Jesus, Forgiveness, Healing, Grace, Mercy, Redemption are all words that are associated with Christianity but the understanding of them is being lost today's world.
Our Journey through Life
Our Earthly life starts when we are each born into a particular place in this world and for the first few years we are totally dependant upon older people in order to even stay alive. We eventually become self sufficient at survival but still, in order to be happy, we need to learn even more life skills. We do this by watching others and copying them and also by developing new skills for ourselves through a series of trials and failures.
All this takes place within our own unique environment that depends in itself upon many factors. For example - We maybe an only child or perhaps the youngest of many. We may be rich or poor. We may have only one parent or perhaps none at all. This list of possibilities is endless and all contribute to the unique personality that everyone of us becomes within ourselves. It is natural while this is going on, unless guided otherwise, for us to become self centred and selfish.
These above factors are sufficient, at this stage of my presentation, to make the point that I want to make here - it is that we all become what I like to refer to as 'Damaged Goods' with some more wounded than others. This subject of ‘Damaged Goods’ is covered in more detail in a later Chapter and is best left there for the time being. What I want to highlight at this stage is that many people have difficulty in realising that they are 'damaged' because of the problem we each have in understanding what is 'normal' We often have to wait until we become adults before we realise that what we took as being 'normal' in our childhood is often far removed from the experiences of others. By this time, however, patterns of behaviour have been formed in our minds that govern much of what we do and how we react in certain situations. The acceptance that we have subconscious minds that control much of our lives is quite a breakthrough and is discussed in more details in 'Who am I?' (This is still under development)
At some time or other we realise, sometimes through suffering or other changes in the circumstances in our lives, that there must be more to life than 'meets the eye'. It may be that we realise, like the alcoholic, that we are not in charge of our own destiny. Try as we can we have difficulty in successfully breaking these subconscious habits.
We realise that we are looking for answers to 'why we are here? etc. (I suspect that you Reader have reached this point otherwise you would not be exploring this Web site)
Some 'Second Hand Christians' may at this stage, look deeper into the source of their faith. Others my turn to 'Religion' for the first time not realising the difference between 'Religion' (a set of rules and regulations) and 'First Hand Christianity'
'Religion' and its problems will be explored in more detail in the next Chapter. It is sufficient to say here that the problem with rules and regulations is that they give no more help than does a 'speed limit sign', they just inform us of our faults when we make them. Christianity on the other hand offers to help rewrite the faulty patterns in our subconscious minds once we realise that we can't change them on our own. Self help at trying to change ourselves nearly always fails because it is like asking a broken computer to fix itself.
What we are unaware of at this stage is that God our Father has been watching over us since the day we were born, waiting for the right moment for us to meet with his Son Jesus. God is wise enough to know that if he makes his move too early then we will reject him and a once in a lifetime opportunity will be lost forever.
It may be the case that we need to sit on the fence a little longer, suffer a while longer, before we are ready to invite God into infuse that spark of divine, that is already in our hearts, into a full-blown flame fed by the Holy Spirit.
As time passes we realised that we need to break some of the bad habits that we've accepted as normal and perhaps revise some of our moral standards. Such changes indicated that we have begun an inner spiritual journey were we realise that the circumstances that surround us are only symbols or carriers of lessons that can be learnt.
Some of us are lucky enough to realise that we need outside help of the best kind available - that is what I found when I became a Christian. Why I chose to become a Christian is revealed in a later Chapter but is best left until the whole subject of 'Religion' is also left until later.
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