Some Random God-Thoughts

I've been thinking lately about a lot of things, but here are some of the things that have run through my mind:

-Christians need to starting learning how to dance with their hearts instead of just teaching each other how to play Dance Dance Revolution. In other words, we need to stop reducing the gospel ( which is essentially a love story) into formulas and facts and start focusing on their current place with God, the reality of who we are in Christ and what he wants to do for us and what we should do in response to his love.

-You can't quantify a religion based on love. What counts more than how much or how long you read or prayed is that you wanted to do it at all, that you fought through everything else the average busy daily life is shouting at you to do and spend time with Jesus. Love can't ever be quantified.

-God teaches people to swim by throwing them in the deep part of the ocean, not studying strokes in the classroom. The most effective way to learn is to fail.

-God is just as concerned with saving people individually as he is the whole world. I tried to categorize him and figure out what exactly he was trying to save, if he's more of a universal savior than a personal savior, but he told me that I was separating him too much, taking him out of one box to put him in another when really I should be taking out my cardboard partitions. God encompasses all and therefore can have more than one purpose; therefore, God is equally concerned with individual people and the whole world being restored to him.

There's a lot of things that I have yet to learn, and there's a lot of things that God has opened my eyes about. It's easy to lose perspective sometimes, but sometimes it's almost easier to gain perspective by removing yourself from the situation; it's like being able to calculate the trigonometry of the distance between Pluto and the sun of you move the third point out far enough. God's been doing that to me.
What I've discovered is that the world is ugly. People go to places like India and are shocked by the blatant display of idols everywhere when really it's the same in the western world; they're just blinded to what they're used to. The West if full of idols like celebrities, things, image and it shouts at you from everywhere relentlessly, and we've just become numb to it. Just because we don't have mini buddahs, shrines and temples, alters to the sun and fertility gods on every corner doesn't mean our culture is not steeped in god-worship, in desecrating the very God who died to try to open our eyes, or actually to enable our eyes to be opened. It's sad how people don't see the great chasm that separates them from God; the sparkle of things on this side distracts us from seeing how deep and endless the pit really is.