A week without God....

So I have always felt a deep connection to Christ. The first time I prayed to him alone, I was only 4. My parents took me to church, but they never forced it on me. They were not the over involved hypocritical type.When we were old enough to drive, they didn't require church attendance. They said that if we wanted to go, then we could drive ourselves. So, as a teen I just quit going. While I was on tour, I lived like hell, but I always felt ashamed. I knew what I was doing was wrong. I knew that I had a belief in God and knew what he required of me but I just pushed it to the back of my mind and did what I wanted. And I was miserable....completely lost, wandering through life. That's when Tammy showed up. I got stuck being her roommate. She was a Christian, and her very presence made me ill.She never said anything to me about God, but I saw her Bible and I saw in her the way I was living was against God. I resented her. But no matter how hard I tried, we were stuck as roommates. Over the next few months, it became more than I could bare. I knew that I needed to go home and get my life back on track. When I met Jason, he was attending a church in MI, and I re devoted myself to doing what Christ wanted me to do and I felt at peace again. When we decided to move down here, it seemed impossible.The things that fell into place were nothing short of miraculous. My whole relationship with God revolved around what he could do for me. (There is the problem). Once all of our affairs were set straight, I didn't need anything and I stopped caring about God. So that brought me to the past year. I felt lost and disconnected again. So I started praying a lot. But this time it was different, I wasn't asking for anything, I was praying to find out if Christ was real. That made all the difference. For about a week , I walked around with the thought...."OK, so I am not going to believe in God, and see how that settles my thoughts". You know what? I was miserable. So there is my reality....every time I have abandoned God, I cant be whole. I started reading everything I could get my hands on about how to live the faith I believe I have. What I discovered blew my mind. All this time I have been asking God to service my needs. I had it all wrong.
For weeks I prayed and God wasn't there.....I was looking for him on my terms. Demanding an answer. Then it happened, after weeks of searching the library for a C.S. Lewis book, it was just there. I finally found the book that put it all back together for me. Lewis was an educated man. He was not the typical Bible raised kid, who just said the same old thing. He was a converted Atheist. So I started reading, and within two days, I was a changed person. I cant explain it. But you cant explain Faith can you? I started to see that Christ calls us, we don't choose him....he chooses us. When does he cal us out? When are broken and completely wrecked without the knowledge of Him and who He is. I can honestly say that I was almost to the point of suicidal. I have never felt so devoid in my life. The "week I denied God" was the worst week of my life.
So...where does that leave me? It leaves me where I am today. If I believe in Christ, and cant live apart from the knowledge of him, then I have some changing to do. I will spend the rest of my life trying to know His will for me. God is not a cosmic Genie, servicing the wills of man. Christ was not just another prophet. He claimed to be the son of God. That is a pretty big statement, and it leaves you with a decision.In the words of Lewis himself....


C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity writes the following: "I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [Jesus Christ]: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse .... You can shut him up for fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that option open to us. He did not intend to."

That is it....in a nutshell. I cannot live believing anything other than the last choice. So with that knowledge, I am required to live everyday completely sold out to Christ. Anything less than that is a joke, and makes me a hypocrite.