Love

Rules don’t apply–part 1

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I found a conversation I wrote in a story of mine yesterday that I thought would make a good blog post. It takes place between a main character and a bit of an antagonist character. It was a debate about how to solve a certain problem that had come up. The main character finally gets worked up enough to utter an impassioned speech (I edited this to make it more clear.):

“Yes, love. I’ve found that nothing else matters. Love makes it worth it to go through the other stuff…and that’s why I have to believe in Goodness too. Good things are done out of love, and  they make love grow. Freedom allows love. Evil just wants to kill it. Or twist it.”

“People can do just fine without all that sappy stuff, and what does it help? You think love will fix this mess?”

“Yes! and if it can’t, what can? Work? Work for what? Rules? What good are rule when they have no reason to exist save for control. Why do we get up every morning if not for love of something? And I don’t mean sappy stuff. I mean the real, true, loyal, kind sort of love. That’s what motivates me. Because I’ve been given it. And I stand by God because He gives it. I see no other way and no other Hope but to hope in Him. And that’s my say.”

This was a fan fiction piece, and the world it’s based off is one where Good and Evil are arbitrary things, all depending on your background only, not your personality. Which is an idea present in the real world, but this world takes it to the degree of craziness.

That’s why the character is railing against rules. I’ve been reading about Thomas Jefferson, and one thing that sticks out about his politics is how he was concerned for the common good. It’s actually in the Preamble to the constitution that it is meant to “promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity (descendants.)” The Constitution is a classic example of men trying to make rules that would benefit everyone. those rules are made out of love for their countrymen. These rules are fine.

But rules can also be made out of fear and frustration. As I’m sure you know from your own experience. Sometimes rules are just made out of stupidity. People believe something is right, but they haven’t thought it through, and they use their power to enforce the idea.

Of course that speech isn’t really about rules. It could easily be made in favor of them, if rules were on the side of love. That’s really the greater point.

you see, it puzzles people that two opposite actions can both be the right thing to do in different circumstances. I think that’s where the idea that right and wrong are arbitrary comes in for a lot of us. And it’s true if you ever day any one action is evil, someone will find a case proving otherwise.

I didn’t always understand how you can tell what the right thing to do is if this is the case. how can you ever be sure?

the answer was given to me, as it often is, through a book. “The hiding Place.” Which I’ve mentioned before on this blog. In that book Corrie and her family have an argument about whether it was right to lie about what they were doing in order to keep people safe and alive. Corrie’s sister, Nollie, argues that truth is always the best choice. That the bible makes it clear never to lie. Corrie argues that to preserve their radio she had to lie. (and later she lies while under interrogation.)The thing is, while the radio may be a small thing, no one would deny that lying to save lives was the right thing to do. In fact, it  would be weak not to.

But the strange thing is that the end result of Nollie telling the truth and Corrie hiding it was the same. Both times the person or people they had wanted to help were safe in the end. And the answer seems to be provided in this one line that their father said to calm Corrie down. “I am sure, whatever you said Corrie, was out of love.”

Huh? What does that even mean?

Well, the Bible says that to a Christian all things are permissible but not all things are helpful. It says not to use grace as a license for sin. It also says whatever is not of faith is sin. What does all this have to do with my point? I’ll tell you.

God never says lying is good. In fact, He forbids it. But even in the Bible there are examples of people lying and not being condemned for it. but it was always to protect the lives of an innocent person, or to get justice in some other way, when total honesty would not serve. God still never says it is good, but we have no record of Him punishing the person for it. Often lying still has its own consequences, and so do other sins that might be committed in the same instance. It seems to matter more why someone does something, and not what it is they do.

This is not always the case. But Corrie and Nollie both did what they did out of their respective beliefs that is was the ight thing, or more right, than the alternative. Sometimes the Right thing can be a personal choice. But only if it’s in line with the Truth.

I mean that it is in Love. I can get a little too obsessed with having “All justice” as Portia put it. (The Merchant of Venice.) But just like for Shylock, in real life having all justice means having more than you desired. If you live by Love on the other hand, you will get as much justice as you need, but you will also render mercy.

Justice is important to me, but Mercy is even more important. I’ll go more into this in the next part, but I’m stopping this here.

–Natasha.cropped-welcome-scan.jpg

Not apologetics.

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“Christianity is not a series of myths in the plural, but rather truth spelled with a capital “T.” Truth about total reality, not just about religious things. Biblical Christianity is Truth concerning total reality–and the intellectual holding of that total Truth and then living in the light of that Truth.”–Francis Schaeffer.

