AN OBSTACLE COURSE

  
   Life is an obstacle course, and we can either embrace those things that are in our course of life, or we can go around them.  If we accept them, we become them. 
   Two obstacles people face in life include government and religion.
   Government and religion are twins.  Both require a tax in order to receive the benefits. 
   In religion, you can have salvation if you have the money.  You can have forgiveness if you have the money.  And you can have heaven if you have the money.  When you die, there are people who will "pray you to heaven" if you leave enough money behind.  If you do not have the money, what about the title deed to your estate?  Or the retirement pension you have planned to use in your latter years?  Or the life insurance you have planned to provide for your family?  Fret not, however, because religion also accepts credit cards, and you can leave the bill to your heirs!
      For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?  Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?  (Mark 8: 36-37)
   Another obstacle in the course of life is God.
   Is God real and personal, or is God simply an ideology? 
   It is easy to believe that only certain people, such as ministers and priests, have access to God.  That only certain people can reach God through prayer.  That only certain people can grant salvation, forgiveness, and entry to heaven.  In this situation, God is an ideology, for a person's belief can be that others can insure that he will go to heaven rather than being left alone in the dark.
   Furthermore, if God is an ideology, what happens to poor people with no money, no life insurance, no retirement pension, and no title deed to a piece of property?  Does this mean that heaven is only available to those who can afford a ticket of admission?  Or does it mean that God is only interested in money and not people?
   If God is no more than an ideology, then it is easy to believe that God abides in a building, such as a church, a temple, or a shrine, and when we leave the building we leave God behind and in the hands of the ministers and priests.  In this situation, God is no more than an idol, or an image created in the minds of people, and certainly not alive, for ideologies are not living beings:  leaving us to believe--- through our imaginations---that God is either love and kind, or mean and angry.
   Even in the Christian community, Christ can also be an ideology.  As long as Christ remains head knowledge and not an experience of the heart, Christ can easily become an idol of the imagination, which means that Christ, like God, is an ideology, and while we can believe that Christ is alive and living in heaven, we will not believe that Christ is alive and living our hearts.  Therefore, there is no personal relationship with Christ, just as there is no personal relationship with God.  Such an ideology as this is rather cold and distant, isn't it?  And again, we will leave Christ at church with God and in the hands of ministers and priests to care for them when we are absent from the building.
   My life has also been an obstacle course, and the greatest obstacle I have faced has been religion.     
   In it, I was a prisoner of my own mind, to my own way of thinking, to the thinking of others, and to my own imagination.  But when I met Christ in 1995, all things changed, and I came out of religion, leaving my religious mind behind as well as my religious imagination.  Now I am free and unshackled.  Now I can breathe.
   Looking back, I can see and understand how easily we can be trapped in religion, to the thinking of other people, and to the deception of Satan.  Had it not been for Christ, moreover, I would have never known the difference of being a prisoner from being free, and I would have never been able to write about the prison of religion without the freedom Christ gave to me. 
   Without Christ, I would still be there, and this 7th Highway blog would have never been created, and this story today would have never been written.
   Today, think about the road of life you travel and how to remove those obstacles that are in your way from knowing God.  For God is more than an ideology.