Faith

Why personalising Christianity could threaten your salvation.

"Suppose I go to the Israelites…and they ask me, ‘What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them? God said to Moses, 'I AM who I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you'" (Exodus 3:13-14).

You really don't realize what your thoughts about God are until you have nothing left but the conviction expressed in the book of the prophet Jeremiah: My Father, my friend from my youth (Jeremiah 3:4).

"The fire and wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" (Genesis 22:7).

No one has ever seen God, but the One who knew Him before He was born on this earth taught us all to address Him in prayer.

For me, 2022 was the year of waiting—a word that managed to define our lives, thoughts and actions to an unexpected degree.

"Hi, Alina! I hope you had a productive weekend" was the opening line of an email that, to me, encapsulated a whole misguided philosophy of life.

In the opening scene of The Good Place, celestial being Michael (Ted Danson) explains that most world religions and philosophies get their respective understandings of the afterlife only about five per cent right.

Aurelius Augustine (354-430) is known for the stirring Christian experience he described in his Confessions and for the seminal theological thought that has shaped theology to this day.

According to attachment theory, originally formulated by John Bowlby and later refined by Mary Ainsworth, adults’ relational patterns are formed according to the model of the close relationship they formed in early childhood with their primary caregiver, who is usually the mother.

Ask any cinematographer what gets them excited, and I guarantee there’s a fair chance they’ll answer with “lenses”. Having spent many years studying film and many more practising it, I can safely say that I now understand why this is—and it’s probably the first response you’d hear from me if you asked me the same question.

I was talking to the man I call Professor and I asked him, "I know you had reservations about getting baptised. Why did you decide to do it anyway? What was the deciding factor?"

"From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us" (Acts 17:26-27).

I was a pagan as a child. Not by choice, but as a consequence of lacking any access to the Word of God. In the 1980s Romania, catechizing an Orthodox child (whose parents were members of the Communist Party) was a highly unlikely event Pavlik Morozov’s myth, the hero-child that denounced his own father, generated caution.

“They pour out arrogant words; all the evildoers are full of boasting” (Psalm 94:4).