I found this quote in a book I’ve been reading. (I just finished it. Shooting for over 6o books this year.) I liked it because this is just what I think.

You know, I just read a comment section conversation on YouTube about religion being used as a reason to do anything. These random people I don’t know stated that it should never be used as the only reason to do something.

I guess if you’re coming at it from the point of view that no religion encompasses the Total True and Right way to live, that make sense. But I’m not going to be mean and say these people don’t have a point. A lot of religions have traditions that don’t make any sense.

I’ve heard a belief in Christianity defended on the grounds that it makes the most sense; and while I agree that, out of all religions, Christianity is the most sensible, I would not say all of it makes sense from a  rational, logical perspective.

There’s a reason people have for centuries thought we were a little out of our minds. Christianity requires a lot of faith in the unseen. I don’t just mean the invisible, I mean the unseen results. Often people can believe in an invisible God just fine, but they can’t believe in a God that lets the things happen that happen, and that seems to leave His followers in difficult or fatal positions.

Even C. S. Lewis, one of the greatest Christian minds in the past hundred years, he himself admitted that there were things he could not grasp about God. He didn’t have to. he just had to have faith. Why would such a man of reason admit that God can be puzzling.IT seems crazy then to still believe in Him.

In one of Lewis’ books, Till We Have Faces, there is a character called the Fox, a Greek Philosopher. he spends most of the story trying to understand the Divine Nature by pure reason, he teaches the main character Orual to discount any other method of understanding, but in the end he sadly admits “I never wanted her to ask…why the Priest something from (his faith) that I never got from my sayings.” Admitting that there was something lacking in his “Pure reason.” And that is so, because reason without faith is not actually pure.

We were not made with just our minds to guide us, we have feelings too, and those feelings are often more right than our thoughts. Now, the reverse is also true. Many people never think at all, and run on emotion. But this post is not about that, I’ve laid all this out to make a bigger point:

When you accept that something is “The Truth.” You stop trying to reason with it. No more debate. No more second guessing. This is the hill you will die on. You may literally die too, but it doesn’t make a difference.

Jesus explained it like this, the Kingdom of Heaven. (Truth.) Is like a precious pearl, that when someone finds it in the marketplace he will go and sell everything he has and buy that one thing. Why? Because the Pearl was worth all the rest. We’d call that crazy, the Pearl won’t feed you; it won’t clothe you; it won’t warm you; unless you sell it, and then what was the point. Just to have it?What was that worth? What is mere beauty and rarity worth? Any number of old fables about greed and the vanity of owning precious things and losing everything else come to our minds. Why would Jesus of all people use such an outrageous analogy?

Because; it’s true.

Truth, when you find it, requires that you give up all the lies you subsisted on till now. You must give up even your life, or your family, in order to get that truth. Nothing can stand in your way, because it’s not cheap. When you have it, people wonder why you would sacrifice so much for something that seems to be just an idea. “Things only have value in you mind,” we say, “There’s no such things as inherent value.”

But that is simply wrong. Just like a Pearl is a natural treasure, Truth is naturally the most valuable thing we can have. Unlike the Pearl, it may not always be pretty. Like in the book I mentioned, where the god is an ugly stone. (It’s only a symbol.)

Until you can put practicality aside, you can never accept Christianity. Face it, human beings are not, at core, practical creatures. And that’s a good thing. Practicality only deals with our physical life.

Truth says that there is a point in doing things that make no sense. because  if yo do them, you’ll find a whole new layer of what makes sense. Just like Orual digs and digs to find the kind of reason that is compatible with faith, so must we all. If and when we succeed, we’ll look back on how we used to rationalize (as Alex and Brett Harris say “rational lies.”) and shake our heads at how blind we were.

So what if it doesn’t make sense always? It doesn’t have to. How could we finite beings ever understand all of the Divine Nature anyway? It doesn’t take a Christian to admit that, lot’s of people have.

Let me tell you, the wisest thing you can ever do is to stop trying to fit God into your reason, it’ll never happen. He won’t allow it. He wants your faith.

“Without faith it is impossible to please God.” Hebrews 11:6.

That’s all for now–Natasha.100_3137

Ladylike.

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Here’s something I heard a girl say last week. “I am not a lady.” And I immediately thought. “I am.”

