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I'm reading this book. It's pretty good. I'm always finding some book to read, as if someone else's revelation of God and the human race will become mine and the process that person had to go through to receive this concept will be spared for me because I just dipped in on their revelation. Well I must say, sometimes that works. I shouldn't have to experience everything for myself, sometimes I should just take a clue and learn from the disasters of others. The author is a best-seller and all that, and he is a Christian. In fact he's a "Christian author," (because as we all know unless you're an author that writes books about Jesus you aren't a "Christian author," but just another author who is no different than a non-believer).
Anyway, he writes with such a transparency that it makes me uncomfortable. He writes about his feelings and relationships and stuff with such honesty and openness, it's incredible. How secure does one have to be to give his personal life such an audience?
Anyway, he talks about something that's quite interesting to me: human nature. I study Psychology. Psychology is a funny thing. The "big heads" of the field take principles of human nature, subtract God, and name these principles as theories after themselves, as if God was not the creator of man and already had these answers and more that we could never fathom. The author never studied Psychology I don't think, but his views are quite amazing to me.
He talks a lot about the fall of man; before and after. He depicts the paradise before the fall not in terms of scenery, but in terms of the original mindset of man. These are his views:
Man (and woman) were created to receive affirmation from God. We were created to depend on God for everything that we need. This included emotional, mental, and spiritual needs, as well as the physical. We were created to love God receive love from Him, and interact with Him as if we were best friends, He has father and you and me as child. He created a need in us for Him. We were made to need His words of love and His touch. Then we fell. We separated from Him. We created a distance between Him and us, and no longer were we receiving those words of love and touches like we used to. Think about it. Before the fall, man walked with God. I mean really walked with God. Now? Well we occasionally visit Him. We do walk with Him, whenever we go through this long drawn out struggle of killing our flesh and blocking out the world so we may finally hear and see Him, but we are still separated. Even though we chose to separate ourselves from God, He has not granted the favor of changing our make-up, our internal wiring. We still need these words of love and we still need touch. So now that we are distanced from our Creator, where do these words and touches come from? I guess we just look for them in our current state, in our current environment.
Is this why too many people settle for less than they are worth? Is this why young women are taken advantage of by predators that seek to destroy what was once beautiful? Is this why we feel unacceptable when we don't receive this affirmation that we were created to need?
The author writes this:
And then I started thinking about my own life, how I need people to love me and like me and how, if they don't, I feel miserable and sad and how I am tempted to believe what they are saying about me is true. It is as though the voice of God we used to have has been taken up by less credible voices. And when I think about this I know that Genesis 3 is true; I know without a doubt I am a person who is wired so that something outside of myself tells me who I am. I am not trying to say I have some kind of terrible dysfunction or anything, it's just that other people's opinions, after the Fall, have become very important, and if everybody says that Saab cars are cool, then I want a Saab car, and if people say that a certain kind of music is cool, then I am more likely to listen to that kind of music (Miller, 95).
"...if the relations between God and man are disturbed, then we feel the desire to be loved and respected by other people instead of God, and if we don't get that love and respect we feel very sad or angry because we know that our glory is at stake," (Miller, 108).
Yes ladies and gents, our glory is at stake. But lets be real about this, haven't we already lost our glory? Didn't we exchange our glory for the knowledge that the apple gave us? So when we realized we were no better than apes unless we wore threads of costly clothing, we traded our glory as the price.
We search for all this knowledge. We go to school for years. We take out loans for thousands of dollars and spend our entire lives trying to pay it back, and for what? For knowledge? For that thing that was responsible for our fall? We are still searching for that. Still eating the forbidden apple. Still loaning our souls out for just a bit of knowledge that might place us ahead of where we are. I almost brave enough to stand up and say knowledge is setting us back. It's removing us, again, from our place with God.
So are we now doomed to search the earth for comforts that we need, or will any of us ever become secure enough and close enough to God so that we don't have to search the earth? We can get all that we need from the Creator who designed us to need in the first place.
So stepping back into reality, I'll continue to pay too much money for this all important knowledge that will one day place me in a such a status that I will be loved and respected, and will receive exactly what I've been looking for. So why is it when people get to that place, they aren't fulfilled? Did I miss something? Maybe we are not designed to receive love from just anyone. Maybe we are specifically designed to receive a certain love from a certain Creator. Well that's just great...cuz now I got loans out the trap, and when I get to that place of "status," I'll realize..."dang...all of this crap was just not worth it." 
(By the way...this isn't a pic of the book I'm currently reading, but I plan to get to this one soon.)
