I am honored to have the same initials as Jesus Christ. As I sit and consider the depths of what Jesus Christ represents to me, I am overwhelmed. When I read the Bible and begin to understand the love story it truly is between God and humanity it inspires me to reach my full potential. It inspires me to unleash everything that God created me to be into this world. It inspires me to be a better person. It inspires me to greatness knowing that with God I cannot fail. It inspires me to love fully and reach those who have not yet found what I believe I have. I’m learning that mindset and faith in a power of good beyond our wildest dreams makes a gigantic difference in your present and also who you become in the future. With the combination of unfailing faith and willingness to change your actions so they become fully guided by love, there truly are no limits.
When I think about the stories I’ve been reading in the Bible (as I read the Old Testament and the New Testament), it becomes glaringly obvious to me that people need help to keep themselves from their own destruction. I’m not the biggest history buff, although I am slowly leaning into that. Reading the Bible has brought about a desire to learn more about the balance of the world as it relates to God’s will. I’m intrigued by how evil seemingly sometimes wins (examples such as Hitler, Stalin, and countless others who have walked the Earth and have done horrendous acts intended to harm life) when I like to believe God is great and all powerful. It brings about a desire in me to learn more about free will and my theory on closeness to God and distance from God. Are evil people truly of demonic spirits or are they merely just humans acting in their own free will with disregard for God and life… forgetting where they’ve come from.
God and life are one in the same. You cannot love God and disrespect God’s creations. To love God means to tolerate all forms of life, regardless of how different that form of life is from yourself. I say “tolerate” because that is the minimum requirement. If I want to be more idealist, as I tend to often be, I would say that we should go even further and truly love them. However, sometimes that feels much harder than tolerating someone or something, so I’ll be gentle in the way that I explain this. The idea of God is so large and so overwhelming that there is no possible way that anyone could ever do God justice in their explanation of who God is. I dream of fully understanding all that God is whether in this life or the afterlife. The main teaching of the Bible is love, in both the Old Testament as well as the New Testament. I interpret the Bible as this brilliant love story between God and humanity.
As I think about how many years the Bible has been carried from generation to generation, I am in awe of how relevant the information within these books still is today. I sit and wonder why humanity never seems to change. We all know the old saying, “History repeats itself” and the Bible truly represents this. Time and time again, story after story, we see the same problems being played out. We see people who claim to love God dishonoring Him by some means of wrongdoing (intolerance for one another, dishonoring one another, cheating one another, killing one another, etc.) resulting in distancing from Him. We see the direction of life for people who live guided by love/God and the consequences of those who fail to be guided in this way. We see the constant swing of the pendulum in the yearning of God to bring people closer to Him and their stubborn insistence on doing life their own way. When I read this book, my heart often breaks for our creator who provides a whole world full of wonderful blessings and attempts to have glory through his people in the world He’s created, but there’s this underlying war going on. Time after time, in their own ignorance, people are battling God (in how they live, choices they make, how they treat relationships, how they treat themselves, etc) and that breaks my heart.
It breaks my heart because, for a long time, I was one of these ignorant people. In some moments, I still am. However, in rediscovering God and as a result reading the Bible, I’ve been taken to a new level of consciousness that allows me to see things with more clarity. I’ve gained more awareness of my actions and am cognizant of whether at any moment I am honoring or dishonoring God. I see whether I am acting in love or something else. I serve as a witness to either my gratitude or lack of appreciation. I would have never dreamed that a book could bring about so much change in the way I desire to live my life and my level of faith, but I can honestly say it’s changing me. I believe it’s an act of God that this collection of books has remained relevant for thousands of years. While there are other ancient books that predate the Bible, their popularity and success in changing lives doesn’t appear to be as high.
I have a theory that there are many ways God attempts to bring people back to Him and that the Bible is not the only way. I’m still on my path of discovery into other ancient texts, concerning God. Given the amount of diversity that God used to create this world it wouldn’t be surprising for Him to utilize many different approaches (differing stories, different main characters, different endings) to bring His presence to us. He is a God who loves his creations and desires good things for each one of us and uses tough situations for our growth.
It’s my dream that everyone would stop being so stubborn & childish with God and wake up to smell the coffee. If only we would realize the highest and put him first, I strongly believe that we could overcome the world as we know it. That is becoming my mission in life. I desire to provide inspiration by helping to guide people to what I believe (from my experience) is the only true source of love, power, peace, healing, redemption, and truth. This mission is both tremendously exciting and terrifying because I fear misrepresenting God’s glory. However, I trust that I’ll be guided along this journey or redirected in some manner should I not be going in the right direction. I give my life to Him so that he may lead me in whichever direction He sees fit for I trust that in His goodness my life will be designed more beautifully than I ever could dream and that the impact my life will have will be immeasurably more than I could ever hope for.