curiosity is the best and most addictive drug. it can lead you even unto death if it gets a hold of you hard enough. "i must know what this is!!!"
Discussion
Yeah. The shit my ancestors did blows my mind. "Let's spend half a year on a wooden boat and go explore! Only half the boats will make, but F it, let's do it!"
the secret sauce to confronting the unknown is faith. faith that *someone* will give you the right clue at the time you most need it to avoid that fork in the road that is the end.
it happened to me in Slovenia... i was fading from fatigue and starvation and it was about -8 degrees, and i nearly passed out climbing a hill after sleeping fitfully in a playground in a little village. i found food shortly afterwards, and i eventually got to Ljubljana.
Ljubljana! I want to go there. Looks great.
I didn't have any faith whatsoever, and that something pulled my bacon out of the fire in China. Looking back, it's quite possible it did it several times, but the big undeniable time was when it literally yelled at me in my head over and over until I left China, then went quiet as soon as I left, and then covid hit and then international travel was restricted. And that was the beginning of my obsession with all things spiritual. More crazy shit has happened... Which I've mentioned before, so I won't repeat it. But yeah... that something is there, and its really there in the sense of a true thing being true even if you're unaware of it or don't believe in it.
yup. my conversion, started with at first the suggestion within Phillipians 4:6-7 that prayer must be in private and spoken out loud. then i started thinking about the meaning of worship, and how the word is interchangeably used with fear. then i was like: to worship only God means to fear NOTHING else.
this freed up my curiosity and a silly idea led me to get on the road to somewhere i never ended up, but the journey repeatedly showed me that this prayer could elicit answers that would be received as a quietly spoken statement that revealed information i could not possibly have had in my memory, or observed around me. "wait here just a minute" and shortly after a car appears and a nice italian lady starts talking to me and offers me food and shares some company as i eat her home made bolognese and drink her home made wine grown on the farm, packs me a little bag of food and sends me on my way.
"just wait here a minute". if i'd continued for that minute i would not have talked to her. partly it was me looking at the crazy road ahead, which had no shoulder and fell straight into a flat area below where crops were, and the drivers around Bologna were crazy mfs. so first i hesitated, then i prayed, i got an answer, and my afternoon went a whole different way.
My favorite verse comes to mind :
I think there are more relevant verses, but that's the one that always pops into my head.
that's a very nice one.
yes, that's the "magic" of christianity. it frees you of fear. it lets you get past the panic at the grey and then you can put actual concepts into that spot, and become equanimous towards it. it is what it is, is what you get to when you pass through that fear.
and central to that is the idea that only the master of this universe really has the power to hurt you. He *is* the universe but he is not any one part of it, he is all of it. so you should not bow in fear (or admiration) towards anything you see in this universe. when the reckoning comes at the end, He is the only judge and thus only He should be feared.
this doesn't mean take meaningless risks, it means listen to the voice, seek the answer, and have faith that you were prompted to find it with good intentions and mercy.