Christianity Is Not A Religion; It Is

If God Seems To Be In No Hurry To Make The Problem Of Evil Go Away, Maybe We Shouldn't Be, Either. Maybe Our Compulsion To Wash God's Hands For Him Is A Service He Doesn't Appreciate. Maybe - All Theodicies And Nearly All Theologians To The Contrary - Evil Is Where We Meet God. Maybe He Isn't Bothered By Showing Up Dirty For His Dates With Creation. Maybe - Just Maybe - If We Ever Solved The Problem, We'd Have Talked Ourselves Out Of A Lover.

We Are So Impressed By Scientific Clank That We Feel We Ought Not To Say That The Sunflower Turns Because It Knows Where The Sun Is. It Is Almost Second Nature To Us To Prefer Explanations . . . With A Large Vocabulary. We Are Much More Comfortable When We Are Assured That The Sunflower Turns Because It Is Heliotropic. The Trouble With That Kind Of Talk Is That It Tempts Us To Think That We Know What The Sunflower Is Up To. But We Don't. The Sunflower Is A Mystery, Just As Every Single Thing In The Universe Is.

Older Women Are Like Aging Strudels - The Crust May Not Be So Lovely, But The Filling Has Come At Last Into Its Own.

God Makes The World Not Out Of Necessity But By A Divine Whim, And The World He Makes Is A Whimsically Romantic Place. We're All Crazy About Each Other Because We're Made In The Image Of Someone Who's Been Crazy About Us.

A Lost Sheep Is, For All Practical Purposes A Dead Sheep. It Is The Admission That We Are Dead In Our Sins---that We Have No Power Of Ourselves Either To Save Ourselves Or To Convince Anyone Else That We Are Worth Saving. It Is The Recognition That Our Whole Life Is Out Of Our Hands And That If We Ever Live Again, Our Life Will Be Entirely The Gift Of Some Gracious Shepherd. God Finds Us The Desert Of Death (not In The Garden Of Improvement) And In The Power Of Jesus' Resurrection, He Puts Us On His Shoulders Rejoicing And Brings Us Home.