Choice

I am returning to the blog after a couple of months absence. Looking back through the posts, I’m taken by how much I’ve written and the journey mapped out thus far. It is a pleasure to write if at times, I hold myself in sharp focus and don’t like what I’ve written!

I have plenty of recipes to blog and plenty of news to recount but for now I want to tell you about a new book I’ve started reading: “Utopian Dreams: A Search for a Better Life” by Tobias Jones and in a paragraph he talks about handling the myriad choices we have today and here’s a quote that reaally struck me.

“The trouble is we are in a conundrum. In the stark words of Peter Berger, we’re presented with ‘an unattractive choice between thugs [fundamentalists] and wimps [relativists].’ Obviously anyone who doesn’t want to make a choice is automatically in the second camp. We seem to come to a dead end in which most of us want to be neither thug nor wimp but can’t see the alternative.”

It struck me because it reminded me of Christian faith and some of the contentious issues facing the modern church. How do we stay true to faith but live alongside and reach out to our society, to our culture? We cannot be black and white with answers to such issues as God is multi-hued. Yet to be vague or undecided is deeply unsatisfying for those questions and does not meet the need of a people hungry for God. We cannot be content with either. We need to hold our opinions and our responses in tension. We live with crumbs of the little we know now and the great expansive mystery of God. It is so frustrating to be human! One day it will all be explained, why we wrestle with our faith, our culture and ourselves.  We live in the world where God’s kingdom has come and that is still to come.

 1 Corinthians 13 verse 12 ”For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.”