Why Jesus?

[HKHaugan]

It crossed my mind today that the world around us is full of people scrambling to find identities with which they feel comfortable. The recent election really illustrated this. If you think about it for a minute you'll find that people were so willing to give themselves to someone they believed would fulfill their hope for themselves and society. He seemed to fit a super modeled edition of what they wished they could be, someone formed from hard circumstances and shaped by them. It was not that they found their identity but that they found someone with whom they were willing to identify thus freeing them from the stress of self-discovery. It was not a question of 'who am I?' It was a question of 'who am I for?'. He accomplished what I wish I could have. He is already there. He can do it for me. If I can live in a world where he leads then I can live with my self and others in confidence. The bottom line is this, if I can find someone I can really trust and give my time and energy for---then he is my identity. Unfortunately people look to politicians, movie 'idols', clergy, intellectuals and scientists to be those kind of figures. None of them ever really fit the bill. So to whom can we turn to handle the issues of our deepest needs for identity, security, wisdom, purpose,meaning and significance?

Mankind's problem has historically been the same. It looks horizontally instead of vertically, at what is visible instead of invisible, at changing society instead of the heart, relying only on what can be deduced from within instead of what has been revealed from without and depending on socio-political structures as the solution to social ills.

In Saroyan's one-act Hello Out There, the main character is in a jail cell trying to figure out how he got there. He has a dialogue with the jail's cleaning lady that only depicts the deeper questions of who we are, where we are going and how we get there and the broken world around us is a warden meaning to keep us all in one kind of jail or other. The human plight is one not of what we can see but what we can't see. Every one is looking for that one person, that one example of heart perfection, who can be our heart guide. In the next few columns we will approach why Jesus gives us reason to consider Him as that One, that Person, that Guide who can reach the heart like nothing or no one else can.

Stay tuned. ><>Whitey

[Martha H. McGinnis]

Whitey this is a picture of where we are to day..My first thoughts were that it is like we are living in a whirlwind and things are happening so fast and we know that the only hope we have is in Jesus..when I told Sandra of your new study Why Jesus... she said Why not Jesus...As the deciples said Where would we go ? Lord....Thank you Lord for the Holy Spirit that puts your love and faith in our hearts. Martha M