fake your death

My brother Russ sent this to me today, I think this paradigm could change the world.

"God knows, I could be wrong.

It strikes me as odd that we, each of us, can be mistaken about the weather, about which direction to turn to get to a spot across town, about how we play the stock market, about any number of things, but we can be dead certain about religion and about God.

Perhaps, as most evidence suggests, Jesus was not born on what we now know as Christmas day. Perhaps Jesus wouldn’t make heads or tails out of evangelical healers in two thousand dollar suits while Austrian-crystal chandeliers hang within the camera shot. Maybe God’s love includes gays and lesbians, the Buddhist down the street or the atheist over in the next cubicle. It’s possible what you believe is not as important as how you express that belief, how you buy food for the homeless or comfort a stranger who is flustered at the store because she has just come from the hospital where her father is dying or remember that person who just can’t stand you with love during a prayer.

Maybe God is not found in certainty, which serves to limit God to our own comfortable conceptions, but, rather, in uncertainty and a healthy agnosticism in places, letting God be God instead of a judge and jury schooled in our own prejudices and preoccupations and self-centeredness. Perhaps “God knows, I could be wrong” is an admission of faith, not of defeat. We may be mistaken — the arrival of God will not come in the form espoused by novels about the end times or in the image of a holy city being lowered down from the clouds on pulleys like it was some kind of cheap scenery change. The arrival of God or the second coming of Jesus may very well have taken place already and, in fact, continues to take place over and over again in the people and in opportunities around us, if only we had the eyes to see and the openness of the heart to feel.

God knows, I could be wrong, and in that, I think, I am necessarily right."