God Centered Dad

   I am going to be fully honest and transparent with you, my readers. I have been struggling lately. Those of you who have been regular readers of my articles (I suspect that there are very few of those) will know that I have been called of God to not work for several years already. There have been times when I have had the opportunity to undertake some labour for somebody, but I have never requested payment for that work. I am not receiving any government handouts, I am not visiting food banks and nobody has been supporting me with regular financial contributions. God has been acting in various different ways to meet the needs of myself and my family. I know that I should be grateful for God's provision, and I most definitely am grateful; most people don't get to live under the direct provision of God's hand. But one result of this way of living is that I do not feel productive. I grew up on a farm and working is in my nature. I enjoy working and accomplishing things; imp...

   In the last few months, I have written about the lengths that God has gone to in His pursuit of us, and more recently I wrote about the suffering that we go through on earth and why God may allow that to happen to us. These two articles are weighing on me as we ourselves are struggling with news that my family has recently received regarding a friend of the family, in particular a friend of my wife's. I don't want to write this, especially as this is a very recent event and I don't want it to seem unsympathetic, that I am saying that this young lady has brought her circumstances on herself, but God is compelling me to write this anyway and I hope that I don't screw it up. This friend, we'll call her Pamela, has been connected to us for more than two decades. We got to know Pamela in a church that we used to attend. Pamela has always been vibrant and energetic, always volunteering for her favourite local sports team and if there was a Christian music concert any...

   One of the most common arguments that unbelievers have against the Christian theology of a loving God is to question why there is so much suffering in the world. The argument is based on the false notion that a loving God would never allow His creation to suffer, so there must not be a loving God. This is something that many Christians have also struggled with at some point or another. In truth, I think that one cannot truly understand the answers to this if they have not gone through struggles so severe that they could not have overcome them without God's help. Since I am one of those people, I will try to make sense of it. We have to remember that God is pursuing relationship with us. He is not an authoritarian who is looking to wield His power over anyone who does not submit to Him, willingly or not. His desire is to know us and for us to know Him. This is why He has been pursuing mankind through all time in numerous ways, as I laid out in this article . He wants what is...