Who Art in Heaven

One of the most enjoyable things about my looking at each word or phrase in the Lord’s Prayer has been the sudden discovery of statements I have said thousands of times and never stopped to notice what I was saying or what the words meant. “Our Father who art in Heaven” became just one flowing jumble of words that seemed to go together quite well and flowed off the tongue with ease. Then it hit me that these words were more than just a description of which God I was speaking to; these words were a statement of faith. These words proclaim that I believe God is real and heaven is a place. They also bring me face to face with my doubts.

The fact that God is a loving father allows me the comfort of not only having doubts and admitting I do but it gives me the freedom to talk openly about them with the Father and feel no shame.

In a world of absolutes and proclamations about knowing with certainty that it is all true and any doubt is a lack of faith, it is hard to admit and talk about having doubts.

I honestly believe that most of us have doubts and that it is healthy and helpful to do so. Matter of fact I think faith without doubt is blind presumption. Maybe the best we can hope for is to doubt our doubts and dig deep into what we really believe. Or maybe why we believe what we believe.

 WHY I BELIEVE IN GOD

I could say I believe in God because I don’t have faith enough not to do so. I heard a science professor say that after explaining that not believing took more faith than believing. He explained that to not believe one must accept that the organization and structure of everything we know happened by accident which he said was like thinking the dictionary was the result of an explosion in a printing plant. But of course, one could conclude that the structure was the result of evolution.

Ultimately, everyone must find their own reasons to believe or not to believe in the presence of a power outside of ourselves. The main reason I believe can be dismissed as just too simple or shallow of course but I believe in God because there is love in the world and I cannot find anyway to believe that man created that concept. It had to come from an outside source. I believe in Jesus for the same reason. I can find no place in history that can convince me that a mere man came up with the concepts of love and life He lived and taught.

 WHAT ABOUT HEAVEN?

I have always had a struggle with heaven. Not whether there is such a place but with how it has been presented and pictured to me all of my life. Gates of pearl, streets of gold and mansions don’t have much appeal to me, and strange as it may sound, I do not want to live in a perfect world. A place with no problems to solve, no decisions to make, no issues to face, nothing new to learn, no one to argue with and nothing to ever complain about sounds very stale and boring to me. I have just retired and am finding out that having nothing to do is worse than chopping cotton all day in the hot sun. And frankly heaven lasts too long. When I was young I was not afraid of Hell, but Heaven scared me. It never ended. It went on and on forever and somehow, I found that to be frightening. I know that sounds crazy but consider the source.

So, heaven was a struggle until one scripture somehow broke through the muck I call a mind. That scripture said, “We shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is.” Pow. You mean there is a place where everyone is like Jesus? No pecking orders, no super people, no ghettos and no silk-stocking areas, no political parties or religious denominations or groups? Just a world of Jesus folks loving in peace? I don’t think I would ever get tired of that kind of a place especially if He was there along with a whole bunch of people I have had to learn to live with them not being here.

I lived with a Jesus type of person for fifty-seven years, so I have a pretty good idea about what it will be like when everyone is like Him.