Posted by Roberta Grimes • January 21, 2023 • 44 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus
I paused to watch a darting speck
That flickered in the yellow breeze
And came to taste my daisy bed
And touched with gold my lazy trees
And blessed all I had done.
And though I had to turn my head,
I watched it as it fluttered by.
And though I had to work instead,
I ached to be a butterfly
And frolic in the sun.
– Roberta Grimes, from “Butterfly” (1962, 2012)
Christianity is dying now in much the way that a serpent might die, writhing and churning as it seeks to maintain its hold on teachings that have nothing to do with Jesus. That image of Christianity as a dying serpent came to mind as I read a diatribe against what someone called “the heresy of universalism.” And what is this monstrous heresy, you might ask? What could be the worst heresy of them all? Why, it is the awful notion, so ghastly even to contemplate, that everyone might be going to heaven, even those who never have claimed the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior. But I can tell you now with certainty, after having spent more than fifty years studying the genuine afterlife, that universalism is no heresy at all. It is instead an absolute fact. The true God is a far greater God than any petty Christian ever has imagined, so everyone does indeed go to the self-same afterlife together, no matter what they believed in life. But tragically, it is this very sadistic pettiness of Roman Christianity that is the only thing that lies behind the whole concept of the Christian belief in a fiery hell. Someone recently wrote a tongue-in-cheek post for Patheos, the Christian blogging website, about how relieved an imagined group of mean and petty Christians are to learn that hell is real after all, so some of the people those Christians thought ought to by rights be condemned to burn in hell are indeed roasting in hell right now. But in fact, of course, there is no hell, and the concept of hell has caused so many millions tremendous emotional pain.
Christianity has never recovered from the Covid closures. And traditional Christian practice – at least in the United States – has become a partially online activity, while it seems at the same time to have entered a more rapid stage of its writhing decline. I watch all this happen, and I feel as miserable about it as if I am the cause of it all. I apologize for having left off last week’s post with a set of enigmatic ellipses. But Christianity is dying fast, and I feel as if I am its executioner. I have loved Christianity since I was a child, and ever since my childhood experience of light I had assumed that I was eventually going to become a minister. And now, as I have been working on teachingsbyjesus.com, and feeling deeply called to do it, and even feeling called to do it by Jesus, even though the purpose of the website itself is the further destruction of the Christianity that I love, I had begun to hear faint whispers in my mind from someone saying, “Christian, love me more.” For days I tried to ignore that whisper. This is just what feeling guilty does to you, I thought. I kept telling myself that actually losing your mind is a conscious choice, so I could choose not to do it. “Christian, love me more.” But could feeling so guilty make you lose your mind? Was that a real possibility? That whisper would not stop, so then I Googled the phrase and it came right up. There it was: an old hymn from my childhood. It was the perfect theme for this whole series, so Thomas and I used it as our frame-verse last week.
And then, as I was working on this post in the middle of last Tuesday night, I drifted into a catnap. And I had a vision of the pink child’s bookcase that was in my bedroom when I had my experience of light; but it was standing out at the curb with the trash, and oddly it was covered in moss. This was a vision and not a dream, since it has stayed with me ever since. When I asked my Thomas what the heck was going on, he told me that Jesus is dredging up these old memories for me. The hymn. The bookcase. He wants me to more intensely recall the Christianity of my childhood days so I can now more properly throw it all away.
What is astonishing is that even now, there are people who confidently believe that the Catholic Church carries a permanent franchise granted to it by Jesus. They say it smugly, as if just saying it with enough certainty might put more people back in those pews. Or Protestants in evangelical churches try to mix organ music with praise bands, in something they are calling the worship wars. Or then there is the megachurch theory, to overwhelm people with the smell of success. Or then, even possibly, what just might work is a return to the solidity of old-fashioned ways. Anything to put people back in those pews! But the plain fact is that the Roman Emperor Constantine’s idea for a religion that he could use as a weapon of mass control is just not working anymore, and it never is going to work again, no matter what we try.
