yeah

I've found that most of my struggles with God, or life, come from the fact that I don't believe that God is good. That is, often when I'm feeling shitty I realize that the source of my shitty feelings is that I don't actually trust in God, that there is nothing but goodness in him and that he desires good in my life and the lives of others. Obviously, it's easy to say that God is good, I just fight with actually living that out. Not today, really, it's cyclical (which probably means it's constant, I just tend to notice it in cycles).

I was thinking about this today because of predestination. I hate the idea of predestination. It's difficult for me to reconcile ideas of predestination with ideas that God is good. Saying that God has foreknowledge but doesn't necessarily predestine isn't a way out, either. With God's omniscience, foreknowledge and predestination become the same thing, in a sense. That also seems to be based on a model of the world where God is absent and doesn't intervene. But I do believe that God intervenes and interacts in the world and the events of the world. God interacts, and moves us towards certain ends. I believe that, and (mostly) I'm not bothered by that, it's what I want. But that's based on the assumption that when God moves, he is moving for God. Suffering in hell for eternity is not good, and if God moves people towards that, it's difficult to see him as good rather than evil, even if eternal suffering is something that all of us have earned.

I feel detached from the concept of sin right now, it doesn't seem very real to me. I look at what we consider sin, and in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't seem very big or very important, not important enough for someone to suffer for eternity. then again, there's other moments when I feel like weeping because of sin and the hurt that we cause each other.

and isn't it funny how we think of sin? for some reason, social injustice seems wrong, but few seem to call it sin. refusing to help the poor seems wrong, but few seem to call it sin. what do we call sin? lying. sex before marriage. drunkenness. for some reason, these issues seem less important to me than they used to (except lying? I guess things would be different if I had close relationships to alcoholics). I guess if I could eliminate poverty in a society or if I could eliminate sex before marriage (a term I hate, but it's better than "fornication"), I would eliminate poverty. Well, I say that, but my actions don't necessarily follow.

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