Weathering the Storm?

Why do I feel like a ship on the Ocean, controlled by winds that I cannot see, bound by chains, lashed to a yard-arm, all I want is to be free

From a poem by me.

Ever feel overwhelmed by life?
Recall that moment towards the end of the movie, Deep Impact, when Jenny Lerner and her father await certain death as an enormous tidal wave rushes ashore - there are aspects of life that can almost certainly assail us in that fashion. Fear and uncertainty have certainly encroached in new and unexpected ways as I've grown older, causing me to often be troubled about issues that seemed much more straightforward in youth. As a result, it can often feel that I'm standing on a similar beach before an inescapable wave - the floods of uncertainty and death - held fast in a quicksand of anxiety.

There appears no relief in the natural. When much of contemporary theology encourages me to accommodate a theistic evolutionary approach to our origins, or to re-define my understanding of human sexuality to see the biblical material is entirely cultural and therefore dead in the modern context, what am I to make of the claims, the authority of scripture, on such matters? Are they merely empty sets to our lives, to the issues of our age, or are they in fact living words that we must approach and consider with care?

If the entire goal of the drama we term history is to marry those two key themes of essential truth - Creation and Redemption - then can we really dislocate the Biblical material on such issues from the story of mankind or the condition of ourselves? Do we gain anything by doing so, and equally important, what do we loose?

I ask these questions because it seems to me that unless we are indeed 'held' by the God who reveals Himself in these revelatory works, we are indeed horribly adrift and without any true hope of refuge.

Where does the church go from here?