Seventeen hundred years ago, the Romans under Constantine seized and destroyed a spiritual movement that was then three hundred years old and thriving. Had they simply left that movement alone, it might have gradually overspread the world and made the universal love that Jesus taught the lingua franca of humankind. But emperors bent on conquest have no interest in teaching the world how to love. So the Romans cut down and reshaped the Jesus movement into a religion that they thought they could use as a more effective means of control, and they destroyed all its love-based variations. For how long did the Christianity of Jesus survive? Just to give you some idea, three hundred years ago was the year 1723, and Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743, so more than the lifetime of the United States until now was the lifetime of Jesus’s spiritual movement. And in those three hundred years after Jesus’s ascension, the movement that He and His followers had begun had already grown to millions of people when Constantine co-opted it. The Roman armies massacred whole villages of those first followers of Jesus, and they hung them on crosses or fed them to lions in coliseums in the process of creating their own new religion. Because the thing about organized religions that so often makes them evil is that they cannot tolerate competing ideas. But the Jesus Movement – which is what Jesus’s movement actually seems to have been calling itself in various languages by the time it was destroyed – had tolerated a host of widely varying beliefs. There was that one belief, though, that tickled Constantine’s fancy. He loved the idea that Jesus had been crucified for our sins, and that Jesus then had risen from the dead. It was not the central teaching of the Jesus Movement, but it ended up being the primary fear-based dogma of Constantine’s new Roman Christian religion. That was something the Romans knew they really could use!
So the Romans killed the Jesus Movement, but they did keep the figurehead of Jesus. Then Constantine presided over the First Nicaean Council in the year 325. It was the first in a series of seven Roman Christian Councils, and there they set about creating the Roman version of Christianity that is practiced worldwide today. In the Bible that the Councilors put together, we do have preserved the core of the teachings of Jesus, and a record of the start of the Jesus Movement. But the dogmas of Roman Christianity have nothing to do with what Jesus taught. I have asked a few Christians that I know well enough to actually ask them why Christians don’t, you know, actually read and follow the Gospel teachings of Jesus. Some of them protest that of course they do. Some admit that they don’t, but say perhaps they should. Although none of them think this is much of a problem. But, good grief! When the core of the Roman Christian religion is that Jesus died as a sacrifice to God for our sins, and Jesus tells us right in the Gospel of John that God never judges us for our sins so no sacrifice is needed, then I would say that is a pretty big problem!
Christianity as it stands now is built on a lie. And it is a gigantic lie. Jesus died for our sins, and unless you claim Him as your personal Savior, you are going to hell? Wow, that lie is epic. And you can sell a lie for only so long before people catch on and your lie falls apart. The Christian Bible, too, is an important book, but it is not the inerrant word of God. Sad to say, that is another big lie. So the Christianity that the Roman Emperor Constantine designed as a fear-based weapon to control the masses of his day is being practiced now by more than two billion people, nearly all of whom think that they are following Jesus. But none of these people has much idea of what their beloved Jesus actually taught.
After Jesus has endured seventeen hundred years of this treatment, I find it hard to even imagine the level of His personal frustration. I don’t know how He patiently manages it, but Jesus transforms Himself into church-Jesus repeatedly, something like every hour on the hour if there were hours where He is now, so as not to disappoint all the newly-transitioned people who keep coming to Him to receive His post-death blessing. He helps people on earth, He constantly answers prayers, He is always deep in service. Just a couple of nights ago, Thomas and I met with Jesus briefly, and something in the order of things had broken down so much that I remember that meeting. Which never is supposed to happen, unless there is some reason for me to remember a meeting with Jesus. And He was indeed Jesus. Omigod. I was feeling His overwhelmingly powerful and gorgeously silken personal energy. But He looked like a mix of church-Jesus and Mediterranean Jesus, with olive skin but lighter, longer, and almost-straight hair. He seemed a bit flustered, and He was speaking so rapidly to Thomas that I couldn’t register what He was saying. If Jesus is being so driven to distraction now that He can no longer manage smoothly transitioning back and forth between His astral bodies, then we really are in the midst of a crisis.
My dear friends, I wrote the first half of our frame-verse when I was sixteen years old. I found it among my mother’s papers after her death, and I actually remember writing that first half, sitting at a picnic table in my family’s backyard on a hot summer day. When I found it, I thought that poem needed a second half, so fifty years later I gave it one. And now modern Christianity, too, is ready for its second half. But so much more importantly, Jesus deserves the right to bring to completion what so long ago He so well began. Jesus’s own true Christianity looks nothing like our present Roman Christianity. And His Jesus doesn’t even look like our Jesus! When I first personally met Jesus last April, and I asked Him why He chooses to look as He chooses to look now, He said just that everyone looked that way back then. Well, of course they did. To tell you the truth, I am used to it now, but nine months ago His Mediterranean look was a shock.
