God is good. He will give me strength to make it through today, tomorrow, and as long as I live. Somehow I have to keep that at the forefront of my mind, especially when I am tempted to try and go it on my own and fall splatted on my face. I am so thankful for friends who come along side me and spur me to be more like Christ. I am so thankful for a savior who walks this road with me, who knows what I am going through, and how icky I get on the inside and loves me even so. I am so thankful for the grace of God and his hand in my life. I would not be here if it was not for him. I would not make it through tomorrow without him. He is good.

That being said, be praying for me like mad tomorrow. Tomorrow is the last day of add/drop, and I might be switching my major tomorrow. But I really have no clue. and I have an 8:30 am class, so it is gonna be crazy as far as sleep goes 'cause I have a bunch of homework left to do before sleep can happen. And several more really hard things to deal with right now. So yeah, prayer would be appreciated.

People search for the oddest things...

The fun thing about having a blog tracker on my blog is that I get to see how people get to my blog. Usually people come here from the nav bar thing, or from searches for a green dragon pub. Today, however, I found a new one. Someone got here from a search for "green dragon Pentateuch". Perhaps I am am just missing something, but that seems like a very random search. Whaddaya know, my blog happens to be the first thing that come up with that particular search.

1 p.m. to 7 a.m.

I just got back from one of the most amazingly odd things we do here at college, the Homerethon. We started reading the Iliad at one pm Sunday afternoon, and read through it and the Odyssey, ending at seven in the morning. While incredibly insane, it is one of the most amazingly fun things ever. But now I need to go sleep......

hurrah!

I noticed on my tracker thing that someone ended up here by searching for a picture of a green dragon. That sparked the idea of finding a pic of a dragon for a mascot, so I googled green dragon and found this amazing website that has pictures specifically for people to put in their blogs. Pretty spiffy, eh?

Anyway, I am pretty fond of my new pet, even if he does look a bit more dangerous than jolly...

The best conversations happen during car rides...

I went shopping with one of my friends a few days ago, and as we were driving around looking for stores that would have the things that we were looking for we were able to just talk. Both of us came into college pretty sure that we knew what we were gonna do with our lives, and what majors we should be to accomplish that. Now that our sophomore year has rolled around, it feels like someone yanked the rug out from beneath our feet and we are now in free fall. We don't know what we want to do, or how to accomplish it. It is so disorienting after having been so sure for so long. Her comment was that it is so tempting to curl up in a ball and wait for someone to put something else under her to stop the falling. The only problem is, this is our life. We are now the ones responsible to find something to base our lives on. And the discovery that we have no idea what we are doing makes it terrifying.

It is so weird. I knew for most of my life that I want to be a doctor. Then I started getting a bit closer, and started to see more clearly what it will require of me. Quite honestly, a large part of me says it is not worth that much of my life. I actually want to have a life, not spend most of it inside a hospital or med school. I am confidant that I will survive college, but another six years of mad crazy deadlines and really ridiculously hard work does not sound like something that I am gonna be interested in. I want to get out there an get my hands dirty making a difference while I still am alive enough to do it. Quite honestly, I am not even sure that medicine is the difference I want to make in the world. There are so many other ways to change the world. I have spent so much of my life watching the kids around me destroy their lives, and I have been powerless to do anything about it. I hate the thought of living the rest of my life in that same position of watching the unbearable. I want to save even just a few of the kids who are headed for destruction. I have no clue, however, how on earth I am supposed to do that. I have no idea what God wants of me, and what he wants me to do to equip for it. And I hate that. I desperately want the reassurance of knowing where I am going, what I am doing, and what the end result is supposed to be. This whole navigating blind thing is not fun. Yet in the midst of the chaos I know that God does have a plan for me and for my life, and even for this time of blindness. Though right now I see through a glass darkely, I know my God sees my life clearly. I just have to trust him, even though it is hard right now.

Brother’s K: Is it possible for God to be good given that he created creatures with free will who turned to evil?

