you do believe that Jesus died for your sins and was resurrected from the dead, the Bible promises that the old has gone and the new has come.

 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:The old has gone, the new is here! 2 Cor 5:17.

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Photos are from Walkway, an art installation/exhibit in Bonifacio High Street by a creative group of Christians called Church Simplified.  The Walkway event runs every Holy Week at Bonifacio High Street Bonifacio Global City, Taguig

All photos were taken by Gail Bitoon of Foreveryday Photography 

station 8

Please pray for this kid

When people we love hurt us

When people we love hurt us, the usual desire is to change their feelings. We think that if just strive harder, love stronger, be more positive, be more attractive, then they'll come around and stop hurting us.  Well, let me tell you something.  Love is not something that we earn by being more beautiful, being more loving, being more compatible, being more faithful, being more and more and more for the other person.  These actions are a natural outpouring of our love, but we can't force someone to return these feelings just because we felt or did these things for them.  Love is given freely to those we love.  When we love just because we're getting something out of it, then that's not love.  That's emotionally abusing the other party.

when people we love hurt us </3

The next reaction would usually be the desire to get back at the person who hurt us. We want to act all screamy bitchy and maybe, please, could you gouge his eyes out and cut open his stomach and remove all his entrails just to get some revenge?

I wanted to do that.  I wanted to shout and curse and make the other party feel the extent of my pain.  But I couldn't.  I would have done it before, but I couldn't do it now.  The command is clear: In your anger DO NOT sin.  I could tell the other person how I felt, but I COULDN'T SIN.  I couldn't run over him with a ten wheeler truck or ram him with a bulldozer.  The anger in me felt that I could though, and what's more, that I SHOULD. And to tell you frankly, I did hurt many people back with my actions and words.

I struggled with that command.  I felt that God was restricting me.  That it wasn't healthy, that God was unfair and that he didn't care because the other person was just getting away easily with every hurt that he did to me.

does God care?
credit: ilovedoodle@flickr

I couldn't accept that God was asking me to do such an unhealthy thing as repressing my feelings.  Is God really unreasonable? Does God want to restrict me and make me live abnormally?  Why would he create me with feelings in the first place if I can't act on them?

When Christians are hurt, should we just keep quiet?  I grew up thinking that aside from not sinning, I should also never ever question God when I didn't understand Him, as doing so would also be a sin.  The bible discussions I attended the past months revealed to me just how false this teaching was.   I can absolutely relate to David when he poured his heart out to God and asked,

"Will the Lord reject us forever?  Will he never show his favor again? 

 Has his promise failed for all time?" 

The prophet Habakkuk is another example, crying out to God accusingly,

"How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?"  

Yes, in our anger we shouldn't sin.  But in our anger, we can talk to God.  We can come to him and question him and struggle with him when the hurt doesn't make sense anymore.  Most of all, in our anger and grief, we can hold on to God and be assured that He is faithful.

God does listen and answer.  God answered me, but it took a while for me to understand, because it wasn't God  who wasn't listening.   I wasn't listening.  I didn't like what God was telling me, because it went against what I wanted. I wanted the other person to love me first and love me above all, but God was telling me to love Him, my God, first and above all.  I didn't hear God, because my eyes were focused on someone else.

In other instances,  God's answer became clear at a much much later time.  I'm sure that some of you had those moments when you said, "Ah, so this why this happened! I'm so happy that it did!"

 I don't understand many things until now, but I'm glad that I don't have a blind and mute wooden replica of a God who doesn't know how I feel.  Instead, I have a God who knows how it feels to be betrayed, denied and rejected by people that He loved.  I have a God who was whipped, crowned with thorns, mocked, jeered at, and nailed to the cross.  I have a God who called out to His Father, "Why have you forsaken me?"

True Love.
credit: flamable77@deviantart

When people I love hurt me, I CAN shout, scream, gnash my teeth, and just pour out everything to my Father.  Unlike other people who'll eventually get tired of my drama (I am such a drama queen when it comes to things of the heart, and you have this post as a reference) or who would just tell me to drink myself to death and party all night or to travel to forget my problems, my God offers complete healing.  What's more, I can be assured that I will eventually be redeemed from any pain, hurt, embarrassment and failure.

Christianity is NOT about hopping bunnies, bright sunshine and colorful flowers.  Christians also get hurt, mad, and angry.  We can spend seasons in the desert or in a battle.  Being a believer does not guarantee a problem-free life, but what it does guarantee is that we will always have a great God to help us go through anything.

PSALM 130. credit: Philip Davis

Is it okay for Christians to read Harry Potter?

I used to have a secret fantasy. I wanted to teach History of Magic in Hogwarts castle and finally give life to the sleep-inducing subject. Blame it on the magic of Harry Potter. Was I sinning by reading Harry potter?

If you would allow me to make a sweeping statement, I would divide the major book crazes of this generation into three:

Harry Potter
Twilight
and the most recent, Hunger Games

Another generalization I would make is that Harry Potter is the most widely-read book by both young adults and adults of this generation. You can call me biased, because I myself have devoured the Harry Potter books. Like a true fanatic (and geek), I debated over the political implications of Harry Potter 5 in the fansite Mugglenet.net, I got sorted into a Hogwarts houses through Harry Potter quizzes made by fans (I'm a Ravenclaw by the way), my favorite subject is Charms and Herbology, I find Divination stupid, and I reread the HP books before stepping into an HP movie.