And now, my beloveds, it is long past time for each of us to choose! Will we choose Jesus as He wants to look now, with His Bible which contains just His four Gospels and His love-based teachings that can transform the world? Or on the other hand, will we choose to remain with the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christianity, and his thicker Bible that the First Nicaean Councilors assembled at Constantine’s command? It must be one or the other. So, whose Christianity will you choose?
Now fifty years have come and gone
Between that butterfly and me.
I’ve done what I set out to do,
But still my fondest memory
Is what I wouldn’t try.
I’ve had enough of cheap success
And superficial days and hours.
Now what I want is gentleness,
The joy of decorating flowers
And trembling in the sky.
– Roberta Grimes, from “Butterfly” (1962, 2012)
“If Jesus is being so driven to distraction now that He can no longer manage smoothly transitioning back and forth between His astral bodies, then we really are in the midst of a crisis.”
Unfortunately, we seem to be edging towards to a nuclear war with Russia.
In any case, I appreciate everything Jesus has done for us. Bless our brother and I hope he can stop pretending to be something he’s not soon enough. He’s been doing it for far too long.
Oh my dear, what Jesus does, He does for His pure love of people, so He is joyous to do it – you needn’t worry about Him! I have watched some of His interactions with returning Christians, and His smiles are genuine, and what He says is always from His heart. What I saw a few nights ago was kind of a behind-the-scenes view, and actually as Thomas reminds me now, apparently I was not supposed to mention it here, but we got our wires crossed. I think Jesus really is exhausted, but not at a spiritual level. I think He is plain weary of the grind of what the religion that He didn’t start and He has had nothing to do with has done to the lives of so many people. And in His name!
To All:
I choose my Friend, Jesus, who is Love and condemns no one. He is my Lord.
I ask Him to greet me as I leave this incarnation to return to the Greater Reality so that I may tell Him “Thank you, Brother for showing me the way to ascend. I love you.”
I pray that this whole world (and my children’s children) will one day find His Way.
I love you all, dear ones.
David D.
Oh my dear beloved David, I am sure that our Brother will be there, and ready to take your hand!
David D. Thank you. I love you and all of our family here.
Beautifully expressed: “The true God is a far greater God than any petty Christian ever has imagined, so everyone does indeed go to the self-same afterlife together, no matter what they believed in life. But tragically, it is this very sadistic pettiness of Roman Christianity that is the only thing that lies behind the whole concept of the Christian belief in a fiery hell. ”
Dear Roberta, while your focus is on Man-made “Christianity,” the very same problem applies to all of the Man-made religions. Thus, and expanded statement would be:
It is instead an absolute fact. The true God is a far greater God than any petty Man-made religion ever has imagined, so everyone does indeed go to the self-same afterlife together, no matter what they believed in life. But tragically, it is this very sadistic pettiness of all Man-made religions that is the only thing that lies behind the whole concept of Heaven for the faithfull, and Hell for the disbelievers.
And it’s not only religion as such that owns this problem of a distorted perspective on the nature of life and ignorance that we all are eternal spirits temporarilly visiting here for the natural hardships in a material world life. The same rejection pof Man-made religion equally well applies to the political excess of perverted nationalism which justifies wars, such as Putin’s attack on the Ukraine, and China’s threats against Taiwan, not to mention WWI and WWII and the tribal murdering that has plagued Africa.
Our mortal lives are hard enough by design w/o people foolishly making our short lives harder.
I have not commented for a while due to personal tragedy😔but I have been reading and following your blog Roberta “religiously” pardon the pun 😎… how I have loved reading the above and of course dearest Jack’s contribution , and I look forward to reading more .
Just wanted to say 🙂
All my love
Louise
So sorry to hear that, Louise – hope things are getting better. Sending love and light
And all our love right back at you, dear Louise!
Louise. I second the sentiments of Roberta and Lola.
Thank you Roberta for all that you do and express it so beautifully.
Loved Jack Hiller’s comment today, especially regarding an expanded statement being… all Man made religions not just Christianity and “perverted nationalism”.
Christi Pitliangas
Dear Christi, I think we all loved what Jack Hiller said! Jesus is calling me to speak quite narrowly, only addressing Christianity, so I am doing that. But what Jack said really applies to all the modern religions, and I think that is pretty easy to see.
