Catholic ping!
A seven year old wants to give me wisdom? Really?
“...whenever God is pushed aside, only emptiness awaits.”
Too true. Took me a good many years to figure that out.
FWIW.
Can God exist without Satan?
I think the answer is yes.
Which begs the question.
Can Satan exist without God?
I believe that answer is NO.
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,
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This is something that I had been wrestling with for a number of years. That, and Free-will.
Resolving the Free-Will question, since there are innumerable ways I can and likely have messed up God’s plan for me, I’m left to sort out my own desires. Left to myself to either spin along with no foundations for belief in anything at all or acknowledge the existence of Satan.
“The Devil’s greatest accomplishment was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
I can’t square the math here.
The fact that “Objective morality” is a solid truth claim. The or our ability to even know this and use logic as we understand it to make sense of the world allowed me to come to Christ as my Lord and Savior in a process of elimination.
FWIW.
The confession that counted most was to the brother against whom she had sinned, and that confession was not made. Check your Bibles.
How true how true. We see that emptiness engulfing the globe like an out of control disease.
I can’t remember the last time I heard the term ‘dime store.’
I did the same thing. Once. I took a 10 cent plastic “Tommy gun” (not full size) from the local Ben Franklin 5&10. After three days I was so ashamed and scared that the police would come for me that I confessed to my mother and begged her to take me back to the store to return it before they could arrest me. It was my one and only venture into crime....
So Killary has quit hanging around in the woods and is hanging out in the Five and Dime store now?
thank you for posting..
Well written and it probes a deep truth with simple language - the best way to express important conclusions. Did anyone notice the author’s last name? I wonder if she is a distant relative.
You always post the greatest threads! We are Catholic too and this story reminded me of one 26 or 27 years ago. Our daughter was 3 or 4. We were in Sears buying something in the paint department. I noticed she was running her hand over the soft paintbrushes. Before we got in the car in the parking lot she held it up proudly. I explained to her that we did not pay for it and you can’t take things that are not yours. We went back into the store and gave it to the clerk and she said she was sorry. A few years later she made her first confession and I remembered she told me she mentioned it to the priest.
By the time they were eleven, some of the kids in my neighborhood could get a whole carton of Winstons in their coat sleeve.
This should had been Catholic Caucused.
I mean you no disrespect, and I say this with all gentleness, but this story contains something that’s an example of why I’m not Catholic. I agree that when God is abandoned, that brings emptiness, and that this is what the Devil wants for people.
But like others have said here, this woman’s view of her act of restitution troubles me. And specifically, this:
“I had confessed regret to my God and made a generous, if anonymous, restitution, and the gaping mouth of emptiness so eager to swallow me had been resolutely snapped shut.”
I just cannot see, in a Christian sense, someone saying that their monetary restitution for a theft was “generous.” I believe that’s self-praise and self-deceptive. That theft was quite a chunk of change in 1965, and who knows if someone else suffered for that theft, for example. Maybe someone else got blamed for that fan’s loss - perhaps the shopkeeper’s child.
I was just looking at how Bruce Jenner settled a lawsuit in the death he caused on a California freeway. It was probably a “generous” settlement, but that doesn’t restore the life lost.
And that’s an important point about sin that God forced us to see through Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden (which God foreknew): sin breaks something irrevocably, and it causes death ultimately. In a spiritual sense, there is no restitution for it that people can perform, which is why for disobeying God’s express command (the essence of ALL sin), Adam and Eve were given a death sentence, and we’ve received that sentence through them as well, in that we have their same nature, to disobey God. The only restitution, eternity-wise, is through God’s sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ.
Not that attempts at some restitution shouldn’t be done, but they can not unbreak what someone’s sin has broken. And it is not just that our sin always injures other people somehow, but that it is always against God.