And this after decades of walking with Him, serving Him, seeing Him work wonders in my life and the lives of others.

When I reached that border mentally, St. Peter’s words flooded my brain….

“Lord, to whom shall I go? You have the words of eternal life!”

I walked mentally back to Jesus and here I stay, with grace, mercy, forgiveness, and boundless love. No other (Buddah, Mohammed, Krishna, Mithra, Marx, etc. …) can offer what Jesus offers me, offers us.

iMonk, like you said. It all comes down to Jesus, and I’m grateful He, God the Son, lived in human flesh and fully understands our weaknesses.

Often I pray, “Lord, I believe! Help, Thou, my unbelief.”

And, all of the above of what I wrote is why I love Jesus even more today than that first day I believed.

iMonk, this post of yours is yet another example of why we all love to come to your site.

Thank you!

One of the most difficult things I have in my Christian life is the lack of permission from fellow Christians and non believers to admit that I doubt. I am learning, though, that doubt is most likely God’s greatest “thorn in the flesh” to keep us humble and to remind us that it is His strength that is perfect and not ours.

Faith and doubt go hand in hand and truly make a Christian an honest person.

You too Michael.

I share this because whenever I am completely filled with doubt I go back to my room those many years ago. I had received a Gospel of John and sat reading it. No one had told me what I would feel or experience—-I simply had received a “booklet” and was reading it. That day I completely changed—that evening I experience a feeling of being completely clean—innocent, forgiven. No one had told me I would feel this—-or whipped me up into some emotional experience—-yet it HAD HAPPENED and I felt the presence of God so close that I cried in joy and overwhelming thankfulness.

In my case I feel this memory was “implanted” in me by God in some way. Sure—I need to remind myself of that day—-but every time I do I realize IT HAD TO BE REAL. There was no way I could have imagined all of it, or made myself feel it through some emotional frenzy I created. NO–it was very real—and it serves as a reminder that no matter how many doubts I have NOW—-I can always go back to that day and relive it in my mind and KNOW I was TRULY born-again—I was TRULY visited by God that day. That is how I deal with doubt—-and have for years. I simply cannot deny that what happened to me was REAL. I am wondering if any others have the similar experience.

By the way, I am not saying that doubts are not real for everyone. I experience them all the time. I am just explaining how I always eventually wind up dealing with them—-in a quiet place—re-affirming a faith i know to be very real.

As to Jesus walking on water, Peter walks on water as well and he had the same kind of body that we do. Something else would be going on there.

Of course, my thoughts are not ironclad certainties here. The probability that the stories that we received in the Gospels were transformed in various ways during transmission/composition complicates things beyond hope of certainty.

The only analog to the Jewish people i can think of are the Gypsies. It would be miraculous if all the Gypsies in the world decided to move back to their homeland in India and declare a Gypsy state.

Guess God’s been favoring some other ethnic group above them, huh?

I think that the survival of the Jewish people is similar. There are no Hittites, Amalekites, Minoans, or Etruscans any more. I think it is kind of miraculous that the Jewish people survived to the present day despite the efforts of the Romans, Nazis, and the Inquisition to exterminate them. The bible said that that they’d be exiled, peresecuted, and then gathered back to Israel and all of that came true!! No one can deny this, one can only avoid chalking this up to God’s hand by atrributing it to coincidence.