SEVENTY THINGS I STILL WONDER ABOUT (First half)

         “For we know in part…I think like a child…we see a poor reflection of reality…” I Corinth. 13

                          From the book, Icons of My Life, A Celebration of 70 years.

1. How evolutionists can still hold to their out-dated theory in the light of continually discovered complexities of life processes and components, e.g. DNA.

2. How Christians can go to war, potentially killing each other, or certainly people who have not yet heard the Gospel.

3. How rich Christians can pursue a standard of living many times that of 2 billion of the world’s destitute people, most who have not yet heard the Gospel either.

4. How abortionists can believe that the fetus is not sacred human life.

5. How Belizeans and perhaps other people can live in poverty without seeming to worry about their next day’s needs, and keep having babies in that situation. “Take no thought” seems to be what some remember most from the Gospels.

6. How anybody could know the love of God and not respond positively to it.

7. Whether all marriages could be saved.

8. Whether hell is really forever for those who have not heard of Christ, and will those people have some other chance after this life.

9. Whether Tim LaHaye of Left Behind fame is right about his scheme that Jesus will come twice, or three times; and whether Jesus will reign on earth while evil men are still around.

10. Whether I will live to be an old man like some of my ancestors, or go younger like the others.

11. If energy and mass in the universe are interchangeable and constant in totality as science projects, then how much energy did God exert to create the universe?

12. What is culture and what is personality when people do things strange to your way of thinking. like when up stairs neighbors chop down your beautiful plants just so they can see sand in the lawn, or a pastor signs a contract to make payments on a car, but never does even when he can.

13. What heaven is really like.

14. How God decides who should be in heaven and who should go to the other place.

15. Whether born again Republicans or any other Christians will ever learn to love the poor as much as themselves as Jesus taught to love your neighbor as your self.

16. Whether Jesus will return in this century or the next, or when?

17. Are there any marriages in which the two partners are completely satisfied with each other?

18. What would my baby sister Rhoda have been like, had she lived?

19. What would life be like for the remaining spouse when one of us dies?

20. What would my life have been like if I had been loved as much as I wanted to be from the day of my birth until this day? And would that have been good for me? Would my ministry have been better, and I a better person?

21. I still wonder why the opposite sex has to be so opposite. Couldn’t God have made sexuality a bit easier without it becoming boring?

22. Is there an end to space, or an end to the universe?

23. How did God become?

24. Was this the first world with people on it?

25. Are there other kinds of living beings not needing an atmosphere, or temperatures between freezing and boiling, perhaps black matter beings or gaseous beings with spirits and consciousness with whom God relates as he is also Spirit?

26. What was God doing before the creation of our universe? Inventing other physical/spiritual systems and relating to them? And did any other system fail morally like man in God’s creations?

27. Did it take any length of time as we measure time, for God to design DNA and other incredibly complex matters of “intelligent design”? Did he have it all figured out when he started?

28. Of course we are glad we are not moral robots, but does God ever have second thoughts about making man with free choice, and not wishing he had slanted man with inclinations a bit more toward his ways?

29. What kind of feelings does God have about the condition of the world, both the present world, or at any other time in history? Does he go by his feelings to decide when to end it all for our planet? Is he now more nearly fed up than any time since the flood? Will he end it when enough good has happened, or when too much bad stuff is going on, or when ever?

30. How can God be so patient with his children, and still not be indifferent to their sin?

Especially the sins of materialism, militarism, and indifference to the poor and sinners?

31. How can God tolerate all the suffering of the innocents in the world: children, widows, orphans, the impoverished, war victims, et.al?