Free What We Talk About When We Talk About God by Rob Bell Page A

like a mini United Nations. There is something tangibly divine about what they’re doing.
    We do know things—
    we know them with every fiber in our being—
    they’re revealed to us,
    they seize us and they won’t let us go.
    They haunt us,
    they capture us,
    they plant themselves deep in our hearts and
    they don’t leave.
    So when we talk about God,
    we’re talking about our brushes with spirit,
    our awareness of the reverence humming within us,
    our sense of the nearness and the farness,
    that which we know
    and that which is unknown,
    that which we can talk about
    and that which eludes the grasp of our words,
    that which is crystal-clear
    and that which is more mysterious than ever.
    And sometimes language helps,
    and sometimes language fails.
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    Several points, then, about how we talk about God.
    First, it’s important for us to acknowledge that when we talk about God, we often find ourselves in the middle of one paradox after another.
    Near and far,
    known and unknown,
    words and silence,
    answers and questions,
    that which is deeply mysterious and ambiguous and
    that which is right in front of us as plain as day.
    I point this out because the dominant consciousness of our world continues to perceive and process reality in mostly either/or categories—we want to know whose side you are on, which one is the answer, how the tension is going to be resolved, how the paradox will be eliminated.
    But some truths don’t fit in a twenty-second sound bite on television.
    Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren’t opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it’s alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren’t opposites; they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.
    Back to paradox, and an observation about our world today: fundamentalism shouldn’t surprise us. When a leader comes along who eliminates the tension and dodges the paradox and neatly and precisely explains who the enemies are and gives black-and-white answers to questions, leaving little room for the very real mystery of the divine, it should not surprise us when that person gains a large audience.
    Especially if that person is really, really confident.
    Certainty is easier, faster, awesome for fundraising, and it often generates large amounts of energy because who doesn’t want to be right?
    Which leads us back to our original insight that how you believe and what you believe are two different things. Two people can believe the same thing but hold that belief in very different ways.
    You can believe something with so much conviction that you’d die for that belief,
    and yet in the exact same moment
    you can also say, “I could be wrong . . .”
    This is because conviction and humility, like faith and doubt, are not opposites; they’re dance partners. It’s possible to hold your faith with open hands, living with great conviction and yet at the same time humbly admitting that your knowledge and perspective will always be limited.
    Do you believe the exact same things you did in the exact same way you did five years ago?
    Probably not.
    You’ve grown,
    evolved,
    changed,
    had new experiences,
    studied,
    listened,
    observed,
    suffered,
    reflected,
    and reexamined.
    That’s how faith is.
    We learn as we go.
    Years ago I was struggling—really, really struggling to make sense of a number of things in my life, in a lot of pain. I started going to a counselor who gradually helped me understand why I was feeling how I was feeling and how I got there and what a better future might look like. It was, as I look back on that period now, truly life-changing. My counselor, who has become like family to me, wasn’t ever pushy or judgmental or condemning, and he never tried to get me to believe