Chapter 5: Shipwreck (Кораблекрушение) 7 страница

You can fall in love with a wide variety of people throughout the course of your life. You can fall in love with people who are good for you and people who

are bad for you. You can fall in love in healthy ways and unhealthy ways. You can fall in love when you’re young and when you’re old. Love is not unique. Love is not special.

But your self-respect is. So is your dignity. So is your ability to trust. There can potentially be many loves throughout your life, but once you lose your self-respect, your dignity or your ability to trust, they are very hard to get back.

Love is a wonderful experience. It’s one of the greatest experiences life has to offer. And it is something everyone should aspire to feel and enjoy. But like any other experience, it can be healthy or unhealthy. Like any other experience, it cannot be allowed to define us, our identities or our life purpose. We cannot sacrifice our identities and self-worth to it. Because the moment we do that, we lose love and we lose ourselves.

Because you need more in life than love. Love is great. Love is necessary. Love is beautiful. But love is not enough.

 https://observer.com/2015/03/love-is-not-enough/

 

Article:

An Encounte  r with God o  n the Moon: Ast  ronaut Jim I  rwin’s Inc  redible Lu  nar Experie  nce

By Clare B  ruce

James (Jim) Irwin, one of the astronauts on the Apollo 15 mission to the Moon in 1971, was a believer who had a spiritual encounter with God while on the lunar surface. It was a moment that would change the course of his life.

According to journalist Mark Ellis, at one point, Irwin was having trouble setting up his equipment for one of the experiments he had to conduct on the Moon. His wife Mary explained, “[The] experiment wouldn’t erect, due to a cotter pin or something of that nature”. Irwin stopped to pray. Until then he had been a relatively nominal, half-hearted Christian – but not half-hearted enough to humble himself and ask God’s help.

After praying, “God I need your help right now”, Irwin reportedly experienced the presence of God’s spirit in a way he’d never felt before.

“The Lord showed him the solution to the problem and the experiment erected before him like a little altar,” his wife said. “He was so overwhelmed at seeing and feeling God’s presence so close… at one point he turned around and looked over his shoulder as if He was standing there.”

In a 1991 article after Irwin’s death, the New York Times reported that he would often tell church groups he “felt the power of God as I’d never felt it before” in that moment.

The Apollo 15 mission transcript (above) also shows that while Irwin was exploring the moon’s landscape with commander Dave Scott, he was reminded of “a favorite Biblical passage from Psalms.”

Speaking by radio to Mission Control in Houston, he quoted the verse: “I look unto the hills, from whence cometh my help” – before adding in good humour, “But, of course, we get quite a bit [of help] from Houston, too”.

God’s Call to a Life of Mission

Mark Ellis writes that Irwin was so impacted by his God-encounter, that after returning home he left his flying career behind to serve the Lord. His wife Mary says he made the decision while riding in a ticker tape parade through New York, and seeing the thousands of people lining the streets.

“God dropped it in his heart that he had a responsibility to mankind to share Jesus with everyone after that,” she said.

He resigned from NASA within the year, and established the “High Flight Foundation”, a missions organisation that billed itself as “goodwill ambassadors for the Prince of Peace.”

Irwin is quoted as saying, “God decided that He would send His Son Jesus Christ to the blue planet, and it’s through faith in Jesus Christ that we can relate to God… As I travel around, I tell people the answer is Jesus Christ; that Jesus walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon.”

Irwin spent 20 years travelling the world preaching the gospel, and also presenting small flags he’d taken to the moon, to the leaders of nations – as a means of opening the door to share Christ.

Irwin wrote his story in the book, To Rule the Night: The Discovery Voyage of Astronaut Jim Irwin.

Jim Irwin – prototype of Spike Tiggler

https://rhema999.com.au/an-encounter-with-god-on-the-..

 

 Article:

Heaven: A foo  l's paradise

Why do the m  ajority of B  ritons sti  ll believe i  n life afte  r death?

John Lennon urged us: "Imagine there's no heaven/It's easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us only sky." Today, according to a new book by Lisa Miller, Newsweek's religion correspondent, 81 per cent of Americans and 51 per cent of Brits say they believe in heaven – an increase of 10 per cent since a decade ago. Of those, 71 per cent say it is "an actual place". Indeed, 43 per cent believe their pets – cats, rats, and snakes – are headed into the hereafter with them to be stroked for eternity. So why can't humans get over the Pearly Gates?

In reality, the heaven you think you're headed to – a reunion with your relatives in the light – is a very recent invention. Most of the believers in heaven across history would find it unrecognisable.

Heaven is constantly shifting shape because it is a history of subconscious human longings. Show me your heaven, and I'll show you what's lacking in your life. The desert-dwellers who wrote the Bible and the Koran lived in thirst – so their heavens were forever running with rivers and fountains and springs. African-American slaves believed they were headed for a heaven where "the first would be last, and the last would be first" – so they would be the free men dominating white slaves.

