Significant Changes

Much has happened since I've last been here. I've moved to Colorado Springs, for one. It's beautiful here; I can see Pike's Peak from my house, all majestic and oft capped by clouds.

I've also finished writing a book and gotten it published on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/More-Confident-You-Discovering-ebook/dp/B007124L96/ref=pd_rhf_cr_p_t_2 It's called A More Confident You: Discovering Your True Value (Note: I have recently changed the title to Your True Value: Unlocking the Gospel's Extraordinary Secret), and writing it changed my life. I'm not going to turn this blog into a self-promotion bonanza, but if you're a guest who stumbled across this, I strongly encourage you to look into it. It's only $3 and it talks about getting a self-confidence that's set in stone, one you don't feel like you have to prove constantly through that next promotion, relationship, or nice TV.

Ok, now that the book plug is done, what I may do is turn this blog into a series of insights I learned from it. First up: the reason atheism and other religions won't give you lasting self-confidence.

Consider an atheist's worldview for a moment. It's really depressing. It states, in essence, that we are the byproduct of billions of years of random chance (or a long line of impossibly complex mathematical equations, which is really the same thing if we can't possibly understand them). We're born, we live, we die, and that's it. No meaning. No future. Life is what we make it and it's all we have. That last sentence may sound good, but what then does it matter if someone is deprived of that life early? What does it matter if it's wasted or wonderful? At the end, all of it was for nothing because life is meaningless. Even helping others is meaningless because they, too, will die, along with all their emotions and memories and talents and fears. We may all have the same inherent value in such a worldview, but that value is 0. Any value we have is earned, which means we keep having to earn it.

With other religions, they all say the same thing: do this, do this, and don't do that and, if you're lucky, our god(s) will smile on you and give you what you want. You never really know where you stand with such a god because we all know someone whose moral standards we disagree with, yet whose life seems better than our own, so we know it's not a hard and fast rule that anyone with a good life must be serving the right god. Besides, if that were the case, we'd all serve that god, but none of us would love him or her. It'd all be about what we could get out of it, which is sadly where a number of Christians are in their faith. Christianity is the only one that says, "There's nothing you can do to earn heaven. It's about what I (Jesus) did, not about what you do. Believe in Me, and love Me. That's it." There may be other commandments, such as love your neighbor as yourself, but those aren't requirements for getting into heaven; they're things we should do because we love God...and because we understand that God loves us.

The real difference is that with God, you can't earn anything. It's given to you. With other gods, your friends, coworkers, bosses, and significant other, love is earned. Even with family, though there may be some bond that is always there, love is earned. It can be stronger or weaker depending on how you've made each other feel. But God's love for you, the value He sees in you, is always the same. He's not going to leave you because you got fat, or because you missed a deadline at work, or because you messed up and went too far with your boyfriend or girlfriend. He loves you the same no matter what you do. Because His love is steadfast, your value is steadfast.

Next time, we'll look at where our struggles with self-confidence began.