Mike's musings

Reactions to comments

My thanks to Simon and Sally for their comments on my previous two posts. I'm not sure that I was sufficiently clear in the first of them that one of things that I was trying to address was the tendency that we have as Christians to criticise and try to lead people away from things. This is particularly the case, I suspect, with our children.

On the more recent post, about "true love", Simon made the excellent point that God-given relationships can be abused as well. He added:

In human relationships duties to god and society can be put to one side in the intensity of our emotions. Unless God is allowed fully into the relationship as a participant - not just as a founder - it is not 'true love'

I like this thought. There's a responsibility on us to nurture what God has given us, and to be active in his gifts. But I'd also said that it's not necessary even to have a knowledge of God in order to do this - or even to accept his gifts in the first place. We, as Christians (or Jews, or Muslims, or ...) can acknowledge God's gift in the relationships that non-believers have, even if they won't. It's realities like this that make it difficult for me to understand why some people don't see agency of the Holy Spirit in non-believers, and therefore that the God can work through society, even where some - or the majority - of its members aren't Christian.