'Confusing Christian Terms' 2: The Fear of God

I apologize for the time it took to write this blog post, I have had a lot going on in my life and been very busy with a lot of new projects that will be very fruitful!

The second confusing Christian term I have to share with you is the fear of God. A common concept throughout the Bible, I didn't understand it for years. I want to make that clear---when I use the phrase 'confusing Christian terms,' that means they were confusing to me, and I grew to understand them as I grew closer to God in my relationship with him.

I knew that God was supposed to protect us from all fear and we were not supposed to allow that into our lives, and that seemed to conflict with the Biblical idea that righteous men fear God---if we aren’t allowed to fear anything, how can we fear God?

The answer that I came to realize is that the emotion that most people use the term ‘fear’ to describe is a different type of fear than the fear that “righteous” men are supposed to feel for God. The fear of God isn't about terror like being scared of an earthquake or someone beating you up. In fact, your relationship with God should, over time, protect you from that type of fear as you grow closer to him. The closer you grow to God, the less you will fear even death. Before I became a Christian I used to be very worried about the bad things that could happen to me, but now I know that God will take care of everything in my life for the better. I can rest assured that I will not die even one second before I am supposed to.

The fear that Christians are supposed to feel for God is something very different from that type of fear. It is more about being in awe of something much bigger and mightier than you. I realized this when my niece was very young. When she could barely walk, she wasn't terrified of me---she wouldn't run away from me---but when I would come around, she would stare at me for a few minutes before deciding that it was OK to play with me She was just unsure of how I would react, but every single time she would eventually come to the decision that I intended her no harm. This is one aspect of the fear of God.

There is another aspect of the fear of God. A lot of people have had the experience of having done something as a child that they knew was wrong, and having suffered no tangible punishment when they were caught. Instead of being spanked, put in a corner, grounded, or otherwise, depending on the age of the child, the parent actually did nothing but use these words: “I’m very disappointed in you.” Sometimes knowing that you’ve disappointed the ones that you love and you know love you more than anything---knowing that you’ve disappointed the ones who “brought you into this world” is a more searing punishment than any grounding can give you.

However, children in healthy homes learn to thrive on the joy of their parent’s approval and pride as well. Knowing that you’ve made your loved ones proud of you is a feeling like no other. Your relationship with God should be a lot like that---he loves you even more than your parents, other family members, close friends, even your spouse if you have reached that stage in your life, could ever love you---and the fear of disappointing the one who created you and loves you that much also has a lot to do with the biblical fear of God.

'Confusing Christian Terms' 1: Surrendering your life day-to-day to Jesus

When I first started growing in Christianity, there were two terms that I didn't fully understand which I believe I have a better grasp on. I'm going to talk about the first in this blog post.

The first is surrendering to God. The phrase is used frequently throughout Christian wisdom. However, it is definitely a bit confusing. The concept of surrender we are used to is giving up. It is a word that makes you think there is no longer any hope for success, and you now have to negotiate with some party that has defeated you in order to salvage a slightly more decent result than death.

That is, of course, not what it is about with God. In Christian terms, surrendering to God is not about giving up, it is about giving IT up---giving up every decision, choice, the path of your entire life to him because you know he will make your life better than you could make it yourself. It isn't about being defeated, but actually when it comes to the war, it's just about switching sides. You were born in sin, spiritually dead---born to the side of Satan, and you have the choice to switch to the side that actually is guaranteed victory. You don't lose hope when you surrender your life to God, you actually gain hope of a better future on Earth and a much better future after death! The first thing you have to do is to make the decision to surrender your life as a whole, but then you have to operate on a day-to-day basis, giving your path to God, letting his will, not yours, choose the way for you to go. How do you do that? You have to pray about it relentlessly. Ask him what is the right decision to make, or that you will make the right decision. Ask him to guide your life, even ask him to open the door that will guide your life in the right path. There are several ways he will make your future brighter, and one way or another he will let you know.