Any religion based on what Constantine says should re ignored He was definitely NOT the nicest guy in the world (to say the least)
Oh my dear wonderful Lola, how sadly true! Constantine was not the nicest guy in the world. In the same way that, um, Count Dracula will never win a charm award.
LOL
Oh my dear much-beloved Jack, yes indeed! I never remotely liken myself to our treasured Wayshower and closest Friend, but the one way in which my mission is like Jesus’s mission is that He said at the start of His mission that He had come only to the lost sheep of Israel, and in the same way I am speaking only to the lost sheep of Christianity. But you are altogether right when you say that every man-made religion shares all these same problems. So perfectly said!
Good Morning Roberta and Everyone,
There is so much to take in, especially with your expanded view, dear Jack. I find myself thinking, “Get on with it!”
I also, Roberta, was so committed to the religion of my upbringing, that I am surprised at my easy willingness to just let it go, and rather than mourn it, to feel compassion and gratitude and let it pass. And, like you, I know there are hidden pockets that need cleaning out, much like your bookcase vision; old ties have been revealed to me just this past week, and I have stood back, “oh wow, now THERE’S something!” And once seeing it with His guidance, it’s like it’s easier to let go.
But I don’t feel a “crisis”, which also surprises me. I feel a certainty He knows EXACTLY what He’s doing, and all that is asked of me is to allow the cleaning up, healing, transformation to take place within me; and that is started by being determined to see clearly, truthfully. My hands are full just with my own inner work alone. Yet, many are in the same place, and with all of us concentrating on that, on our own “house”, so to speak, cracks and fissures occur into which the Light can shine in and cause greater cracks and more and more Light shines upon us all. This morning, after reading and talking to Jesus, I believe my greatest “support”, “help” to Him is to do just what I’ve expressed: to ALLOW the help and healing of Heaven, to TRUST God is in control, to BELIEVE in the highest and greatest good, and KNOW I am loved and supported. It sounds “easy” but each step will have it’s hiccups and unravelings and all the emotions that go with it. It’s spending time with my friend, Jesus, that helps me move past that.
For me, personally, the “vacillation” of His image is a sign to ME, in a sense, a vision of the choice you propose as the title to this blog for today; not that HE is having any issues with His identity. It’s a question to me: “whom will you choose?” (church Jesus or the REAL Jesus?) I choose the latter. And I move on, a little insecure and scared, but I am determined to see/be differently. Love you, Fran
Oh my dear Fran, this is so beautiful, and so strong! I read it twice. I’m sure that Jesus loves it too. To have loved Christianity, and Jesus within Christianity, makes it hard to let it go, but we realize now that He never really was in it at all, and where He is, we will go.
I enjoyed your poem, Roberta. You are a lady of many talents.
“But emperors bent on conquest have no interest in teaching the world how to love”. Why is love something that needs to be ‘taught’? Isn’t love a natural part of being human, mother’s love for her child, love of family?
I live in Missouri, one of the more conservative States, with one of the most restrictive abortion laws (no abortion/no exceptions). A group of clergymen, both Christian and Jewish, are suing the State to overturn the law. Their argument is that the State government is imposing their religious beliefs on others. Okay, I get the separation of church and State, but how does the Church explain this to their parishioners? Is killing your unborn child a sin, or isn’t it?
Hi Amanda,
“Isn’t love a natural part of being human, mother’s love for her child, love of family?”
Can you love everyone the same as a mother loving a child? For me that is our ultimate goal while navigating the negativity that surrounds us.
“Is killing your unborn child a sin, or isn’t it?”
We don’t really die and therefore can’t be killed.
What abortion does is deprive another soul of a chance to learn from this existence to grow spiritually. Which is very unfortunate.
I wouldn’t look to the Church to explain anything for the reasons Roberta has pointed out in many of your posts.
Oh my dear Amanda, if you think I might be a poet, just imagine me as a novelist. We took my series of channeled novels out of print years ago because I didn’t have the bandwidth, and because Jesus was pressing me to do this work. But Marvina kept working on this most recent novel, and now it is finished, so we are going to put the whole series back into print next summer, with Thomas’s and Jesus’s permission now obtained, and then we’ll publish the final one. I think it’s pretty good, actually, and the series is relevant to all of this work! Back with more information in April….
