@ame 987631 wrote:
It would be good to meet Jesus and talk to him about this. Or to be smarter because I just am not sure I understand.
Faith and spirituality are difficult to understand. The more I look into it and why some people believe in different forms of it and others (often with good reason) avoid organised religion altogether, yet often replace it with other forms of spirituality), I come to the conclusion that it is not straightforward (perhaps near impossible) to explain any of it in the quite same way you could describe how the electricity arrives at a building, the basics of how a computer works, or any other scientific stuff.
Yet there are experiences I have personally where at the last moment “something” has warned me “take care!”. For instance just around Christmas I escaped getting a full hit from 230V after a mains plug on a piece of equipment came apart, I was seconds away from putting my hands straight across the live terminals which could easily have finished me off, especially as my heart rate was elevated for “other reasons”.
I genuinely felt that “those upstairs” were looking out for me, and also thinking “we have quite had enough members of this family join us recently, and he is at least trying to do something useful with the later part of his life, let him have a few more years on this earth.
A German TV programme I was watching about protection angels just last night coincidentally explained this is often how they work (its not always like in the old paintings where they physically appear to you).
I think folk should be free find their own spiritual path in life, which may or not fit in with an organised faith. I have also found that balanced, rational discussions about faith and spirituality in English seem to be much harder to find than in Dutch or German (I am not sure why TBH although it could just be a cultural thing).
At the same time, organised religions which interpret their scripture too literally (especially some forms of Protestantism and Islam) can lead folk down very dangerous paths – the chap who collates the Groningen blog also tweeted a link to a really good site about truths and falsehoods about Islam, although it is all in Dutch and German (its a pity there isn’t an English version although its still a matter of getting people to make the effort to read about this – if folk bothered to read some of these resources (for some reason Groningen NL and the neighbouring regions of DE seem to produce many websites with especially good resources for all faith groups) there wouldn’t be half the trouble in the world today.
