Eye of God?

I received this chain email today. (a heads up for those who don't yet know - I HATE and despise email chain letters! Please don't send me this kind of crap. The commentary on this one is a rare event only because it for once inspired a blog entry ;)).

So anyway... when I saw this picture my instinctive Crapola Meter swung into hyper-alert with all dials whizzing into the Red Alert zone almost instantly! ;)

Which of course... made me do what I always do when I receive a "new" chain email that may not have any basis in fact... I head over to BreakTheChain.org to get the background on it.

Well the photo is indeed "real" but only in so far as yes... that Nebula is out there in the galaxy and yes... we CAN sort of see that it looks like an "eye" from our perspective. But... NASA have no records of calling it "The Eye of God" and the picture IS actually a construct of many parts anyway so it's a representation of what it might look like not what it actually is. What we see and what it actually is could be two entirely different things.

So it is with God. What WE assume and think we know about Him is quite different to what and who He actually is. We assume too much of the wrong stuff and too little of the right stuff. Humanity is clouded by its own desire to be god to be able to see God clearly.

Anyway... why do we need to see the Eye of God anyway? What is it about us that requires us to have this kind of information? Why do we even need to be so assured that God is watching us in such a concrete and physically identifiable way as suggested by the above image?

Faith is by its very nature a subterranean thing deep inside the psyche/heart/soul/being. Faith by itself can never be proven either way, true or false. The test of Faith is that there is hope beyond reasonable assumption and evidential experience that that hope is being made reality in the here and now.

Faith requires that we experience God for ourselves, not through objective means - although reasonable intelligence demands a fair bit of objective truth in order to move across the threshold into the stuff beyond objectivity - but that we feel and know the reality of God expressing Himself within us.

That's where Faith becomes a life-changing thing and not a mere superstition. Real Faith doesn't NEED to see physical evidence of God because the evidence of God is already made real though personal experience of Him.

And real experience of God is very deeply personal indeed! It's an incredible journey of discovery and relationship based not on traditional external expressions of faith - unfortunately expected by far too many - but on inter-personal dialogue and simply KNOWING Him as a real person.

Thing is... that experience of God is less than likely to come via external means. No pictures of "god" in the sky will ever MAKE someone believe in God - you have to already believe in God to "see" Him in these pictures! You construct God from out of the physical world through your own Eye of Faith which is highly personal and subjective and either true or false - who knows? Not for me to judge really!

God is Relationship - the most intimate kind.

You can find God in this picture though. Not His eye or a picture of Him - but you do see his handiwork in the amazing wonder and simple complexities of the universe and for me, my Faith says that makes Him real enough :)