We know precisely when this story of projecting our lack into the sky began: 165BC, patented by the ancient Jews. Until then, heaven – shamayim – was the home of God and his angels. Occasionally God descended from it to give orders and indulge in a little light smiting, but there was a strict no-dead-people door policy. Humans didn't get in, and they didn't expect to. The best you could hope for was for your bones to be buried with your people in a shared tomb and for your story to carry on through your descendants. It was a realistic, humanistic approach to death. You go, but your people live on.

So how did the idea of heaven – as a perfect place where God lives and where you end up if you live right – rupture this reality? The Greeks believed there was an eternal soul that ascended when you die. The Zoroastrians believed you would be judged in the end-time for your actions on earth. The Jews believed in an almighty Yahweh.

But in the run up to heaven's invention, the Jews were engaged in a long civil war over whether to open up to the Greeks and their commerce or to remain sealed away, insular and pure. With no winner in sight, King Antiochus invaded and tried to wipe out the Jewish religion entirely, replacing it with worship of Zeus. The Jews saw all that was most sacred to them shattered: they were ordered to sacrifice swine before a statue of Zeus that now dominated their Temple. The Jews who refused were hacked down in the streets. Many young men fled into the hills of Palestine to stage a guerrilla assault – now remembered as the Hanukkah story. The old Jewish tale about how you continue after you die was itself dying: your bones couldn't be gathered by your ancestors anymore with so many Jews scattered and on the run. So suddenly death took on a new terror.

But while the key components of heaven were in place, It was a land where you and God and the angels sat – but Jesus warned "there is no marriage in heaven". You didn't join your relatives. It was you and God and eternal prayer. It was paradise, but not as we know it.

Even some atheists regard heaven as one of the least-harmful religious ideas. But its primary function for centuries was as a tool of control and intimidation. The Vatican, for example, declared it had a monopoly on St Peter's VIP list – and only those who obeyed their every command and paid them vast sums for Get-Out-of-Hell-Free cards would get them and their children onto it. The afterlife was a means of tyrannising people in this life. This use of heaven as a bludgeon long outlasted the Protestant Reformation. Miller points out that in Puritan New England, heaven was not primarily a comfort but rather "a way to impose discipline in this life."

Worse still, the promise of heaven is used as an incentive for people to commit atrocities. Heaven can be an inducement to horror.

Yet there is an unthinking "respect" automatically accorded to religious ideas that throttles our ability to think clearly about these questions. Miller's book – after being a useful exposition of these ideas – swiftly turns itself into a depressing illustration of this. She describes herself as a "professional sceptic", but she is, in fact, professionally credulous. Instead of trying to tease out what these fantasies of an afterlife reveal about her interviewees, she quizzes everyone about their heaven as if she is planning to write a Lonely Planet guide to the area, demanding more and more intricate details. She only just stops short of demanding to know what the carpeting will be like. But she never asks the most basic questions: where's your evidence? Where are you getting these ideas from? These questions are considered obvious when we are asking about any set of ideas, except when it comes to religion, when they are considered to be a slap in the face.

Of course there's plenty of proof that the idea of heaven can be comforting, or beautiful – but that doesn't make it true. The difference between wishful thinking and fact-seeking is something most six-year-olds can grasp, yet Miller – and, it seems, the heaven-believing majority – refuse it here. Yes, I would like to see my dead friends and relatives again. I also would like there to be world peace, a million dollars in my current account, and for Matt Damon to ask me to marry him. If I took my longing as proof they were going to happen, you'd think I was deranged.

"Rationalist questions are not helpful," announces one of her interviewees – a professor at Harvard, no less. This seems to be Miller's view too. She stresses that to believe in heaven you have to make "a leap of faith" – but in what other field in life do we abandon all need for evidence? Why do it in one so crucial to your whole sense of existence? And if you are going to "leap" beyond proof, why leap to the Christian heaven? Why not convince yourself you are going to live after death in Narnia, or Middle Earth, for which there is as much evidence? She doesn't explain: her arguments dissolve into a feel-good New Age drizzle.

True, Miller does cast a quick eye over the only "evidence" that believers in heaven offer – the testimonies of people who have had near-death experiences. According to the medical journal The Lancet, between 9 per cent and 18 per cent of people who have been near death report entering a tunnel, seeing a bright light, and so on. But in fact there are clear scientific explanations. As the brain shuts down, it is the peripheral vision that goes first, giving the impression of a tunnel. The centre of your vision is what remains, giving the impression of a bright light. Indeed, as Miller concedes: "Virtually all the features of [a near-death experience] – the sense of moving through a tunnel, an 'out of body' feeling, spiritual awe, visual hallucinations, and intense memories – can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a horse tranquilliser frequently used as a party drug." But Miller soon runs scared from the sceptical implications of this, offering the false balance of finding one very odd scientist who says that these experiences could point beyond life – without any proof at all.

But even if you set aside the absence of even the tiniest thread of evidence, there is a great conceptual hole at the heart of heaven. After a while, wouldn't it be excruciatingly dull? When you live in the desert, a spring seems like paradise. But when you have had the spring for a thousand years, won't you be sick of it? Heaven is, in George Orwell's words, an attempt to "produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary". Take away the contrast, and heaven becomes hell.