Hey, Joe.

"...I don't have to listen to crackpot theologies, and unsettling religious diatribes from them..."

Ouch, I'm like the Joe Wilson of evangelical Christianity.

I see, I mean, you know, what I had meant was...

Jesus loves. He loves, and He saves. And we know it. We search for it. We spend our lives assigning meaning--we try to find work that we love, friends who understand us, and partners who help us to grow. We write poems, and compose songs, and paint paintings, all in search of some central truth, something within us that might make it all make sense. Being made in His image, we search for ourselves, and in so doing, we find Him.

And so. To turn God into a vending machine is unsettling. To pretend that our whims are His desire is disturbing. I once prayed that God would give me a "radical faith." At the time, I wasn't sure what that meant; in retrospect, I think He answered. The implication of praising God for good weather, and work, and wellness is that God chooses to suspend the "natural" workings of the world in order to better suit the world to our wishes. In reality, I think that Jesus wishes that we would do better work in His world.

That is, even assuming the constancy of sin's consequences (that people will be dishonest, and mean-spirited, and cruel, and that regardless of our own contribution to this milieu, we will have to deal with the fall-out), Jesus expects us to seek Him. And in seeking Him, to eschew many of the pleasantries of the secular systems of economics, and entertainment, in order to put His whims to work.

Thus, seeking under this assumption means something very different. More on that later. Needless to say, I need to go a little easier on the Christians. Rome wasn't built in a day.