God created creatures with free will. Does that make God evil, to create creatures with free will? No, because he isn’t creating evil. He knew that the free willed creatures were going to turn against him, and he created them anyway. Does that make God evil? No, because he didn’t make them with no choice to do ill. They still had the option to chose good rather than ill. It was their own choice, not God’s. What of the evil done here on earth? Humans have free will. God, having created them with said free will, does not interfere directly in humanities choices. He has, however, set up boundaries that were not to be crossed with definite punishments if they were crossed. When humans choose to cross those boundaries they reap the consequences. However, it is not God who makes the choice to inflict them. It is their own choice to break the rules that inflicts the punishment. Unfortunately, the consequences are of a wide reaching nature, so the world is full of ills as we have seen. But that does not mean that a good God and the ills here on earth cannot co-exist. In fact, the particular nature of the ills on this earth cannot exist save a good God, and if God is good and humans disobedient then these ills are unavoidable. If God allowed evil to go unpunished then he would be unjust and no longer good. The other question is that of the existence of disobedient free-willed creatures and an omniscient and good God. If God is omniscient, then he knew before creating free willed creatures that they would turn out evil. If he knew that before their creation did he create them for evil? If one’s actions are foreknown does one have a choice? I think one does. If I know that if I present you with an apple and a chocolate bar and tell you that you can only have one of them, I know that most people would choose the chocolate. But I have a friend who despises chocolate. I know without a doubt that she would refuse the chocolate. That is not to say that she cannot choose the chocolate, but that she doesn’t want to. I did not force the apple upon her. Also, if God is omnipotent and omnipresent as well as omniscient then the whole question of foreknowledge and doom may be academic. If God is not trapped in linear time as we are then it doesn’t matter that he can see something before it has happened, because not only is he there when it happens, he is there before and after it. What happens happens, and God just happens to be able to see everything at once because he is not human. Also, do the ends justify the means as far as God is concerned? If he allows evil to exist for a time, and creates creatures with free will that he know are going to fall into disobedience in order that when the evil is vanquished he is brought glory, is that wrong? If he is the standard by which everything is judged, can anything he does be wrong? Did he create us with moral sense that is in alignment with his own? If so, does it seem wrong for him to allow a problem to develop in order that the solution could be unveiled for his glory? Is it like a parent allowing a child to do something painful so that the child will learn a lesson and learn to listen to the parent? That kind of seems like that is what it is like. You can tell a child not to do some things and almost guarantee that they will do it. But they will learn so much from the results that it is worth whatever they suffered. It seems like that is what God was doing in creating human kind. So then what he was doing was for our own good? How was it for the good of the souls in hell that he created them? Are they worse off than if they had never existed? I suppose that they are. But those who are not condemned are greatly elevated. So is it worth the sacrifice of the damned souls in order to create the subcategory of humanity: redeemed saints? What about the creation of Satan? If his creation was just, the creation of humans could simply be seen as the creation of weapons against Satan and the means of his destruction. Satan was created to serve God. He chose not to, and chose to fight him instead. When God created him, he knew that was going to happen. If he foreknew does that necessitate predestination? How can God who is all powerful and all knowing be good and yet create creatures who he allows to do evil? If God doesn’t stop the evil thing from happening isn’t he a party to it? Isn’t the evil at least partially his fault for not stopping it? Is it like when you give a little kid matches in a dry field and tell him not to play with it? If he sets the field on fire it is your fault for giving him the matches. I mean, it is the kid’s fault, but he should never have had the matches. Little kids are not responsible. I guess it comes down to God is the adult. Are we kids or adults? Was Satan a kid or an adult? Which court do we try ourselves in? If we are responsible, then it isn’t God’s fault. However, if we are not fully sufficient to stand then it is God’s fault? I guess it comes down to that. If God know that we are going to fall, are we truly sufficient to stand? Was Satan truly sufficient to stand? How then was he able to fall? Somewhere in here we have been lied to. I am not sure, but some of the reasons that God might be culpable sound like the excuses of a five year old or of our culture of lawsuits. “It was the neighborhood I was raised in. People weren’t nice to me. It’s my parents fault, etc.”. What about personal responsibility? Are we responsible? Why or why not? If we are not responsible for the ill that we do, then there is no such thing as justice. If we are not responsible for what we do, then we have no right to punish those who do wrong. But God set up a justice system. Whether or not we say that we believe that people are responsible for their actions, we live like we believe that they are. If this is so, then we are responsible for our fall. We were sufficient to stand. If this is the case, then it follows that Satan too was sufficient to stand, and is culpable for his own fall. This means that God is not culpable for the fall of either Satan or of humanity.