Why aren’t Christians more sexist?

Or to put it another way, why do we apply such double standards to Paul’s letters.

I have been recently reading through Paul’s letters [and suffering my traditional irritation as I think he is self-righteous and self-obsessed.]

I was unsurprisingly (yet again!) annoyed by his various diatribes on women. I think the gist of them are offensive to men and women of today’s society.

To take a case in point; see 1 Timothy 2:
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing–if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

My point however is not that Paul should just get over himself but rather that his various views on women do not seem to hold sway in today’s society and most interestingly in today’s Christian society.

Now I know the arguments why…Paul was a product of the time, you need to take the comments in context..bla,bla.

But this is where the double standards seem to come in. Many of Paul’s comments about women are followed by various qualifications of his right to make statements.

However women are not the only topic Paul makes pronouncements on to take an obvious example is his views on homosexuality. How come a large majority of Christians support Paul’s comments on some topics for example homosexuality but ignore the comments on women? Why are the other comments not contextualised to the point where they can also be side-stepped?

What is the rationale for taking such selective views of Paul’s letters?

Horror and the absence of God

I love horror movies. They are far and away my favourite film genre.

Just saying that has got me some very bad looks from Christians before now, but allow me to explain why …

There are lots of reasons to like horror movies: they tend to be very ironic and self-aware, which is always good, a lot of effort is put into the visual aspects of the film – something I personally like, they are aware of their own history and make lots of backward references, they produce a rush of adrenaline, they allow us to explore feelings about death and fear we might otherwise have to confront for the first time in real life.

(There are doubtless many more reasons, but let me stop there.)

Now, I could go into a discussion about whether films can corrupt us etc., and there a probably quite a few people reading this who have decided for example that they don’t want to watch 18-rated films, etc. However, I want to put that debate aside for another day. I don’t know whether it’s right to watch “evil”-seeming films or not. What I’m interested in is why I _want_ to watch them.

The reason (or maybe just a part of the reason) only struck me quite recently. I think it’s because they represent a world that I can recognise: one in which good and evil exist (in fact they are often explicitly set within a Christian worldview) but in which God is absent or only vaguely involved.

Let’s take some examples:

The Exorcist, probably my all-time favourite horror movie, and a serious attempt to scare containing little or no irony, is about two priests who attempt to exorcise a demon from a 12-year-old girl. The film is controversial because the actions of the little girl while acting possessed are extremely disturbing. More importantly for this discussion, the universe in which it is set is a perfect example of what I’m talking about: Christianity is true, but God is extremely inaccessible while the evil force of a demon is readily accessible and tangible. At the end the demon is not defeated but persuaded to move from the girl into one of the priests, killing him. Whether this condemned him to hell is unclear, but it is not a happy ending.

Another of my favourites, The Omen trilogy is again set in an explicitly Christian world. The film makers have tried faithfully to represent the words of the book of Revelation as they interpret them, in particular the parts about the antichrist. Several Christians throughout the series attempt to kill the antichrist, unsuccessfully, and finally at the end an impersonal bright light – God – appears and effortlessly kills the antichrist. This begs the question: why did God not intervene earlier?

But doesn’t our whole life beg that question?

Of course many horror films are not set within an explicit Christian context, and here the analogy is weaker, but they still represent a world in which evil is obvious and tangible while good is squeezed out of human hearts, possibly with grudging support from the creator. I think this is what attracts me to them.

I am a Christian. I do believe in God, and at the moment I don’t often worry about whether or not that is true (so I’m lucky given what I know some here are experiencing). I do believe that God is all-powerful, and that we are on the winning side. But, like Job, I just think that it doesn’t often feel that way. God seems distant.

I try to have a relationship with him, and I do love him in some way, but he just seems distant.

In a way it’s not a surprise – I can’t hug him or hear his voice – how could I expect to feel close to him? But we do expect to feel close to him, and he allows some of us to have that feeling at certain points in our lives. I’m sure I’ve had it, but at the moment I just try and pray, try and read the Bible and wait for him. (Isn’t there a Psalm about “I will wait for him”? Could someone look it up and post it?)

So horror films serve as a kind of therapy for me I think. They express my pent-up anger that God doesn’t intervene by portraying him how I feel he is in my angriest moments: uncaring and, fundamentally, distant.

If only life were so simple, I could just hate him and be done with it, but I know that he loves me and hates to see me feel like this, and that makes life very complicated.

Of course none of this really gives me an excuse for liking Buffy: I just think it’s cool.