Lou Dobbs leaves CNN, and my general opinion on cable news channels

Lou Dobbs announced his departure from CNN abruptly last night on air, effective immediately. That is something that I am not sure has ever been done in the realm of news.

I remind you, I am politically neutral. I am also a Christian, so let me make this clear. Just as an example, I believe abortion is a sin; it is essentially manslaughter. I just have no opinion at all on whether or not it should be legal. That, I believe for various reasons, is not for me to decide. I might discuss why I feel that way one day, and today isn't that day.

The point is, I appreciate CNN because it has been the least opinionated of the three cable news networks for a long time. I don't care to hear anyone's political commentary. It doesn't matter to me at all. It won't change my mind. I just want to know what has happened. Get to the point, and move on. Let the viewer make their own mind up. That, to me, is news. MSNBC doesn't have news in the title, but when FOX News claims to be news and then gives me a big dose of unresearched opinion and what's worse, its anchors organize political rallies using their shows (*cough* Glenn Beck). I'm not even sure showing a little opinion totally disqualifies FOX News as a legitimate news source, but when they are based on total lies and you give us phrases as racially tinged as 'Obama's Baby Mama,' you could at least do us the justice of renaming your organization FOX Opinion with a little News Mixed In.

This is a good thing for me, because now I can watch CNN and know that I won't get a dose of opinion, at all, which suits me perfectly. The only problem remaining is CNN's choice of news. I try to catch PBS' BBC broadcast because to me, BBC News actually equals perfect news---for example, CNN spent hours of a day on the Balloon Boy. Really? That's a problem. I also am kind of wary of a news channel that claims to be a 24/7 news network but reruns its shows, but they all do that now so I guess I just have to get over that one.

I miss CNN Headline News, the precursor to what is now HLN. Headline News used to just get to the point of the story, and move on---they spent no longer than 1 minute at a time on a single event which did me the most justice. Now HLN's most notable personality is Nancy Grace, who is well intentioned but just overwhelms me with the opinion and covers nothing but the sob stories. She basically, these days, stays stuck on the 'missing-4-year-old-white-girl' story of the moment, constantly. The other hosts on HLN are a bit more tolerable, but it is a shadow of what it used to be.

On the other hand, I'll miss Lou Dobbs for now. If he showed up on FOX News, that might be the first FOX News show I could tolerate in several years. His opinions may be a bit extreme, but remember, I don't care about anyone's opinions---at least he checks his facts. His topics may be ill-advised sometimes but you can't say he has ever out and out lied, so it would be a step up for FOX News---and his independent views are more refreshing to me than the extreme right-wing lie-infested crap of FOX news, and the extreme left-wing (although slightly more honest) crap of MSNBC.

Rihanna and Chris Brown: America proving that 70% of people are full of it

America has an amazing propensity to blame the victim, and America's people have an amazing propensity to say stupid things, especially if your sample population is the population that ride out Twitter.

Allow someone who is the victim of rampant child abuse give you an outlook of a person who may have some experience on the issue of abusers. Without explaining to non-Twitter users what a trending topic is, last night #rihannasforehead was one. Essentially, a bunch of people decided to defile Rihanna by picking on her, claiming that she has a forehead 'wide enough for an airplane to land on,' as one twitterer put it. This came after someone doctored a photo exaggerating the look of her forehead, and a bunch of Chris Brown's fans have consistantly defiled the victim of a horrendous crime just because they 'can't believe' it. Well I can't believe 9/11, Hurricaine Katrina or the Holocaust. I can believe that a 19 year old man had a temper tantrum.

