Blasphemy?

What would I see if my vision was truly his? Often I pray, "be thou my vision," but do I know for what I am asking? I am asking to see the ugliness I so desperately try to turn away from. I am asking to see the hurt, the need, the hunger, and the pain. The rancid brutality of war, rape, violence, and so much more I couldn't dare imagine, all these things in life that don't make sense to me, are in his vision. Death by starvation, abandonment, despair, he knows them well. I pretend that this draining, daunting, life-sucking evil doesn't exist. Yet, this is what he sees. This is what he hears. This is what I want nothing of. Why should I? It is not my problem, I certainly did not cause it, I am not responsible to help, and I cannot hope to fix it. I am only a drop in the ocean. It makes no difference whether I choose to live for myself or "world peace." Is that what I believe? Is that how I justify it? If only I could understand the world the way it's meant to be understood, the way he understands it; stripped of bias, ignorance, and self-preservation.

One life! It haunts me. Just one life is all I have. What if everything I believe is not true? What if I spend myself—the way so many others have—for the sake of the gospel only to find that in the end it is just another religion. It's just another way for humans to make sense of their world. Blasphemy! You say. But don't deny you've thought it too. Some day I want to mean it when I say: I'd rather come to the end of my life knowing that I gave everything to God and what Christ lived and died for, than realize I spent my life doubting whether Jesus existed at all. Faith is a choice.

While I rack my head struggling through philosophy and theology, there are still hurting, desperate people out there; people who need hope. What Jesus Christ preached, what he did...there is hope in that. There is hope. And perhaps Christianity is just another religion, with rituals, and traditions, and beliefs. Yet, perhaps it is not. I believe that, from the context this religion is based on, what it guides us toward, what it teaches, what it is leading us to; there is something far greater. Something greater than any one of us could ever imagine. Something that is entirely otherworldly. While we pick apart the Bible, Christianity, and religion in general, perhaps we are missing what it was meant to do for our sick world. The gospel fulfills religious doctrine. It should bring humanity together, not pull them apart. It should set our souls free, not bind us to theological obligation. How can we judge the Buddhist, or Muslim, or atheist? They want what we want. We are all humans, why must we distance ourselves in fear of violating our precious belief system? I am no theologian, yet it seems that while we nit-pick and tilt our noses, people are still suffering.

If people's souls are of the utmost importance, and a Buddhists reaches out to a dying human being and cares for them, restores them, can you say God is not in that? Is all the good in the world irrelevant if it does not spring from a Christian heart? I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me. If it is true that God works in and through all things, what about other religions?

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. - Mother Teresa