Complexity of the Universe

It is interesting in a way that as science progresses, it finds that our universe keeps getting more and more complex.  This week, a new subatomic particle was confirmed.  Though I do not pretend to understand everything involved (I have long since been out of that game), I am impressed at the things we are able to discover.  The thing that really gets me is that as we discover the universe to be more complex than we imagined, we can still look at the world and say that it all happened by chance.  There are so many presuppositions that must be stacked on top of each other to make for a completely natural universe that it is astounding that would be our conclusion.  And yet it is.  Quarks, neutrons, protons, etc. are so complex that the vast majority of people can't understand them without years of study.  Yet it is the assumption of many people that these all came together through random/lucky processes to form matter and eventually life.  Bravo, that is an incredible act of faith indeed!

Love is/not

There are a lot of notions going around about what love is or isn’t, what love does or does not do.  A very common statement in our culture is, “love accepts someone the way they are.”  With all deference to my postmodern contemporaries, this simply is not true.  Allow me to modify the statement so I may prove my point.  “Love loves someone as they are.”  Semantics?  No, it is much deeper than that.  The reality of love is that it never allows someone to stay the way they are.  Or at least, it never hopes to leave them as they are.  It does not accept their present situation/actions/thoughts/feelings, without beckoning them to change.  True love helps someone to become the best version of who they can be.  So if someone is living in sin, love calls them out of it.  Does this sound judgmental? Hateful?  At first glance perhaps it does.  After all, who are we to tell someone they are living in sin?  Paul says it very clearly.  We are Christ’s ambassadors.  In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting the world’s sins against them (2 Corinthians 5).  And that’s as much the point as anything.  God isn’t counting our sins against us.  But he is beckoning us to come be reconciled to him and be healed. 

What kind of parent would let their child grow up to be a monster because they accept them the way they are?  What kind of a master would let their dog jump, bite, bark and terrorize people because that’s the way they are?  What kind of spouse would watch their husband or wife spiral down into depression while they just accept them the way they are?

Love that asks nothing of the other person is merely affection.  Affection idealizes the other person.  It fails to see them as they are, which is a broken, hurt, sinful, wonderful person that needs help (as we all do) to become the person God created us to be.