Of course, I realized at once that being a lady is not seen as a very good thing nowadays. It’s got a bad rap.

I think that girls look at the term ladylike as being restrictive. It means you can’t do a  bunch of things that you like, that guys can do, just because you’re a girl.

I get it. But I’ve never seen being a lady as being restrictive.

It’s true that there are some rules, you can’t just decide to be one and then act however you wish. And it’s also true that being a lady did become something confining after awhile.

You see, what a lot of us don’t realize anymore was that Lady used to be a title. It meant you had some relation to a king or queen. That’s where the term lady-in-waiting came from. Ladyship was part of being nobility. It was a little different from gentry, (gentry are people who don’t have to work and live off their estates usually. Read Pride and Prejudice.) Being a lord or lady meant power as well as money. It meant class.

Eventually being a lady came to mean anyone who demonstrated the qualities a lady was supposed to have. And that’s where the modern era got persnickety.

Being a lady is shown in you taste. What you wear, how you wear it. How you walk, and how you talk. It is called being well-bred.

But as authors like Jane Austen have so candidly pointed out, being well-bred has nothing to do with your wealth, status, or how fine your clothes and house are. It has to do with how you treat people and how you conduct yourself.

A well-bred woman would be one who is gracious to guests and hosts alike, treats everyone as if they are worth being kind to, and does not discriminate between race or class. She does not throw herself away because she  had been taught that she is worth being earned. She ignores vulgarity and certainly won’t participate in it. She strives to shoe her children or any children around her that they need to conduct themselves with dignity.

A lady will not use vulgar language because she will not need to, she ha the ability to make her point using the words everyone can understand.

It may sound by this point like I’m creating an impossible standard. But that is kind of the point.

Not many women achieved being a lady, even in the day and age when it was a title, because it rests on the heart and not the training. It is hard to be really kind, really classy, really set a good example.

And I don’t always. but I want to. So even if the standard seems impossible, I think it is better to reach for the impossible than to settle for being mediocre.

We keep telling girls not to hold back and to reach higher, but we are not telling them that that starts with their character. If you want to excel in life, you need to excel in you soul. You need to be kinder than people expect; braver than they expect; more merciful than they deserve; and stronger than the kind of strength that comes from being uncouth.

If I may be so blunt, why do you deserve to succeed more than men if you treat men worse than you’d treat a dog?

Now I’ not saying you personally do, (I’m sure you don’t,) but you’ve seen examples of it before. Women are told to be ruthless now, and to trash all hint of being at all feminine.

I saw a commercial for a kid’s show that defined being equal with men as being as good at sports and “just as gross in the bathroom.”….?

I mean, seriously? I’m bringing up equality only because I know just talking about being a lady is enough to get a fight going about gender roles.

Here’s the deal, guys need to have the same qualities that I’m talking about. I’m just saying that it’s ladylike because I feel like girls are taught to be ashamed of possessing a lot of the gentler virtues. The fact is, all of us need them. because it’s part of being a full human being to be a kind, forgiving, brave, and strong person.

However, strength is not always force.

I can be a bit rough it’s true, but I never try to  be unkindly so. And girls, I don’t mean that if you have a fiery personality that’s a bad thing. I have one myself, and I don’t think it has anything to do with being a lady. Like I said, it’s a matter of the heart.

But I think we’d all be surprised at how much power there is in the thing that used to be call ladylikeness, and also class. It doesn’t matter really what kind of music you like, or if you can speak proper grammar, or if you know how to behave at a fine restaurant. Your class shows in how you use the things you already have.

This is running long, so I’ll end on that thought. Until next post–Natasha.

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Like a lily among the thorns.

Proudly Unpopular–Part 4

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Even though the last part was more general, I still wanted to talk about why my faith is so unpopular, so you know what you’re in for.

You see, I think a lot of Christians have this idea that if we were just nicer people, more non-believers would be interested in our message. And to be fair, a lot of unbelievers do say that.

I won’t argue that Christians often don’t know how to live out the faith. Maybe to some that means it doesn’t work, but I’ve never felt that way.

When I was growing up in church, I always sensed this difference between myself and the other believers. I would think to myself that they had something I didn’t. I never knew what it was exactly. Some describe it as happiness, but I wouldn’t call it that. It’s not that I didn’t believe, I did, but I lacked something. Some meaning that my parents saw, and other adults saw, and I didn’t. After I became a Christian full on, I realized what it was.

