Evil

Evil is rebellion against living a life of love. It's not an equal force to good. My amazing pastor explained this recently, and it opened my mind up to a whole new way of thinking about this. I grew up in a Christian home and went to Christian schools, and I've been taught all kinds of things which have lodged deep in my spirit. Some of them make sense. A lot of them do not.

In the last few years, I have embraced the freedom to think differently about spiritual things (and by extension, other things too). This process has radically changed my life. I used to be afraid to change my ideas, fearing that the ground under my feet would shift and I would have no safe place to stand. Now I think that I was only fooling myself when I thought that having all of the answers provided safety and security.

I have never had as many questions as I do now, and I have also never felt as close to God. I have focused more on my relationship with him, and less on the dogma of my belief system. It no longer matters to me what others believe. It's not my job or mission to convert anyone to my line of thinking. How arrogant I was before to want everyone to believe as I did.

I would like for other people to find God on their own terms, and to develop relationship with him which is meaningful and important. This is an individual process, and it is not necessary to know anything at all about God. We can be in relationship with him without knowing scripture or arguing theology. It's not about that anymore for me. It's about loving God, and loving others, and being as kind as possible.

This idea of evil was very interesting to me. I always understood evil as the opposite of good, like a tug-of-war where evil was just as strong of a force as good. Thinking of it as rebellion against the wholeness that was always meant for us and for the world we live in is an entirely new idea to me. We are broken people, but brokenness was not our intended state. We are damaged and wounded because we rebel, and try to find our own way apart from God and love, and then we end up living with the consequences of our choices.

I like softening my thoughts in a new direction. I have the ability to test out anything at all I hear or read and think through it to determine if it makes sense to me or not. Just because we've been taught something doesn't make it true. We need to test it out and see if it sits comfortably or uncomfortably with our intuition and values. I trust that God can speak to me in new ways, and as long as I'm in relationship with him, I don't have to hang on so tightly to what I once believed.