"For the first few centuries after Christ the church tended towards believing everyone would be united with God in the end. Then the doctrine of Hell gained prominence.

So, let's see if I read this correctly - closer to Jesus we were more loving and inclusive, once man had time to make his own influence felt things started going to Hell."
David Mclaughlan

I wonder if this switch David is speaking of, had anything to do with the church becoming a political/cultural institution under Constantinople. Certainly force and power and control entered the picture then.
It seems obvious that to force someone to become a Christian completely and effectively bypasses the inner spirituality of a relationship with God.
Hell replacing God's love is pure and simple what happened. Makes you want to cozy right up!!

I am so bold as to think that the fox took over the henhouse a few hundred years ago and corrupted what a relationship with God was meant to be. The same human propensity still affects the church today, using force, control and manipulation through proper thinking and proper action to not enjoy a deep seated inner peace with God but to avoid punishment.

No wonder the church has not affected and deeply transformed the culture. It's not just a perversion to lead people to God through fear and intimidation, it doesn't work well!!

Boston harmonies

I love cities. I suppose growing up in a practically virginal valley in the western edges of the Catskills shouldn't set me up for this but it did. But even now I live on the main street of a small NH town and I can walk out my door across a couple of yards and I'm back in the woods from where the deer sometimes glide out and eat the yews around the houses.

I love the hustle and bustle, I love the traffic confusion, I love looking at huge buildings and looking in the window trying to see past the drapes and wondering who lives their life up there?

Recently I've been in Boston more than usual as I am having dental work done at Tufts Dental School to save money and also to support students who need practice.

As I stand waiting near the windows of the 12th floor I look out over Chinatown and can see lots of roof tops. This reminds me of one drapery job I did in Cambridge just over the river from Boston was installing a 30' wide motorized drape (into the concrete ceiling!) into a penthouse the building owner had built on top of his apartment building so that his daughter could live there while she went to Havard or something. Just threw a penthouse up on top of his apartment building! For his daughter to live in while she goes to college! Hey, presto; empty rooftop now penthouse.

This is what I'm talking about. Another world, another way of living.

So I had been to the dentist and was driving away when I looked out at the scene ahead of me; Chinatown stores, tall residential buildings, people scurrying around, construction going on and suddenly I was elevated by having this urban scene overlaid in my head with this section from The Message;

"From beginning to end he's there, towering far above everything, everyone. 
So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross." 
 Colossians 1

It was a surreal moment. I felt a kinship, a joy in this huge, gritty, intimidating world. A vibrant harmony.

In Reaching Out, by Henri Nouwen, Nouwen describes the ability to engage in solitude anywhere you are, people or no people, quiet or no quiet. It's an inner attitude that I can choose. And in so doing be where I am for others.

This is in contrast to the emotion of loneliness I'm sure I would have felt in a big city a few years ago. Sad, anxious, and always living in the future of getting back to where my partner in co-dependency, my wife, was. Taken up with the impossible assuaging of my own feelings of loneliness that I was choosing.

Now in this celebration of vibrancy in the midst of the ebb and flow of traffic and bustling people I was able to engage a God's eye view. What could be seen as "broken and dislocated pieces" fitting together in smooth harmony. All the diversity and activity flowed as a beautiful river through the canyon walls of brick and mortar and glass.

And I was part of a larger whole. 

Uncomfortable living

It’s interesting that people pay money and take time off work to come to Discovery or Breakthrough seminars so that in a very real way they can stop “feeling good, looking good, being right, and being in control".

So why would someone want to pay for the chance to be uncomfortable, out of control, look bad, and allow themselves perhaps to be wrong about something? Well, I think that maybe that’s very much like what Jesus calls us to. Jim Elliot who was killed by the Auca indians he was a missionary to, said “He is no fool to give up that which he cannot keep, to gain that which he cannot loose”.

And maybe it's because we may find that our certainties and belief systems built up in us may not be supporting the life we say we want to live. We may actually have conflicting intentions that we are not aware of.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who choose to go back into Nazi Germany to oppose Hitler and was executed in a concentration camp days before he would have been freed by the allies, writes in “The Cost of Discipleship”,

“ The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity (that is, in truth, into the absolute security and safety of the fellowship of Jesus), from a life which is observable and calculable (it is, in fact, quite incalculable) into a life where everything is unobservable and fortuitous (that is, into one which is in truth the infinite) into the realm of infinite possibilities (which is the one liberating reality). "

I’m not sure I get all of what Bonhoeffer is saying here but I get that to really follow Jesus and live a life of real freedom, we have to step out of what’s familiar and seemingly certain and be willing to live in the very real question of “what are my hidden motives and beliefs?” as I intentionally consider living in a way that others can experience as love.

As I write this I'm uncomfortably pricked in my conscience about my really being in the "safety and security of the fellowship of Jesus". But then I think that all I really know to do is to fall on him. God is the one "who works in us, both to will and to do".

And I can pray as David did "Investigate my life, O God, find out everything about me; Cross-examine and test me, get a clear picture of what I'm about." Psalm 139;23