{"id":11147,"date":"2024-02-23T22:03:10","date_gmt":"2024-02-23T16:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/23\/we-talk-about-god-too-much\/"},"modified":"2024-02-23T22:03:10","modified_gmt":"2024-02-23T16:33:10","slug":"we-talk-about-god-too-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/23\/we-talk-about-god-too-much\/","title":{"rendered":"We Talk About God Too Much"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m not sure where this came from.<\/p>\n

Maybe when I was buttoning my shirt this morning, on the way to teach an adult class at a local church\u2013another among\u00a0countless other classes where I am, once again, going to\u00a0talk about God.<\/p>\n

God must be bored out of his mind.<\/p>\n

We have a lot of free time here in the modern west, a lot of access to information, and many means for communicating that information.<\/p>\n

And we religious types have the luxury of time to turn God over and over in our heads. Over and over. Again and again.<\/p>\n

Nothing wrong with thinking<\/a>, of course, but it can become habit-forming\u2013especially thinking about God.<\/p>\n

In my experience, the more we think about anything, the more we become viscerally committed to our ideas and the false security<\/a> we gain for our fragile life-narratives from holding tightly to those ideas.<\/p>\n

We actually do become addicted to our thoughts, those beautiful thoughts.<\/h2>\n

We love them so much.<\/p>\n

And the more personally meaningful the thoughts, the tighter our\u00a0grasp, the greater our\u00a0addiction\u2013and the more we fight to hold on.<\/p>\n

I am coming to the conclusion\u00a0more and more that the most interesting people to listen to when talking about God are those who have suffered enough to know that their thoughts are never meant to be confused with the real thing.<\/p>\n

I find it more interesting to listen to an \u201cuneducated\u201d Nigerian father talk about his faith in God after his daughter was kidnapped by Boko Haram than a western educated white male who is genuinely skillful and adept at explaining biblical texts.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0latter\u00a0is fine, of course. Maybe even quite\u00a0interesting.\u00a0But I don\u2019t think I will come face to face with God in the same way as when this Nigeran father opens his mouth to speak, a man with less\u00a0free time on his hands and a spotty internet connection.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t wish suffering on anyone, and most of us here on this side of\u00a0the Atlantic don\u2019t suffer the same atrocities as other world citizens.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0that\u2019s O.K.<\/p>\n

If we could\u00a0tap into our own pain, to those places where we suffer (and we all do), we might find ourselves\u00a0reducing the background noise of our wordy thought-worlds.<\/p>\n

Perhaps we would find\u00a0ourselves talking less, fighting less, embarrassing ourselves less, alienating others less, and finding more peace.<\/p>\n

Perhaps. Let me think about it.<\/p>\n

This blog was originally posted in February 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m not sure where this came from. Maybe when I was buttoning my shirt this morning, on the way to teach an adult class at a local church\u2013another among\u00a0countless other classes where I am, once again, going to\u00a0talk about God. God must be bored out of his mind. We have a lot of free time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[]},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11147"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}