No Barriers, Placerville (Christian Study Blog)

Part of being Christian is that one is to work in this world to better it. Feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, healing the sick, casting out demons. Doing God's will on Earth as it is in Heaven. The pit trap of New-Age spiritual paths is that they draw the person, the Mage, into oneself disengaging from the world outside. The world outside is scary, ugly, disenchanted, and unimaginative. This is not due because early Christianity drove out the enchantment of creation from the Pagans that enchant it. It is because we have evolved enough culturally and technologically that we can witness all the ugly as never before. Yes partly because the industrial revolution gave us the ability to communicate ever more rapidly and provided increasingly complex and effective tools of destruction. But nothing about human behavior has changed in the past several millennia. At least not in the respect that we do each other ill. The natural world holds less mystery than it used to, our perspective ...

I wanted to post this little introduction, particularly pertaining to my experience with faith. Currently in my early forties I never really went to church outside a period of about a year when I was about 5 or 6 years old until around 2005. For the first few years my wife and I would only go on the Sundays that our daughter's sang in the Children's Choir, but after hearing some brilliant sermons that sounded a bit different that the stuff we had heard from other churches we began attending more regularly. We were all baptized in 2009 into the United Methodist Church. Since then we have been involved at various levels of activities and groups, growing our faith and discipleship. The first test of faith that I really noted was getting my current job. May I never forget it. With nearly ten years at my current company our team faced re-deployment. When a corporation issues a re-deployment you are not laid off, yet. They give you a couple months (paid) to look for positions els...