A thought for the day.


I wrote this for the purpose of a daily reflection, a thought for the day. I am no English scholar but I would like to know others insights or reflections which they have had and so I offer one of mine.

You wake to the sound of your stereo as it forcefully throws out pressure waves which bounce of solid objects giving rise to the acoustics in your room. You listen to the music before opening your eyes as your mind slowly comes out of its sleepy slumber and begins to go through those first thoughts of the day unaware of how your inner ear translates the vibrations caused by three small bones in your middle ear into electrical impulses sent to the cerebrum of your brain.

You slowly get out of bed oblivious to your mind controlling your nervous system responding and reacting to every move you make. You walk across your room barely even comprehending how the mass of the earth is compelled to pull on your mass by constant force of attraction. You reach out to your stereo in order to change from the radio to a tape which is one of your old favourites. This simple action stops the information being received from electromagnetic radiation via modulation of a carrier wave at a specific frequency, to an induced electromagnetic force corresponding to the magnetic alignment of iron oxide particles.

As you open your door you hear the hinge creaking and almost asking you to give it some lubrication, which you instantly forget about as the light from the sun hits you with the full force of its luminescence. As your reflexes instantly force you to shield your eyes you ignore the fact that those rays of incandescence were formed by a thermonuclear reaction around 100 million miles away.

You enter the kitchen in order to make yourself your morning brew and turn on the kettle unconsciously accepting the generated electricity most probably by way of a turbine. You pour out the boiling water without a thought to the delicate irony of superheated steam producing a rotation in order to produce electricity so that you can create steam once again.

You stand for a while staring out of a fusion of lime, soda and silica window and watch a bird fly effortlessly outside. While you stare at its brilliance of control and wonder how can something so stupid know how to manipulate its body so gracefully using such complicated aerodynamics, you begin to wonder, how much do I really understand of this world ?

God is Sneaky

This is more of a ‘have you ever felt like this’ article rather than a BIG QUESTION I am struggling with though I do feel that it could start off some interesting stuff about how God affects our lives/influences us in a real way…

So, enough ‘prep’ and here is the real thing.

Has anyone ever found that God has sneakily changed your mind about stuff when you didn’t even want to change your mind?

I have

Especially about those really fun things that _good christians_ aren’t meant to do – like getting drunk, snogging random (inappropriate?) people, smoking… need I go on?

I have

Let me give you an example: at age 17 – very definitely a committed christian – I regularly went out and got really drunk with all my friends (one other of whom was a christian). The way I saw it was – I was ‘being real’ with them and being’one of them’ but really, I was just doing what I wanted to do and having lots of fun. (This did not stop me having a relationship with God where I was striving to do what He wanted etc) This may have led to lots of unfortunate things (or not) but this is not my point….

My point is that, at some point around 18/19ish, God managed to convince me that maybe this might be something I should at least look at. And the weird thing was – I didn’t resent him for making me think like this – I actually agreed.

What I’m getting at is – God somehow changed the way that I thought about the whole thing so convincingly that I actually believed him… I had always thought that if ‘God stopped me having fun’ I would put up with it, but not necessarily agree.

(Please note at this point that some of this particular change was also due to growing up a bit but let’s leave that as another aside…)

So – what do you think? Not about getting drunk etc but about how God influences us and how he moulds us to be more like him.

How do we know what is HIM and what is socialisation/growing up/suppressing ourselves/christian culture?????

On Attempting to Comb God’s Hair

A friend of mine has convinced me that people who do maths at university study truly wacky things. For instance, he claims that he once took an 18 lecture course to show that you can’t comb the hair down on a hairy sphere. Eh?

Imagine a circle with hair growing out of it. You can comb it down – just start with your comb at one point, and comb it down all the way round.

But when it comes to a hairy sphere – ah, now you’re in trouble. You can start combing the hair down, but you’ll always find that somewhere or other you’ll create partings or mohicans. It just won’t lie flat.

I feel something like the same way about my beliefs about God. I have various beliefs that I think are true – I’ve got these from a mixture of reading the Bible, listening to other Christians, thinking for myself (heaven forbid!)… and I feel as though I should be able to arrange them all neatly together, without any scrunches.

So far, it never quite works.

It *nearly* works – they do fit together and tie in together quite a lot. For instance, I remember feeling reallly satisfied when I realised I had an answer for the question ‘Why do we divide the Bible into two main sections, not three or fifteen?’ It’s a trivial example, but it’s pleasant when you realise that your beliefs fit together to make sense of unfamiliar questions.

