Today is Pi day.
Remember? 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 etc etc etc?
That mathematical constant that defied your TI calculator's poor attempt to finally, once and for all, say what Pi was?
All these years since then, somehow you have managed to live a fairly normal life without ever resolving that question sufficiently. So I think that there's hope for you when I tell you that you can believe in Jesus.
Huh?
Yes. You can believe in Jesus.
I'm writing today to those among you who are struggling with the questions still unanswered about Jesus, the Bible, and God. If that's not you, then please forward this along to your sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, that guy in the next cubicle, your prof in psych class, that neighbor who'll change the subject - you know plenty of them.
There just seem to be a lot of people who will not give Jesus a chance because of some misguided idea that in order to do so, every question they have about Him, God, the Bible, the Church etc, has to be 100%, completely, nailed down. (Of course, those of us who follow Jesus consider something being 'nailed down' as certain, but I digress).
Jesus asked, as near as I can figure, 287 questions of the people around Him while he was here during His earthly ministry. Some people were baffled. Some people intrigued. And some gave incomplete answers at first, but were able to understand the answer later.
Like this man. His name was John, and he spent most of his adult life it seems trying to understand who Jesus was and how it was possible for God to love him. He kept referring to himself, this John, when he wrote everything out for us to read - in the third person, like some sort of Monty Python mode "we are not amused". Except he wasn't kidding. "the disciple that Jesus loved" is the way he'd describe himself.
So he got to the end of his life here, this John. The last few years. He was trying to make sense of it all. This is what he wrote.
1 From the very first day, we were there, taking it all in— we heard it with our own ears, saw it with our own eyes, verified it with our own hands. The Word of Life appeared right before our eyes; we saw it happen! And now we're telling you in most sober prose that what we witnessed was, incredibly, this: The infinite Life of God himself took shape before us. 3 We saw it, we heard it, and now we're telling you so you can experience it along with us, this experience of communion with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. 4 Our motive for writing is simply this: We want you to enjoy this, too. Your joy will double our joy!
1 John 1:1-4 (MSG)
Look very carefully at that again. Do you see any explanation of why what he saw happen... happened? Do you detect any attempt to explain the intricacies of God? No.
Just an attempt to invite others to live the questions with him and experience the same joy.
I'm not saying that we can't learn the deeper truths about God, or that we shouldn't.
What I am saying is that we can live, laugh, cry and experience joy even though some parts of our understanding of God and His work through Jesus remain unresolved to us. Kind of like how we have lived with Pi all these years.
Come. Follow Jesus. Enjoy the journey. Live the questions until the Truth makes Himself known to you.
Grace and peace,
David
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