President-elect Obama

In my short life I have witnessed two things that I thought were impossible. The first was when the Berlin wall came down signalling the end of the cold war. In the eurphoria that followed there was talk of a new world order, and influential US intellectual Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history. Decades later we can see that much of the euphoria was based on a false hope. Russia has regressed back to a virtual dictatorship, Islamic terrorist flew planes into the twin towers, and the US launched an illfated venture into Iraq. Yet despite these and many other intractable problems millions are now free, and the risk of nuclear war has receded (though it is still with us).

The second was last night. I watched something I thought I would never see, an African American giving his first speech as president-elect of the USA, a little over 40 years after Martin Luther King gave his famous mountain top speech. In electing Barack Obama, the American people have shown that they can rise above the racism and prejudice of the past. As with the fall of the wall there is euphoria and expectation of a new and better world. Yet as I write this I know that Barack Obama faces many difficult, even intractable problems. Yet despite these problems and the inevitability of disappointment, the world is a better place for what happened last night.

My prayers are with the president-elect and the American people. May God bless America!

Confusion

I was going to get around to writing something deep and meaningful about the forthcoming elections in both the US and NZ, but that can wait until after the results have come in.

Instead I will ramble about something else that is on my mind for a while now. Having written this, I am struck by the weirdness of the English language, for how can I have "something on my mind" if the mind is a phenomenon that does not exist in the world of real objects. I can for example sit on a chair, or place a book on a table, for tables and chairs are real world objects that exist in time and space. But the mind is not a real world object, so how can I have "something on it". But I digress.

Prayer for Christians is suppose to be a part of their normal everyday lives. It is often presented as a conversation with God, an important part of which is presenting petitions and requests to God that he does something, e.g. heal John of Cancer, or provides something like a good job. It is an assumption of Christianity that not only will God hear these requests, but if they are within his will He will grant them.

As a Christian it has been part of my life for the majority of my existence. But herein lays the problem. For over those decades I have made countless requests of which none have come to pass. In fact this has been the norm. Indeed there have been times I've prayed for something, and times I haven't prayed for something. And when I compare the two I find no difference in the outcomes. Maybe this would make sense if the prayers were along the lines of let me win lotto or make me a millionaire. But they weren't, in fact most of them were help with normal life issues and problems.

So I find myself with an irreconcilable conflict between my theology that says there is a God who answers prayers and my experience of a God who doesn't. And much of what I've read has been unhelpful; along the lines of you need to repent more of unconfessed sin or wait for God's timing (which for those friends and family who have died despite the prayers for their healing seems a strange thing to say), or suspend my mind and just name it and claim it (based on the notion that we live by faith not by sight).

Maybe what I have asked for is not part of God's will or plan. But what then is God's plan? While I can see it at the cosmic level - the salvation of the world and the restoration of his Kingdom etc, I have been unable to determine what it is at an individual level. Indeed if you were to ask me what is "God's plan for my life?" I'd stare blankly at you and probable mumble something along the lines of "I dunno".

So what is my conclusion to this ramble? At the moment I don't have one. I m just confused.