But it doesn’t *totally* work. Fort instance, I can’t fully reconcile these things, all of which I believe: (a) God knows everything about the future; (b) God is totally capable of acting to bring about any outcome he wants; (c) we have real choices. How can all three be right? I’m not entirely sure. I’m not willing to abandon any of them, because they all make sense and seem important on their own; but together they seem to make a mohican.

And my point is?

Well it certainly isn’t ‘Give up’. I think we can make progress in making sense of what we believe – we can talk to each other, wrestle with the issues, read books, think hard, decide to be ready to change our minds, abandon some beliefs, correct others, be prepared to let the Bible disagree with us and change us – maybe some of the knots in our hair can be disentangled. The branch of theology that tries to lay out a set of beliefs in a well-ordered way, Systematic Theology, is really valuable, and none of us has investigated it enough, I’m sure. Life is too short.

But my main point is that, if you feel as though your beliefs are a bit provisional, messy, and contradictory, then you’re in good company. We all have to put up with this, while trying to seek out more understanding as time goes on. We aren’t God, and it would be a huge surprise if we could describe him and the world fully and without distortion.

I seem to remember that there was a happy sequel to the sad “can’t comb the hairy sphere down” story. Although I can’t imagine it at all, I seem to recall that if you have the 4-dimensional equivalent of a hairy sphere, you *can* comb it down. I wonder if our attempts at having no tensions in describing God are doomed to failure for now, because our descriptions are always going to be on too low a plane…?

The Rich Young Man

This is a story that has come to mean a great deal to me. I used to think that what I lacked in my life was a direct challenge from God; that if like some first century martyr I was thrown into a place where the choices were simple, black and white and irrevocable, I would be OK. It was the endless uncertainty and struggling to have the faintest idea what God intended me for that was the problem.

However, increasingly I’ve been drawn to this story. Here’s a young man who gets exactly that. Jesus himself offers him a direct black and white choice – sell all you have and follow me, or don’t. And he doesn’t.

I have found myself looking increasingly hard at how I would have done in that situation. Not that Im a millionaire or anything; but I have a stable job, I can afford to live in a nice flat, by myself, in a nice area; I can go out a lot, to nice places, with my nice friends; as the prevalence of that hideous word ‘nice’ suggests, I’m very comfortable. And I like it; or to be more accurate, I strongly dislike the idea of losing it. Actually, to be more brutally honest, I am deeply afraid of losing it. Not in the sense of lying awake at night worrying about being made redundant – in some ways redundancy would be a relief, forcing a change of direction. But whenever I contemplate doing the bunjee jump; voluntarily throwing myself over the edge, abandoning my security and comfort; well, I get a serious case of cold feet.

I can’t help but wonder whether that was the case for the rich young man too. Was it really greed – or fear? There’s something very moving about the story; the young man knows there is something that he lacks, that what he has, what he is doing isn’t enough. He knows who can tell him what he should do, too. He even has the courage to ask. And Jesus looks on him, and loves him (God bless Mark for including that bit), and tells him what he needs to do. And he goes away sadly; that’s always struck me as tremendously significant. He isn’t angry or resentful; he isn’t challenging Jesus’ diagnosis. The sadness suggests he accepts it. Jesus has asked for something he lacks the courage to give.

That’s when I see myself; kneeling in Church, asking for God to show me how I can serve him, resolving to actually mean it when I say I dedicate my life to him. And I wonder whether I don’t hear anything because I have already shut my ears to protect myself from hearing anything I don’t want to hear; and I go away sadly, because I am very comfortable, and very uncourageous. Would it really make any difference if I had Jesus physically standing there and asking the question?

It’s not necessarily about money, either. I’m not the best person in the world at interacting with other human beings, and whenever I get the slightest sense that it might be my duty to get involved I go cold to my very heart with fear. I wonder if one of those men on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho passed by on the other side not from pride or contempt or disdain, but because he was afraid; afraid to go outside his own comfortable world and deal with the pain and hurt outside it, interacting with strangers, people whose reactions and behaviour he could not count on. God help me, I’ve done that. And I wonder if there will be a third category on the last day, the cattle, who will cry out “Lord, we saw you hungry and we knew you, and we did not feed you; we saw you thirsty and we knew you, and we did not give you a drink; we saw you homeless and naked and we knew you, and we did not take you in or clothe you; we saw you sick and in prison and we knew you and we did not visit you. For we were comfortable, and afraid.”

