23 | May | 2013 | Life and Photos by Andy

I’m a Christian. I believe in God the way the protestant Christian church describes him to me. I believe He loves me, wants the best life on this earth for me and despite knowing better than me, would never take away my power of choice no matter how much I might hurt myself or others with those choices.

That being said, I have read Love Wins and although I don’t believe in every part of the books presumptions, I believe what I think is the strongest message in the book, that God cannot be limited. He cannot be contained by any description or theology. He is bigger than anything we can imagine and He can present Himself to those who may never know His name (do we even really know His name?) or His form or His church. I believe that there will be atheists in Heaven. I do absolutely mean those who identify themselves as atheists in North America where there is infinite information available via the internet and were we have unlimited access to churches and complete freedom to believe how we want. There are people, in this country, world… whatever, who have been presented with the idea of the Christian Jesus Christ in such a distorted way at an impressionable time in their life that they are not able to accept that idea of Him that way. I believe that only God Himself knows who will be happy in Heaven, which is an idea so far from what we know, that we cannot even fathom it. He alone can determine who will be in eternal bliss or in eternal hell in the Heavenly setting and we have no idea who He is working on and who He has already touched. Is it hard to understand that? Is it hard as a Christian to accept that we don’t have a guest list in hand? Yes. We think we have at least some of the answers and that we know who will be there with us but we really don’t. We don’t even know for sure who WON’T be there and that is an even harder concept to accept. It is easy to think we know who might be there but is it easy to accept that we don’t know for sure who won’t? Can we accept that? Can we, as Christians, be ok with what God decides at the end? I hope so because He is God! and we are not.