Before I reveal it, I want to say something more. I’ve since noticed the same difference between other people I know, and between different families I know. You may have noticed that you feel different around different people. Some make you feel secure, some make you nervous, some make you focused, others distract you.

The reason I don’t think Christians themselves are an excuse to stay away from Christianity is that despite the difference I mentioned, I never found Christians to be any nicer, more friendly, or more inclusive than non Christians. They acted the same most of the time, except they prayed and talked about the Bible, and listened to a different kind of music. So what made the difference?

The faith itself. Maybe this won’t make sense if you haven’t seen it, but faith really is a part of your personality. It should be the most important part. And though I believed, I lacked the genuine, fulfilled faith that I saw in other people. Until I began to have it myself.

Until I did, I hated anything in Christianity that was outside my comfort zone of what I could trust. I had nothing to make me more ready for the harder parts of it.

And that is why people hate Christianity. It is not that Christians are jerks, religions of more violence and cruelty than Christianity are not knocked as often or as bitterly as it; it is because Christianity is scary. C. S. Lewis wrote that until he became a Christian, he was sometimes terrified that Christianity might be true. After he became one, he had sickening doubts that it might be false. The problem is, Christianity, if you understand it at all, is not something you can be half in and half out. You are either all in, or all out. The Bible gives no middle ground. I don’t say this to convince anyone it’s true. My point is that those who are concerned about being nicer about it to toher people have missed the point.

It is not a nice religion.

Now, I can already hear the protests from those of you who are Christians, telling me that we need to be loving. Oh yes, we do. We need much more of that, there never can be too much of love in the world. That is not what I mean. I mean that there is no easy way to become a Christian.

We’ve put way too much focus on nursing people into it. People come to church and leave unchanged, not because we aren’t loving, not because we aren’t teaching the Word of God, not even because we are making God too soft; no, no , no, you can’t exaggerate the kindness of God, as Amanda Cook said. People leave because they don’t share the faith. And they don’t see it in us because we haven’t been honest about it.

You see, real faith is fiery. It makes timid people bold, and foolish people wise. this actually is true of any genuine faith in a good thing, but especially in God.

Christianity is not meant to be popular. It shouldn’t be. Not because I don’t wish it was, but because the only way it ever becomes popular is by people neglecting certain parts of it. (Study Martin Luther, you’ll see what I mean.) It is a waste of our time to try to make it more appealing by selling it on the world’s terms. We just need to live it. And I don’t mean by loving others, though that’s a big part, but by loving God more than others.

People, until I loved God more than others, or myself, I couldn’t really believe on Him and trust Him. Whatever your experience with God has been, until it’s to that point, it isn’t actually faith yet. If you aren’t ready for that, that’s okay. I had to get there. I’m not making an altar call. I just want to set the record straight.

I really want my love for God to be the most important thing to me. I don’t care if it make me unpopular, because when you really get to know Him, you don’t care anymore. The Bible really won’t make sense to someone until they realize that it’s about God and the People who loved Him, not about rules.

 

Okay, this did get preachy, but I warned you; if you read his far, you wanted to hear it. So, thank you, and until next post–Natasha.

Proudly Unpopular–Part 1

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So,  a little fun fact about the past century: Though popularity has existed as long as civilization, the adjective Popular really became itself in the last hundred years or so. I think we’ve all seen the movies of the last couple of decades that focused on the pros and cons of being popular or achieving popularity.

There’s nothing wrong with those movies per sec, but I’m beginning to think they’re  a little outdated. Although I’m sure popularity is still a big motivator for people,  what we’re hearing about now, and being held up to, is Self Expression.

Frank B. Gilbreth once lamented that because kids wanted to be popular so much, they didn’t care about being smart or kind, or anything else. (Cheaper By the Dozen.)

Well, we should be glad that our culture has embraced new values, right?

You all knew that was a trick question. So I’ll say upfront that I don’t at all wish for a return to the obsession with popularity. That always stuck me as shallow, and a lot of movies still clichely make the popular people not at all relatable, or even like real people. (What surprises me is really that only us younger generations seem to think that’s a bad representation of them.) But I wonder, have we really lost our obsession with popularity?

The thing about embracing it, was, that it was honest. One freely admitted that they considered the approval of others the most important factor of life. And whether that was applauded or disdained, we were all on the same page. Now, however, popular ideas, opinions, and styles are no longer seen as what they are.