That’s why I choose to live in a nice area; it shelters me off from dealing with people in situations which will be uncomfortable. That’s why my friendship circle remains the same group of people from school and university; people I am comfortable with, people like me with similar thoughts and prejudices and ways of behaving. It’s why I seek out a church filled with people like me, and even there I try to hide away, at the back, not to interact. It’s so that as far as possible I can insulate myself from ever being uncomfortable.

If it’s not too heretical, a paraphrase:

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, ‘How hard it is for the comfortable to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a comfortable man to enter the kingdom of God’

The disciples were even more amazed and said to each other, ‘Who then can be saved?’

Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’

A bit of hope there, perhaps. Perhaps that rich young man came back, one day, and managed it. I hope so.

Not being close to Christians.

Does anyone else find that their close friends – indeed the vast majority of their friends – aren’t Christians? I’ve always felt far more comfortable with non-Christians.

I find that with Christians there’s always something in the way somehow or other; I feel both under pressure to project a version of myself which isn’t the truth, and also that they are feeding me a false image of themselves. My friendships with non-Christians feel far more honest, and so far more real. I can’t help but feel that this is totally the wrong way around, that it should be within the Church that people are free to deal with each other as we are rather than as we feel we ought to be; but it doesn’t seem to work that way. To me, at least. It’s not for want of opportunities; I was brought up in a strongly Christian family, went to the usual round of Christian house parties, my brother and sister both have largely Christian friends.

Of course, there are some pretty painful issues with having a basically non-Christian circle of friends. First and foremost there’s the difficulty of not being able to talk about something that’s the most important part of my life. I’m a very reluctant evangelist; not entirely from fear, either – I have always been very reluctant to trespass into the parts of people’s lives that really matter to them without their invitation. Where invitation and opportunity arise I do, but they don’t very often. Not that I find it any easier talking about Jesus to Christians – not without slipping into some fairly shallow cliches and platitudes, anyway. And then there’s the points at which morals diverge so sharply as to make it very difficult; particularly over relationships.

I don’t know whether it’s a failing of mine or not, but it makes things very difficult. It’s difficult always being a bit of a prude by comparison with your friends, unable to share in many conversations without either appearing a rather judgemental prude or else betraying things you really believe. It’s particularly difficult if you fall for someone who doesn’t share your faith. Yet I rarely feel at ease, relaxed and comfortable, in a group of Christians.

Why is there suffering?

Why is there suffering?

God can do anything, so why doesn’t he stop us from hurting?

This article is a collection and re-organisation of the thoughts of loads of different people who contributed to the Wiki page called WhyGodAllowsuffering. Apologies if I’ve messed it up in any way.


Important things to say first

If you’re suffering

If you’re going through real suffering at the moment, it may be that the ideas talked about here don’t help you – what you’re really looking for is love and comfort. We want to pass on to you our very deep sympathy; please contact us and we’ll do our very best to show real concern and help. We’re an odd lot, but we’ll listen and we care.

God suffers

A lot of people talked about the suffering that God has been through and still goes through:

“Not quite an answer to the question, but important: God isn’t immune from suffering himself. At the very crux of history, God the Son screams in agony at the cross. Whatever the answer is to God allowing suffering, it’s not something he takes casually – it’s at the very heart of his plan for this universe, and he’s suffered more than anyone (I wonder what having a Person of the Trinity amputated feels like?)”

“Add to this the combined suffering of all the people he loves more than we ever can. How does it make you feel when someone you love suffers?”

“Add to this the fact that so many of his beloved people reject him. Even people he has saved and loved for a lifetime turn away from him and betray him again and again.”

Add to this the fact that there are those who believe that Jesus’ death and the fact that he took the punishment for everyone means that he went to Hell, and that perhaps in some sense the suffering he experienced there is eternal, and we begin to get an idea that God is no stranger to suffering.


Possible Answers

We don’t know

Lots of people expressed confusion and and worry about this issue – all the ideas in this article are just possibilities and suggestions, not definitive answers.

“I personally find it hard when this question is actually asked. I cannot really explain it cos i know that God knows us inside out, so knows what we are going to experience. I have asked this question so much. I feel like God wants us to find faith in him when we suffer. i cannot really see why it all happens, only God has the answer to that one.”

“God seems to know more about what we are to face that any one ever can. I cannot therefore explain how he can justify it all. We are children and what father would allow his child to suffer?”

