an exhortation..as 
a lay Christian examines his faith..

By James Ross Kelly
Of my mind and my experience this Way, my walk with Christ Jesus, for myself is the most excellent Way—as it has been for countless others. This is because it is experiential truth and at the same time the truth behind all things that are true. Men and women who know God have always felt the pain of the worlds rejection and mocking disbelief, as if the foot steps of our blessed savior to bloody Calvary have never ended in an unending historical example of the mythic Sisyphus, torture and disgrace one after another, rolling up the hill, time after time and time again. And though endlessly exposited upon, this most excellent Way, is really attained only by waiting upon Him and in the practice of humility. God comes to us waiting on Him some in an instant and other after decade according to His own divine will. Is this easy? In a word, ‘no’ Is it attainable, in another word ‘yes,’ gloriously ‘yes,’ a thousand times yes attested by millions that have known this Truth to be so.

People who have trouble with the concept of‘ ‘Father’ to be current politically incorrect thinking and offer up an apostasy which calls the thinking of “Our Father,” as a patriarchal oppression may have issues which sadly are borne out in the universal necessity for an archetype of a kind and loving, but austere father in our humanity. The lack of which at this moment is a dynamic; so our cultural and sociological pundits tell us—we are sadly lacking and suffering for want of—in finding out who we are as men and women. It has been said that a person approaches God the same way that they have had to approach their own earthly father. And to our own cultures demise, we have to contend with a train wreck of absent, over working, or uncaring and unloving fathers many of whom have spawned and coldly left a throng of unbelieving children in an era of an unbelieving cultural malaise. Unbelieving, or incapable in believing, in the sense of an all encompassing love of a heavenly Father—because the reality of the absence of an earthly humane father makes a heavenly Father unimaginable!

Or a “can’t believe” media manufactured X-generation sliding on the sex saturated video culture— which rejects whole-sale, the notion handed down to us by our own “fore-fathers,” and because of this inattention and the selfish self-centered denial of children, born often out of passion instead of out of love— to this progeny. There is only one antidote for this poison— the Father Himself. Not the idea and concept of the Father but the real thing.

“..O Lord, to You most excellent and most good, You are Architect and Governor of the universe, thanks would be due You, O our God, even if you had not willed that I should survive my childhood. For I existed even then; I lived and felt and was careful about my own well-being–a trace of that most mysterious unity from where I had my being. I kept watch, by my inner sense, over the integrity of my outer senses, and even in these trifles and also in my thoughts about trifles, I learned to take pleasure in truth. I was averse to being deceived; I had a vigorous memory; I was gifted with the power of speech, was softened by friendship, shunned sorrow, meanness, and ignorance. Is not such an animated creature as this wonderful and praiseworthy? But all these are gifts of my God. I did not give them to myself. Moreover, they are good, and all together these gifts constitute myself. Good, then, is He that made me, and He is my God; and before Him will I rejoice exceedingly for every good gift which, even as a child, I had. But this was my sin! That it was not in God the Creator, but in His creatures–myself and the rest–that I sought for pleasures, honors, and truths. And I fell consequently into sorrows, troubles, and errors. Thanks be to You, my joy, my pride, my confidence, my God–thanks be to You for Your gifts. Please preserve them in me. For by this You will preserve me; and those things which You have given me will be developed and perfected, and I myself will be with You, for from You, comes my being.” Augustine ca 285AD.2

Augustine brought up in Afro-European pagan society tells us like it is from seventeen hundred years ago. What is our culture but obsessed with, “my own well being..” and the post modern new age neo-pagan fashion is precisely, “not in God the Creator, but in His creatures—[ourselves] and the rest–that I [we] sought for pleasures, honors, and truths.”

2 adapted to modern English from public domain translation by Albert C. Outler, Ph.D., Confessions of St. Augustine, Chapter 14