Let me elucidate. What I mean is, a popular idea is one held by a large portion of your society, maybe the majority, or one of the majorities. It is not usually a political idea, because those are more official, it’s more the background for political ideas. Popular thinking is nearly always framed as being a new way. (Though it used to be the old way was more popular, but that’s another story.)

Okay, so here’s my main point. We, as a people, have not actually ceased to conform to popular ideas. We just call it something else.

If you only casually observed our culture, you might think that our newer generations think more for themselves than the previous ones did. After all, we’re always talking about what our personal beliefs are; making up our own minds; following our own heart, or path, or road. (Pocahontas or Moana anyone?) But I dare to say this is all parrot talk.

There are no new ideas, just new names for them. And we are not making our own way, we’re simply choosing which of the old ways to go. Unless you’ve taken a cue from  historical figures like Buddha or Mohammad, you haven’t actually founded your own personal religion. (I’m not disrespecting them or endorsing them, I’m just making a point.)

But that’s what we’re pushing for isn’t it? Everyone needs their own way. And every way is equal, every way is good and bad at the same time. Only it’s really good, or we wouldn’t be advocating it.

There could be a million religions out there, and only one of them would ever be the right one. That’s not because I’m a Christian, but because I think it’s simple logic, there is a Great Truth out there that every religion is searching for and claiming to identify with, one of them must be the closest to it, if they’re all different.

I think we’ve largely forgotten that the purpose of faith is to get closer and closer to the truth. And then to hold on to it.

Self Expression if good, as far as it goes. We need an interesting world. But let’s never forget that the reason we express ourselves is not to benefit ourselves.

We were each given a gift to that will make the world a better place. And it will point other people to the good and beautiful things in Life. If we aren’t doing that then we are misusing our gifts, and if it destroys us, that is why. Yes, Self Expression is good for you also. But only if you’re sharing it. Because otherwise, who will you express it to, and why?

I think that’s a lot to think about, (and this isn’t even a really long post for me,) so I’m going to end it here. Thanks for reading and until next time–Natasha.

What’s in a name?

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Well it’s been over a week. It’s the Holidays you know, there’s more to think about, also I have other writing projects I work on besides this blog.

This may or may not be surprising, but blogging is the way I get out my more intellectual ideas and explore real life phenomenon. My real passion in writing is fiction. I love making stuff up. Writing about my own life usually bores me after awhile. Maybe because not too many things have happened to me yet. When you spend most of your time at home, even little things become important, but it doesn’t mean they’d be interesting to anyone else.

An interesting thing that happened last week was I looked myself up on the internet. Of course I can’t be specific, but I found out that a lot of people share my name, my fuller name that is (I knew there were other Natashas already.) And some interesting people have my name. I wouldn’t necessarily trade places with them, but one happens to be a writer of sorts, what are the odds?

It got me thinking about names. Some people think certain names give you certain characteristics. This may be true. In the Bible there’s a story about a guy who’s name meant “fool” and that’s what he was. But then there’s names that mean pretty basic things, like a plant or even a kind of metal, and you can’t say a person will become like that can you?

Maybe it’s all in why you choose a name for something. Plants that are given names thrive better, if the names are good. Naming anything makes you get more fond of it, unless you give it a name to express your contempt. We’ve probably all seen, or read about, or encountered a bully who nicknames their victim something awful, and it demoralizes them. We  know that what you label someone slants your view of them.

You’d think with all our knowledge we’d learn to be careful about what we call people, but knowledge never makes anyone careful unless they are careful already, by nature. I am fortunate to have good names, and very few people have ever nicknamed me, and eve fewer have nicknamed me something bad. But it only takes one time to teach you how much it stings. The worst thing is if you start believing what they call you.

I actually like to nickname people, and usually I don’t do it with an intent to annoy them, but I used to. (To my siblings.) So I’m well aware of how easy it is to start using this power of words the wrong way. And there are many wrong  ways, this is just one of them. I don’t want to hate on anyone reading who’s done this, because I shouldn’t talk. But believe me, it is so much better if you stop. since I stopped doing it, it’s like I can breathe better in my relationships with those people.

I’ve heard that I’m just too sensitive about this type of thing, but in my experience, it’s just better to clear the air and not antagonize people. (On purpose.) The bible has plenty to say about this, and so do plenty of other sources. Like Aesop’s Fables, and plenty of less famous books. You’d be hard put to find a story in which the use of words did not lead to trouble  in sooner or later.  So I think I’ve now made my point quite distincly. I’ve said enough.

Until next post–Natasha.