Is it All Real?

Lanny Donoho, who heads up BigStuf Camps and the 410bridge posted this on his blog today. I must repeat it here! It really sums up what we all feel about life and death and God and existence. Please read! It's worth the time.


Is it all real? “an excerpt”
Posted by: Lanny Donoho on December 9, 2010 at 1:06 am

we dont connect unless we are forced to.

we have to feel the need.

drowning, you reach for the air hose

falling, you reach for the rope

lonely, you reach for people

down, you connect to music..

hopeless, you just wish for hope..

and you hope there is a God.

can we connect with who or what God is????

do we believe or not?

dad gets cancer.

mom dies…

bobby is in a wheelchair

unplanned pregnancy…despair…

friends die and get sick

people make fun of me and i feel like crap

hell doesnt seem right or fair

god loves us…but a billion people dont have water?

tsunamis kill thousands…and where again was god?

jesus loved us but he’s dead now and…maybe… some people saw him alive after he was crucified or maybe they didn’t.

history books are really too sketchy to know for sure. nobody even wrote about it for at least 40 years after he died.

the old testament is bizarre…leviticus…ha! that’s just weird.

the new testament books share similar stories but different timelines, and have different details in different books that don’t match up

biblical scholars dont agree with scientists even on the age of the earth

what the hell? what’s real? what isn’t?

why do we say “what the hell?” if we aren’t even sure it exists?

But…when I stop to really think about all this….if god doesn’t exist….then how does anything else exist?

if there was once nothing …can something come from nothing?

why is god any harder to believe in than “something coming from nothing”?

If it all started with nothing…from our perspective “something” had to be there…because we just said “IT” all started from nothing.

“nothing” isn’t fathomable.

so why would it be hard to believe in “god” existing if you can believe in “nothing” …and then everything coming from “that”

so think about this:

the symmetry of the universe.

the balance of nature

the rhythm of the seasons

the regularity of the electrons around atoms

water

air

what it feels like to BREATHE that air

and drink that water…

the fact that you can have feelings about breathing.

the ability to think…

the ability to say that something or someone is beautiful…

and then

that a smell can trigger a memory of a time with someone you love.

that a sound through a phone is simply vibration of particles in the air, and that sound is a voice on the other side of the world, and the first vibration of that sound, and the recognition of your daughters voice can cause your heart to stir… and whatever might be described as a soul, swells up inside you and you smile and your heart beats faster ….because of a vibration of atoms?

that a touch on the lips by another being could stir every fibre in your being

that the incredible pain of childbirth can be forgotten completely when a mothers eyes get the first glimpse of her baby boy

that we could actually feel so deeply the pain of the death and loss of someone we care so much about

that we can actually care and love…and there is no way to adequately explain what caring and loving really are

that we absorb light through cones and rods to the point that the hues and colors and vibrations of those light waves allow us to label unexplainable art as sunrise and stars and ocean waves and mountain ranges…

and so many illustrations of beautiful art can move us to tears

that the vibration of strings and wind through instruments cause music to happen and that very music causes us to sing, and dance and love and celebrate and weep…

how can any of this be explained by only matter and heat and movement….a cosmic happenstance of sorts?

we create love and art and music and poetry and beauty… or should i say we re create it… and with all of the reason we can muster, the only way that any of that is possible is if it were created for those purposes …for our pleasure …for our ability to feel so we can know that beyond our grasp of knowledge there is something more mysterious… way beyond knowledge…

something that makes us who we are and how we are

we cannot see it we cannot explain it but IT IS there. we KNOW it….in the middle of all the doubts we just know

because we have touched something that contains no matter…

with a part of our soul that has no substance.

we dance to a tune that no man has written

we see art that cannot be painted or drawn

we love an individual who is not defined by anything in our 4 dimensions

we know what we cannot know because we are what we cannot define.

so how could we even say what love is if it may come from a creator who exists outside of all we can comprehend?

love and everything about it seems to be why most of us have any desire to even exist…

and so IT MUST exist…and if so where would it come from except from a thinking creator who…

cannot be defined, understood, described, or really even imagined…

so whoever jesus was ..his words seem to echo all of what we have just said…

trust in what you do not understand ….live in that trust…take the little pieces that you can comprehend and connect with those pieces.

then look around…

the people who live as though all of this were true seem to experience life in a more satisfying way than those who do not.

and for some reason everyone’s goal (other than to be loved) is to be satisfied.

and the mere thought that that is what everyone desires signifies that there must be a desire-maker and therefore maybe…

a desire-fulfiller.

One last thought…

all of the universe has movement…without movement there is no time and no space…

Since the beginning, our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, our cluster, all galaxies, are not only spinning…they are all moving.

Towards what?

Away from what?

In space if there were nothing visible around you, you could be moving at a million miles an hour and not even know you were moving. So everything moves, but movement only exists if it is relative to something else. If we know our solar systems and galaxies and clusters all move because we see them in relationship to other galaxies, we deduce that the whole universe is moving. So again, the question is posed…what are we moving towards or away from….???

Well… it must be something outside of our universe…because our word universe incorporates everything we can possibly imagine…which brings us back to the fact that something we cannot imagine or begin to comprehend exists… beyond even what our understanding of the word “exists” means.

Maybe it is the same incomprehensible “what if” that created the unfathomable, non-definable experiences of love and wonder and passion.