Some fundamentalists and even evangelicals would probably condemn my fanaticism, saying that the HP books delve into the occult, encourage kids into witchcraft and homosexuality (yeah, Dumbledore is gay according to Rowling) and are the products of the devil. After all, the Bible itself condemns homosexuality, and specifically warns against witchcraft.

Some Christian defenders of the Harry Potter books have gone so far as to compare HP to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis' Narnia books which are Christian allegories and have Christian themes. They also cite the messages of love, courage, and friendship found in the HP books as proof of its "Christian message."

I myself would not go into either extremes. I have not gone into a full-length literary analysis of Harry Potter. But I do know that different literary theories could lead us to either conclusion -- HP as satanic, or HP as Christian. Before, I used to look at HP as communist since I was partial to that ideology before I got saved.

My point is that, from a Reader's Response point of view, we can look at books through different lenses. The Lord of the Rings books and Narnia books were written with our knowledge of the author's intention and Christian backgrounds in mind. These have contributed to the literary analyses that the books are Christian allegories. We can even go the way of condemning all fantasy books as demonic just by the characters' use of "magic". Heck, I have read analyses of other Christians condemning the New International Version of the bible as tools of satan!

Can fantasy and faith mix? (photo credit to: fantasybooksandmovies.com)

If we condemn fantasy books as such, then let's throw all other books into the burning pile. Oscar Wilde's classic The Picture of Dorian Gray shows us a hedonistic world. Shakespeare uses witches in his plays, but we don't hear an uproar over his books. And if you argue that witches and hedonists in these books are seen in a negative light, while HP has witches and sorcerers as heroes, then we can do away with Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur and all other books mentioning the "good" sorcerer Merlin. And what do we do with our Greek mythology, science-fiction, the Qu'ran, and The Tale of Genji? They're not Christian at all. They offer a totally different world and faith view.

Personally, I never read HP as a Christian book. However, it espouses values we can call Christian. I love how Rowling, with her own unique storytelling, weaves a tale of good versus evil. These values and themes are not exclusive to HP. We see them in various myths, legends, and other stories around the world. They don't necessarily make Harry Potter exclusively Christian.

Rowling's Hogwarts is not C.S. Lewis' Narnia which has obvious Christian allegories (note: some Christians will still disagree on the Narnia as a Christian allegory premise). But I wouldn't condemn Harry Potter and his friends to the stake either. Books, and things of culture for that matter, are tainted by man. NOTHING created by man is holy or pure. We may focus on elements of HP which are "demonic" and thus, conclude the book to be demonic, or we may look at HP through a Christian lens as other Christian writers have done. Or we may not look at HP from any religious lens at all.  Given the influence of HP, Christians  are more concerned about looking at the HP books from God's lens.

Are fantasy books dangerous then? I agree that these books can be used by the devil to tempt us, as there are numerous ways by which the devil can make us stumble. Even "good" things such as friends and family can lead to temptation. We live in a fallen world, but we cannot put ourselves in an isolated bubble so that we won't get "corrupted".

Our biggest concern should be the state of our hearts and our relationship with God when we read these books. For example, I read the Da Vinci Code before I became Christian. Because the author of this book CLAIMED that everything he wrote was real, and I never read my Bible, I was drawn into believing that the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and other Gnostic Gospels should occupy the same importance as the other Gospels written in the bible. Compared to Brown's Da Vinci Code, Rowling never gave me the impression that her magical world was real. I read it fully knowing that whatever was written there was fantasy. Also, even the Da Vinci Code was used by God in my life so that I could have a firmer stand right now about my own faith. My faith was not made weaker because I learned about Gnosticism. God gave me the choice to believe Gnosticism, but by His grace, I didn't. Now, I could say "yeah I know about that belief, but I still choose being a Christian."

HP awakens my imagination and is a literary experience, but I am also aware that the fantasy is not real. I'm also not "addicted" to it as I was before. I believe it was God who made me realize that He is the only One worth getting addicted to. When I read HP, I admire Rowling's talent and I celebrate its metaphors and its message of love. When I read the Bible, I know that I have the greatest history book, love story and written creative work in my hand. Reading HP does not negate my experience of the Bible.

If we ban Harry Potter, we might as well ban fairy tales and other stories created by man. In fact, we might even ask ourselves, can a Christian read any other book at all without sinning? We might as well ban TV, Facebook, and interacting in the real world which is filled with pornography, violence, real witchcraft, etc. Let's face it, we're not in heaven yet. We are all in a spiritual battle and just like Caspian in Narnia, we need to arm ourselves against the enemy. If a Christian is drawn into witchcraft, astrology, or the occult because of Harry Potter, then maybe he should stop reading it.  This may be a reflection of his heart or his lack of maturity in faith.  Maybe he's still too young to be exposed to such ideas.  Don't take my word for it though. Ask your parents, ask your Christian friends, ask your pastor, ask God.

When temptations happen, a Christian should pray, seek God's help, and read his bible to be reminded of the Good News. No message in any other book, after all, can compare to the message of the Gospel if you have experienced its reality in your life.



Recommended reading regarding this topic:

Harry Potter vs. the Muggles by Mike Hertenstein

A similar debate once raged over whether Christians could eat food that had been originally offered to pagan idols. They most certainly can, insisted the Apostle Paul, provided they can eat with a clear conscience and be mindful of those "weaker brothers" who cannot. But Paul never suggested that weaker brothers must set the limits for everyone.
- Mike Hertenstein