But as to love, don’t assume that love is natural to human beings. Study the Holocaust. The Rape of Nanking. Even study what Constantine did to the first followers of Jesus. No, in human history, love and kindness is the rare exception and by no means the rule!
And where abortion is concerned, I think that working out the competing interests of women and unborn babies is a wonderful opportunity for people to practice love in action!
Exist Responsibly!
Love and a strong moral compass shall softly
Lead the future of humanity on earth. 🌞
Oh my dear James, from your mouth to God’s ears!!
I follow you and I have read all your books but today something you write needs explanation of justice and love! You wrote that Jesus is so busy answering prayers!! Them why, for one example aren’t the prayers of the Ukrainian’s being answered!! Um just suffering in spite of the horror of their lives ?
Oh my dear Barbara, what would you have Jesus – and God, for that matter – what would you have them do? Ride into the battle against tanks with swords upraised? Surely we all have a role in intervening and trying to bring peace to that region, when neither Jesus nor God caused that war?
Dear Roberta, Your observation that God does not make His being and activity glaringly obvious here is surely true, for any such appearance would deprive our Earthly lives of their value, and null our memory block about our true nature being eternal spirit with Heaven as our true home.
But I can declare by looking back at just my own life that divine action was taken thoughout, just in subtle ways that I did not realize at those times, but now see in my old age. Imminent accidents, injury and death spared, subtle guidance when praying to go this way or that, some not so subtle couching as I wrote to share what I have learned about the nature of life — the divine is always with each and every spirit created by our loving God to share His eternal journey.
Oh my dear Jack, it is only in our old age that we can see that we have never taken even a single step in our lives, but God was offering a hand to us, whispering in our ear, and cautioning us every step of the way. I can look back now, and see that I always was being guided. Okay, yes, I just wrote that sentence, and Thomas just tapped my shoulder and reminded me that he was the one that did the guiding but God was the one that got the credit. True. That is what happens in everyone’s life! Our spirit guides are God’s minions in our lives, and this is such a beautiful system. Each of us, as you so well put it, is so tenderly cared for by the divine.
Thank you, Roberta, for your beautiful poem. It snagged me because the butterfly has come up in my meditations recently, as a metaphor for spiritual rebirth and, I think, the re-emergence of the simple teachings of Jesus, but also as a symbol of spiritual freedom – to spread one’s wings and fly about in peace and joy. Jesus after all did say that learning the truth of, and following His teachings will set us free, but as I was reminded very simply upon awaking today, “Freedom lies within,” not in one’s material situation. (The Kingdom of Heaven Jesus spoke of?) Interestingly, like with your vision of the old moss covered pink bookcase at the curb, I’ve had a new guide, Alphonso, turn up who says his goal is to help me “cut the cords” of things like attachment, trauma, and shadow material that pull my strings and clutter my mind, often without my even being aware of it, so that I may, hopefully, more easily reach that Way, “la strada,” as he calls it, of freedom. Thank God for that! I need all the help I can get. 😄🙏
Jesus said: “Whatever you bind one earth, you bind in heaven”.
You wrote: But in fact, of course, there is no hell, and the concept of hell has caused so many millions tremendous emotional pain.”
So, what happens to people who kill, rape, exploit, are addicted, destroy the environment, are full of hatred, anger and resentment, etc.?
How can they possibly go to the “self-same afterlife together, no matter what they believed in life,” as you wrote?
I think that evil people have some restorative process to go through before they can up their spiritual level in the afterlife.
Do I misunderstand your blog this time?
There really was a a yellow monarch butterfly! And trees. And I enjoyed the sound and feel of words as a child. “Flicker” and “Yellow breeze.” I recall that those words felt very satisfying to me. I wrote so much poetry as a child! But don’t you think, my dear Scott, that there is something symbolic about butterflies? Something so beautiful and free coming from a little lowly caterpillar?
Ah, my dear Adrian, but you reckon without the fact that we each go through a life review, and each of those people who rape etc. must face the harshest judge of all. They each must feel how they have made all the people they hav harmed feel. And when they cannot then forgive themselves for having caused such pain, they end up in the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Dear Adrian, A possible explanation follows from the fact that each life here is performed by the combination of body and soul. The body at times overides the guidance of its soul to behave badly; sociopaths and psychopaths are cases of strong body control.
