I had several talks with a young man raised in conservative missionary group this week. As he became a young adult, the founder of the group died. As a result, the group started unravelling. Many of this young man’s peers left and even abandoned their relationship with God. He himself hangs on to his relationship with God but sometimes wonders why. This is a problem that often occurs with the second and third generation of a Church or fellowship group. Parents join those because of an already established relationship with the Almighty. The Church or the group becomes for them a vehicle or a tool to practice their already established faith so to speak. For their children it is different. Being born in it, the Church or the group becomes to them the actual matrix from which their faith is generated. This dependency on a leader, Church, group, or denomination is a fragile spiritual position to be in. Leaders can fail; and Church, group, fellowship, and even denominations grow and change, sometimes for good and sometime for bad. That’s what the Children of Israel learned when they went into captivity in Babylon. Having lost the Temple which was their vehicle of worship, they had to get closer to God by studying the only thing they had left: The Torah, the Word. I explained to this young man that relationship with God must rather be based on a personal tangible experience, not appartenance to a doctrinal group. He said then that he couldn’t pinpoint such a time in his life. This made me rethink my answer. There are many ways that a relationship with God begins and some are not always pinpointable. Some establish it through the vehicle of a sincere prayer; some remember the happenstance of a miracle; a convincing argument; an emotional rush. There are even times when people realized that they had it but didn’t know it. It just grew on them. But all of those probably started with a conscious or subconscious search. Even fighting against God is a sign of having a relationship with Him. It may resemble a very bad marriage, but unless you are crazy, you can’t fight against an entity that doesn’t exist. But back to my friend. I’d like to compare relationship with God to marriage. When we marry we make a conscious rational decision that will change our lives for better or for worse. It is a financial, logistical, and sometimes even a religious decision. In any case it will drastically change the way we live in every way. Whereas we can pinpoint the day we marry, we may not be able to pinpoint the day we fall in love. Yet falling in love leads to very tangible rational (sometimes irrational) and drastic decisions. Like getting married, dedicating our lives to God is our tangible answer to a relationship that started in a time and way we can’t really pinpoint and explain. That’s the decision that we make and no one does it for us. That time of decision then becomes becomes our reference point. I want to take the analogy a little further. The most important part of a wedding ceremony is the sharing of the vows. Everything revolves around that. The vows are the promise that two people make to each other. In the Bible the breaking of vows is so unthinkable that Jesus said that it was better not to make vows than to make one and break it. Many things can go awry in a marriage; but at the end of the day, when the emotions, the violins, the pink clouds, and the butterflies are gone, if it it is based on the reference point and notion of an unbreakable and unshakable promise and not on external conditions, it will never break. It is the same with our relationship with God. Here is a clip from the movie, A Beautiful mind.
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