Today is Pi day.

Remember? 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 etc etc etc?

That mathematical constant that defied your TI calculator's poor attempt to finally, once and for all, say what Pi was?

All these years since then, somehow you have managed to live a fairly normal life without ever resolving that question sufficiently. So I think that there's hope for you when I tell you that you can believe in Jesus.

Huh?

Yes. You can believe in Jesus.

I'm writing today to those among you who are struggling with the questions still unanswered about Jesus, the Bible, and God. If that's not you, then please forward this along to your sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, that guy in the next cubicle, your prof in psych class, that neighbor who'll change the subject - you know plenty of them.

There just seem to be a lot of people who will not give Jesus a chance because of some misguided idea that in order to do so, every question they have about Him, God, the Bible, the Church etc, has to be 100%, completely, nailed down. (Of course, those of us who follow Jesus consider something being 'nailed down' as certain, but I digress).

Jesus asked, as near as I can figure, 287 questions of the people around Him while he was here during His earthly ministry. Some people were baffled. Some people intrigued. And some gave incomplete answers at first, but were able to understand the answer later.

Like this man. His name was John, and he spent most of his adult life it seems trying to understand who Jesus was and how it was possible for God to love him. He kept referring to himself, this John, when he wrote everything out for us to read - in the third person, like some sort of Monty Python mode "we are not amused". Except he wasn't kidding. "the disciple that Jesus loved" is the way he'd describe himself.

So he got to the end of his life here, this John. The last few years. He was trying to make sense of it all. This is what he wrote.

1 From the very first day, we were there, taking it all in— we heard it with our own ears, saw it with our own eyes, verified it with our own hands. The Word of Life appeared right before our eyes; we saw it happen! And now we're telling you in most sober prose that what we witnessed was, incredibly, this: The infinite Life of God himself took shape before us. 3 We saw it, we heard it, and now we're telling you so you can experience it along with us, this experience of communion with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. 4 Our motive for writing is simply this: We want you to enjoy this, too. Your joy will double our joy!

1 John 1:1-4 (MSG)

Look very carefully at that again. Do you see any explanation of why what he saw happen... happened? Do you detect any attempt to explain the intricacies of God? No.

Just an attempt to invite others to live the questions with him and experience the same joy.

I'm not saying that we can't learn the deeper truths about God, or that we shouldn't.

What I am saying is that we can live, laugh, cry and experience joy even though some parts of our understanding of God and His work through Jesus remain unresolved to us. Kind of like how we have lived with Pi all these years.

Come. Follow Jesus. Enjoy the journey. Live the questions until the Truth makes Himself known to you.

Grace and peace,

David

I Think I Heard Jesus Last Night


26 Give thanks to the God of heaven. His faithful love endures forever.

Psalms 136:26 (NLT)
We've been meeting during the weeks leading up to Easter in a special time of worship on Sunday nights. The object is to grow closer to God and each other as we explore just what Easter cost God and just what it means for us. So I've planned each service with the aim to do as much as we can together. No sermon, more sharing.

Each week I've used certain symbols to remind us of what God has done. We had "veils" of paper that we tore as we contemplated what God did through Jesus' death on the cross in tearing the veil in the temple that separated the people from the presence of God. We had bread baking one night in the sanctuary as we celebrated communion. We wore name badges last night that proclaimed us "guilty" that we took off and affixed to the cross to testify that through Christ's death, we were made right with God.

And I've used many different videos - both music and drama, to help us grasp how wide, and how deep the love of God is for us.

My hope is that we have experienced the presence of God together these past few weeks.

But last night, I think I heard Jesus' voice.

I had passed out a sheet of paper which had on it a list of Scriptures that told of God's love for us. I began by reading the first verse, and then each person to my right read the next verse.

Sitting there in the stillness, hearing the voices of these people I've grown to love so much read the words of God's love letter... just took my breath away. Each person read. Some have strong and clear voices, and you could hear the conviction in them. Others spoke softly, but clearly in love. Our friend Allan uncharacteristically stayed to worship with us. He's developmentally disabled, but can read. With the help of his friend Joe Stoy, Allan became a part of our expression of love for God. Then the wavering voices of Robert and Virginia Hughes, aged saints among us were testimonies not just to the lives they have lived, but for Who they have lived them.

It was an experience with the Body of Christ I will never, ever forget.

At the end of the circle was Ian, the youngest among us. The number of verses ended with two repetitions of "His love endures forever." His mother and then his father read those. Ian looked at the paper and at his parents and then spoke "His love endures forever."

Yes it does. And through the voices of God's people, young and old, I think I heard Jesus.