The body of course eventually dies (although the body in having a form of consciousness itself, as does everything created by God, may persist and appear later as a ghost). The soul detaches at the death of its body and returns to Heaven in its spirit form. The spirit is engaged by a life review and judges its own behavior, good and bad. Spirit that has not reached some minimum level of goodliness will be encouraged to return to experience another mortal life; Edgar Cayce said in one of his readings when asked that the average number of reincarnations is 36.
Reincarnation remains a controversial topic. Some believe that we come back to assist a person on earth, but not as that person. This, then, could be mistaken as reincarnation.
In the spirit world there are also opportunities to grow. It’s probably a question of free will how and where you will carry out your growth process.
It’s done by loving service to others.
What if you reincarnated and did worse things than before? You would be trapped in a vicious cycle.
Edgar Cayce and many others may mistranslate what they received from spirit and call it reincarnation.
There are many logical reasons why reincarnation makes no sense. Especially: your parents would constantly change. You would eventually end up with many parents and many siblings once you didn’t need to come back.
Judas is said to be with Jesus in a very high realm. Being helped by Andrew. But he never went back to earth to grow from a kind of hell to where he is now.
So, coming back in some form is probably a choice you can make. Not a must or a fixed requirement.
From my understanding, we have full choice on whether we come here or not.
While we can grow in the spirit world, we tend to make bigger leaps in spiritual growth when here in comparison.
Which is why we push ourselves to come back. Not exactly something we, whom are here, want to even think about. haha
I wonder the same as you regarding going backwards if things don’t work out in this existence. I suspect this is a reason why the GodHead was against Jesus coming here after he ascended.
As for our family members who have done bad things, the only hell that exists is the one we make for ourselves. We need to forgive ourselves. Luckily we have our family there to help those that struggle with forgiveness.
Dear Thomas, I think your ideas are correct.
Dear Adrian, yes indeed, by God’s design, our mortal existence generally blanks out the spiritual world, so anything there, such as reincarnation, is controvercial here for secular opinion and “hard” science. There are, however, good books demonstrating evidence for reincarnation, and here are four:
Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives
by Jim B. Tucker M.D. | Jan 6, 2015
Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation, rev. ed.
by Ian Stevenson MD, Scott R. Pollak, et al.
Children’s Past Lives: How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child
by Carol Bowman, Ann Richardson, et al.
Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect
by Ian Stevenson M.D. | May 21, 1997.
This text contains good photographs of birth defects for which the child reported its significance in causing death in a previous life, and medical records were found that confirmed what the child remembered.
Thanks Jack,
Thanks to everyone here the concepts are sinking in and actually make sense. 🙂
Thank you, dear wonderful Jack! All quite on point, as always.
My dear Thomas, all very well said.
My dear Adrian, it really doesn’t matter what people believe, and no, Judas is not now with Jesus. Reincarnation is indeed a part of the natural process by which all of us learn and grow spiritually, but it doesn’t happen according to Edgar Cayce’s ideas, nor according to what any religion in particular might teach.
Dearest Roberta,
Thank you for your lovely counterpoint to the mangled version of what Christianity should have been. I confess that for many tears I believed the Council of Nicea did the good and necessary work of suppressing various heresies such as gnosticism. My belief was that Constantine did the necessary work of purifying Christianity so we all could believe the dogmas about Christ’s substitutionary death and the like. Considering the pain and fear he caused Constantine comes off as a criminal rather than a hero. Thank you for setting the record straight.
Yours,
Cookie
Oh my dear Cookie, that was what we all were taught! That Constantine had been one of the good guys. But then I got to college, and I majored in early Christian history, and my professor who became my advisor and seemed to me at the time to have been old enough to have been in attendance at First Nicaea gave me her own quite different view of the matter!
Dear Roberta. My first reaction to the crumbling of Christianity was “good riddance to a system of shame, guilt and fear”. It is promising that you hear from so many people leaving it and moving closer to the truth. But, on a broader scale, it seems humans are becoming more amoral and immoral.
As for your thinking you would become a minister; you are/do. You administer truth.
Oh my dear Ray, thank you for saying that! I hear sometimes from people who say that they don’t go to church anymore, but they make coffee and open my blog post on Sunday mornings and they feel that they have been to church. So now we often write with those people in mind. And I think that what we have written for this Sunday will especially make them feel that way. But it really is all Thomas’s doing!
Thank you for providing a space where we can reflect on the profound impact of Jesus.