God suffers, as we know, and that fact provides some hint of an answer to this question:

“The surprise is that God does allow his child, Christ, to suffer – and we share in his sufferings. So, while it would be very wrong for a human father to stand aside and let meaningless suffering happen to his child, it seems that God judges that it’s right to let some suffering happen. Hard to understand, but again perhaps the Cross is at the heart of trying to figure out the meaning of suffering?”

He doesn’t do it

The weakest of the answers we discussed: God never allows us to suffer, it is the people in the land that actually allow us to suffer.

“Still struggle with that one!!! For example, what does this teach us about natural disasters and disease, etc.?”

“I do find it hard to believe this answer. We see many times in the Bible when God does step in and act to rescue people from terrible circumstances; so when he doesn’t, he is ‘allowing’ suffering in some way. The suffering may come from the hands of other people, but God isn’t striking those people down – so at some level he is allowing it.”

It’s worth it

Several people talked about how maybe suffering can help us, which is a very difficult idea but also seems to be true:

“Maybe some of the answer is that God is changing us through suffering. That is very hard to swallow sometimes though, isn’t it?”

“Some suffering is about learning though isn’t it? I mean with children, if you deliberately cause them to suffer or if it’s for no reason then that’s not cool but no matter how much you love them, you can’t keep them in a protective bubble and there comes a point when they have to learn for themselves that if they touch something hot it burns, or that if they climb up on something they’re not supposed to climb on there’s a good chance they’ll fall off and it will hurt. Ok, that’s on rather small scale compared to some of this stuff but thought the idea behind it made sense when I started writing…”

And others expressed the thought that maybe God can see that it’s worth it even though we can’t really understand that:

“The people who make me feel closest to God when I speak to them are often the people who’ve gone through great suffering or are facing death and still praise God for His goodness, with no negative feelings towards Him. They have learnt what it is to trust in God when it really matters, not just in the minor worries I’ve had to face, and it’s amazing to see their strength and love for Him.”

“Does God choose not to save us at the time? Is that also his plan? … Being outside time it must all seem very different to God. The nearest I can get to what I mean is that if I tell my friend’s little girl she can’t do something she wants to do until the evening, she thinks that’s FOREVER and it really distresses her and is a huge deal. She is very little and doesn’t really have much concept of time. Whereas for me, waiting a couple of hours isn’t something that seems very long. And I’m not saying that that means He doesn’t care about people’s suffering.”

“It certainly is hard to swallow sometimes. But yes, I think this is an important piece in the jigsaw. eg Heb 12.5-11, James 1.2-4, 1 Pet 1.6-7, are very much on this theme.”

“Sometimes our suffering is through persecution – part of being on God’s side. He could wind this up very quickly, but that would mean bad consequences for the persecutors. I’m reminded of 2 Pet 3.8-9. I guess the same could be said of all suffering, in fact.”

The idea of our suffering being part of a war we are fight for and with God is taken up and explained in Disappointment with God by Philip Yancey – a book that comes highly recommended for people interested in this topic.

He can’t

This is a controversial idea, but quite a few people were sympathetic to it: maybe God is actually incapable of preventing suffering. The exact meaning people put on this differs:

“Maybe he actually can’t stop suffering. Controversial? Does this mean he’s not all-powerful?”

“There may well be a lot of truth in this. I believe that God is all-powerful; but I think that some ways of explaining what that means don’t make sense, or aren’t true of the Christian God. For instance ‘God is all-powerful, therefore he can lie’ is not right in Christianity. Neither, I think, is ‘God is all-powerful, therefore he can make 2+2=3’. God can’t lie; he can’t do things that are against his character. He can’t alter logic; again, logic is part of his character. A way of explaining what we as Christians mean by ‘God is all-powerful’ is ‘God can do whatever he wants’. It may be that, if you create things like us, and we choose to sin, it’s logically impossible that we don’t suffer. God is all-powerful, but some suffering has to happen. This may not be right – it’s just a guess, but it seems consistent with the picture we’re given in the Bible of an all-powerful, suffering God.”

“Of course, on the “God cannot lie” issue – if God is incapable of lieing, why bother thanking him for not lieing? Perhaps he could lie, but has chosen not to – that would make him worth thanking.”*

So maybe God has deliberately taken away his own ability to prevent suffering (or continually restrains himself from preventing it, because it would have terrible consequences if he did. For example, he might not be able to stop suffering without also stopping our freedom to make decisions for ourselves, and maybe he thinks it’s worth the sacrifice.

