Earlier this week I was on the treadmill and I reached the end of the audiobook I'd been listening to before I'd gone the requisite amount of time, so I just switched my ipod to music and put it on shuffle play. There's all sorts of music on there: Dave Matthews, Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens, Brent Lewis, Matchbox Twenty, MIA and Imogene Heap (my daughter's influence), Soulja Boy and Skillet (my son's influence), and even Toby Mac, who is an evangelical Christian hiphop artist (not kidding)(actually, I love his music). So at some point a Toby Mac song comes up and one of his backup singers has a spoken bit at the beginning in which he says "I'm trying to reach a place that's real and true and eternal," and I thought to myself, "Aren't we all?" I mean, isn't that it? for all of us who are interested in digging beneath the surface, trying to find some sort of connections or meaning or whatever. The names we attach to it, the ideas we use to explain it, are all window dressing, if you ask me.

Then this afternoon, I had one of those moments, which I don't have very often, where it's just you and reality, staring you in the face, and everything else falls away. It was all in my head, there wasn't any amazing thing happening-- I was chopping up stuff to put in the crock pot to make stew, of all things-- and suddenly it occurred to me, what difference does it make right this minute if I believe in God or not? and I know there are people on either side of the issue who would very passionately argue that it does matter, vitally--how utterly important it is to have the correct theology about God so you can be Right and/or Saved, or how important it is to be rational and not delude ourselves with feel-good ideas of order in the universe, or however else they might want to argue. But I have to say, in that particular moment, I couldn't think of any reason why it would make a difference to believe one way or the other. It was enough to be standing there in my kitchen with the winter sun streaming through the window, feeling real.

no great insights here, just passing along what happened. it's always a work in progress.

AB