Policemen aren't idiots. They don't fabricate police reports. They know that kind of thing can result in a brutal lawsuit. They would have asked both Chris Brown and Rihanna if she hit him or defended herself in any kind of way. Of the 8 or so policemen that would have responded to such an incident, one of them would have thought of that. They would have put it in the police report if either one of them had said Rihanna had done such a thing. But on Rihanna's interview with 20/20 this past week, Rihanna admitted that Chris had hit her eight or nine times. The bottom line is, he was a violent man. 19 year old men who are violent can be reformed, because such anger so young had to have been caused by something. I would dare say it was the fact that Chris Brown himself was abused at the hands of his father. It is a fact that the abused are more likely to become abusers than those who were not abused. That is very understandable. It isn't that far fetched. I was the victim of child abuse, and I struggle with anger sometimes. There are times I feel nothing but a burning passion against my abusers, and it isn't far-fetched to believe that burning passion goes further than that for some people. They may become 'mad at the world.'

The first ignorance I remember regarding this incident was a friend who said 'that boy didn't really beat Rihanna up.' That skepticism was fair enough until the TMZ picture came out. Then, they said she provoked him. 8 or 9 times? Really? What could she have done to deserve that? Again, had she done anything wrong it would have been in the police report, and had she provoked him it would have been in the news. The most ignorant thing I heard was the claims that she hit him or beat him up, like she could hold her own against him in a fight. Look at them! Compare their bodies! Do you think Rihanna would stand a chance against Chris Brown? She looks almost anorexic! It's like saying Dakota Fanning could beat up the Rock. According to Rihanna in the 20/20 interview, she caught him in a lie after he received a text message from an ex-girlfriend. Girls catch guys in lies via text messages every day. That's a completely believable reason why this event could have happened, and not a good excuse to beat a girl up so I wish people would stop saying she provoked him. He lied, and he then went on a rampage, saying he was going to kill her and she was 'really going to get it when we get home.' He acted soulless.

I know this is a rant, but I am tired of people being stupid. You can tell what someone is like in the way that they look, and to me Rihanna has looked extremely hurt since it happened, and Chris always struck me as a ticking time bomb. He has always looked like there was some built up anger, hurt, and darkness in his eyes. Girls who crush on him just don't want to admit that. Until he resolves these issues, he should have no career. He isn't really talented anyway. Rihanna is creative, Chris is successful because he is handsome.

I just don't know what else to day, other than the fact that those who defend Chris Brown simply have to be totally stupid. I don't know what else could cause this.

Blogging and Twitter

It has been along time since I have bothered with blogging. This is, in fact, my old blog from three years ago. I have, however, deleted all of the old posts because they no longer reflect who I am properly. For instance, three or four years ago, I was mainly a moderate Republican. I evolved to someone who probably was closer to a moderate Democrat. Now my religious beliefs come first and I am completely politically neutral. I probably wouldn't even vote. That's just who I am.

A lot of my old posts were political. They were kind of immature as you would expect a fifteen year old blogger to be. So since I now have no political opinion at all, what do I talk about? Well, I have some ideas.

One reason I haven't blogged in so long is because I am now an avid user of twitter. I would say twitter actually serves a lot of the same purposes blogging used to. When blogging first started, it was basically like writing a diary of your life that everyone can see and comment on, obviously filtered to an extent to represent yourself the way you want to be represented to other people, compared to a regular diary which, since you assume it will never be read or won't be read for decades by anyone other than yourself, is a bit more uncensored.

Now, twitter does that, probably better. Reading someone write on and on about what they did that day is probably boring. Twitter makes people cut it down to short statements no more than 140 characters long---forcing them to 'skip the shit' so-to-speak. You can also tweet directly to a particular person, which is an extremely fast way to communicate. Finally, you rarely sit there and read one person's tweets one by one---you follow people you like, and see their tweets meshed together to read all of the recent thoughts of all of the people you follow at once. It's just extremely convenient.

What good is a blog then? While nobody will likely want to read what happened to me today, they may be interested in reading my insights about particular issues or current events relevant to them, and you can't adequately comment on the latest trend or what happened to this celebrity or the tragedies of the day in 140 characters. Political outlook, current event outlook, celebrity outlook, sex, wisdom, and even perhaps religion---that is the present and future of blogging, and why there is still a place for both blogging and twitter in today's society.