The Watsonian (blog)

“The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suit­able for him.”

Gen­e­sis 2:18 (TNIV)

God did not design us to live this life alone.

We were and have always been designed to live in com­mu­nity with other people.

We were cre­ated to do this whole thing…together.

My wife is the best thing that has ever hap­pened to me.  Seri­ously, I don’t know what I would do with­out her.  And for a time before I met her, I even doubted there was some­one that I could find that would be on the same path as me fol­low­ing God and join­ing His story.  But I did and now I have a helper and a part­ner to jointly pur­sue the pas­sion and dreams that God has put inside our hearts.

I also have some of the best friends in the world.  This group of guys (who mostly were my grooms­men) are game chang­ers in all the are­nas they are in, from min­istry to law to phi­los­o­phy and the­ol­ogy.  But we didn’t become friends to change the world, we became friends to live life together and through that, visions and dreams are being birthed that WILL change the world.

None of these rela­tion­ships started from a desire to change the course of history.

But they will.

As many rela­tion­ships do, they are birthed out of a desire to be together.

It’s nat­ural.  It’s super­nat­ural.  It’s our DNA.

In the midst of chaos, God creates.

This is a pro­found state­ment that we all strug­gle with in appli­ca­tion and understanding.

But as we look into the Gen­e­sis narrative/story, we see that God cre­ated our world out of noth­ing and chaos.

And as we look into what he called the earth, the plants, the sky, the uni­verse, the ani­mals and our­selves, we see we were called GOOD.

Good is a bless­ing here and also a fact.

God did not cre­ate a “per­fect” world, He cre­ated a GOOD world and He has never not called it GOOD.

This is a hard fact to swallow.

A lot of us have believed most of our lives that the world is inher­ently evil and that has shaped how we view our occu­pa­tions & call­ings (spir­i­tual v. non-spiritual), oth­ers (“are you in or out?”), the planet  (pol­lute more so Jesus will come back) and our­selves (“I am just no good!”)

But when we view our­selves, first, as made in the like­ness and image of God, and then that with the mak­ing, God has also called us GOOD and blessed us, then our lives take on more meaning.

We don’t view our occu­pa­tions as mean­ing­less as we see we were called in Gen­e­sis 1 and 2 to cre­ate, order, orga­nize and serve in the gar­den, and thus in our “gar­dens” (even our urban jungles).

We don’t view oth­ers as in or out, or as evil, but as unique expres­sions of the divine image, cre­ated to do good, but that some­times choose to do evil and miss the mark.  This isn’t dis­count­ing sin, but it is say­ing that you weren’t cre­ated evil and can choose to be good, but the oppo­site in that we were cre­ated and called good and choose to do evil things.  That we all have the oppor­tu­nity, through God’s grace, to be agents of His King­dom and love to the world.

And we don’t view our­selves as worth­less or no good.  We don’t com­pare our­selves to the ‘per­fect’ peo­ple on TV, but under­stand that God has cre­ated us all unique, but with a divine spark within our­selves, that lets us know that we aren’t on this jour­ney alone.

And we don’t view the Earth as some­thing that we can use and destroy for our own lik­ing, but that we ALL have call­ings to be stew­ards entrusted to care for the earth until the ‘groan­ing stops’ and the Earth is renewed in some mirac­u­lous act of new cre­ation by God.  This means that no mat­ter if you believe in global warm­ing or not, that recy­cling, reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions and even work­ing and advo­cat­ing nuclear non-proliferation (see The Two Futures Project) means we are car­ing for what God has blessed and called GOOD.

So as you go through­out your week, and as we remem­ber today the death and sur­ren­der of Christ on the cross in the face of evil and injus­tice, and the tri­umphal res­ur­rec­tion and defeat of death and decay and the beau­ti­ful inau­gu­ra­tion of a new act of cre­ation on Sun­day, the begin­ning of a new week, let us live know­ing that we are blessed, good and cre­ated to live these out.

//join us this Sun­day at Tim­ber Lakes Ele­men­tary in the Water­ford Lakes/Avalon Park in Orlando FL for Gen­e­sis Church and the con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on ‘In the Begin­ning’ as we dis­cuss this very topic.  Check out www.onlyonecity.org for more information\\

‘A ship, belong­ing to a hea­then owner, was once sail­ing over the sea, one of the pas­sen­gers being a Jew­ish boy.  A great storm arose, and all the Gen­tiles aboard took hold of their idols and prayed to them, but to no avail.  See­ing that their prayers had been in vain, they said to the lad: “Call upon your God, for we have heard that He answers your peti­tions when you cry to Him and that He is all-powerful.”  The boy imme­di­ately stood up and called with all his heart upon God, Who hear­kened to his prayer, and the sea became calm.  On reach­ing land, they dis­em­barked to pur­chase their require­ments and said to him: “Do you not wish to buy any­thing?”  He answered: “What do you want of a poor alien like me?”  They exclaimed :  “You a poor alien!  We are the poor aliens; for some of us are here and have our gods in Baby­lon; other have them in Rome; other have their gods with them but they are no ben­e­fit to us.  As for you, how­ever, wher­ever you go your God is with you!“‘

My best friend Alex is doing a series on his blog (Atlanta The­o­log­ica) on ‘Creeds, Doc­trines & Anthems’ (you can check it out here)

But it got me think­ing, how do I view these cat­e­gories that we tend to put our faith into? What is my view­point of God and how do I por­tray that to others?

So in un-0fficial part­ner­ship with him, I want to invite you to join the con­ver­sa­tion there and lets begin to look at the­ol­ogy (which is what we believe/how we view God) that is worth believing.

Calvin­ist, Armin­ian, Bap­tist, Pen­te­costal, Catholic, Emer­gent, et all. are all welcome!