* On this issue there is a counter-argument: “I think praising God for His character (including His faithfulness, or not lying if you prefer) is well-justified by CS Lewis’s idea: ‘I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.’ (in ‘Reflections on the Psalms’)”

He has paid us back

Perhaps life actually is fair because God has paid us back in some sense for the suffering world into which we have been born. This payment may include God’s own suffering, but also his actual decision in the first place to intervene through Jesus. Maybe that gift of Jesus simply redresses the balance. Again, this is a controversial idea.

“There may well be a lot of truth in this. I believe that God is all-knowing, and outside of time – so he did know what bad consequences for him and for us would occur if he made the world. I don’t really understand why he’d still go ahead and do it, but presume that it’s because he judges the final outcome to be worth it.”

“One way of looking at the final outcome is that he has some real friends who chose to be his friends. Also we get real friends in him and in other people. If we think this is what God was doing all this for it makes you really value your friends, right?”


Other issues

Heaven and Hell

In any discussion on this topic the subject of Hell is bound to pop up. After a little bit of thought the consensus was that this is actually a separate topic*, and so the discussion was quite brief – here’s a snippet.

“Maybe God doesn’t stop all suffering because it’s an (admittedly harsh) signpost to the fact that we’re under a curse and facing judgment – this seems to be Jesus’ point about suffering in Luke 13, as well as the point of God’s judgments in Genesis 3 … Of course the suffering on earth is nothing like as harsh as the judgement, so in a way if we can accept that maybe we can accept this world too?”

Heaven, too, came up:

“Again, not an answer as such, but important: we’re assured that God is planning to bring an end to suffering for everyone he rescues, in the new universe that’s coming – and he does this through the suffering of God the Son in this universe. This universe, and our suffering, seem at the moment to last for ages; but one day we’ll look at it as a drop in the ocean in comparison with the ‘time’ that suffering doesn’t exist for us.”

* A fuller discussion took place on the WhatDoYouThinkAboutHell Wiki page.


Last Word

A lot of people have expressed opinions about this topic, and we’ve heard opinions ranging from simply having no idea, to quite radical and complex questions about the very nature of God. In the end, however, the thing that actually makes it possible to think about this issue at all is that God is here with us in our sufferings and sorrows. He doesn’y just understand or sympathise, he experiences them with us, and has experienced many others for us:

“A poem, expressing how Jesus on the cross helps us to comprehend suffering. In particular, I find the last verse very helpful. This is by Edward Shillito, one of the War Poets. It’s called ‘Jesus of the Scars’.”

If we have never sought, we seek thee now;
Thine eyes burn though the dark, our only stars;
We must have sight of thorn-marks on thy brow,
We must have thee, O Jesus of the scars.

The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;
In all the universe we have no place.
Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?
Lord Jesus, by thy scars we know thy grace.

If, when the doors are shut, thou drawest near,
Only reveal those hands, that side of thine;
We know today what wounds are, have no fear;
Show us thy scars, we know the countersign.

The other gods were strong, but thou wast weak;
They rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.


The stuff on this page was written by the GuiltyExpression community, and re-organised by Andy. I’m really sorry if I’ve moved anything out of context or put a slant on things.

He doesn’t drive me away

Whatever it is that makes me dread praying – makes church so unpleasant – fills me with fear of getting too close to the truth – whatever it is, it isn’t God.

When I look at it properly, my life is a demonstration of Immanuel – God with us – he’s always been with me, always been ready to take me back. He’s shown himself to be trustworthy, but I just fear him.

What drives me away from him? Why can’t I be comfortable with him? Is it guilt about how I’ve betrayed him? If so, I clearly don’t understand what he and Jesus have done.

I actually think it’s because I don’t trust him – I don’t want to give myself up to him.

Anyway, I just wanted to say in front of everyone: it’s not God driving me away – it can feel like that, but it’s not.

Singleness or Being Paul

This is an hot potato that has probably done the rounds but just some thoughts. God loves me whether I am single, married, with kids, without. OK. However I recognise that there are differences in how you are supposed to act, behave, think when you are single, especially in the church’s eyes.

Are single people supposed to become Paul and because they have so much time on their hands, become missionaries, help in soup kitchens, volunteer to be youthworkers, help in the local old folks home, babysit etc… And we are supposed to be fulfilled as a person through this service!

I also find it very hard to go to church, join new activites as I am always going on my own, driving there on my own, walking in on my own, having to look for someone I know when I get there… And they wonder where all the young people are in the church i.e. 20’s.

Sorry this has all been a bit bitter and angry and I don’t want it to be like that, thanks for the website.