Gone: the questions

Our special event, Gone, was a lot of fun and is now... yes, you guessed it, gone. During the night, the seniors who hosted asked a bunch of trivia, some of which I didn't know! Then there was the music video (when I find it, I'll embed it here), and personal stories from some of the Koinonia juniors and seniors.

Anyway, Josh also went onstage and asked a couple questions that led to some really neat conversation in the group I was a part of. I met Vanessa (soph from H.2) and David (from a2f Blue), and we talked through these questions:

• Is there was a season of your life that's gone now that you miss? What do you miss about that time?


• If you had to live today over again, what would you do differently?

As usual, there's pictures of the event online. But what prompted this post is the curiosity what you guys talked about in response to the questions! Answer away.

Dr. William Lane Craig and Tough Questions

For those of you who don't know him, Dr. William Lane Craig is one of the voices at the leading edge of defending and articulating the Christian faith in our culture's public square. He speaks at college campuses, debates professors and other thinkers, and trains students, future academics, and Christians around the country.

There's a lot of good information on his website, and a section that answers a lot of neat questions (at a much more scholarly level than yours truly):

• Why does God in the Old Testament seem different than the God of the New Testament?
• Time, Relativity theory, and how it affects our understanding of divine time, and God's relationship (knowledge) of time and future events.
• Do we really have objective moral values, and can we appeal to this when we argue for the existence of God?

Frankly, some of the stuff might be just plain nerdy. He's a scholar, academic, and heavily involved in philosophy of time, historicity of Christ's resurrection, and cosmology. But if this is your thing, or you think it'll help and you're interested, wanted to let you know about him and his website. Another site that has a lot of good info is Stand to Reason--and our church has a good relationship w/ Greg Koukl, its founder and president.

I bring up Dr. Craig because he's someone our church has a relationship with. He trains us (came a couple years ago and gave two lectures on UC Berkeley, hosted by us, "The Existence of God" and "Evidence for the Resurrection"), and we not only support him in prayer (b/c, boy it's tough doing some of those debates on the different circuits of which he's a part) but we also support him financially every month. As such, he sends up updates from time to time about how he's doing and what he's been up to, as well as prayer requests. If you're interested at all in these updates and newsletters, let me know and I can forward them on to you.

Good ol' home-cookin'

If you want to get away from Berkeley and have a home-cooked meal, you can come over to my place tonight. It's a "catch-your-own-ride" kind of a situation, and I'd say grab the nearest senior or smallgroup leader if you want to capitalize on the offer. Of course, there'll be the mandatory study room for the studious, and then there'll be the "I'm glad I'm away from Berkeley" room, mostly hovering in and around the food.

Last night's smallgroup among the frosh was fun since Joe's H.2 group joined too. The room was packed, but it was a good time to meet others and welcome new faces. We asked some questions and put the answers up on the board:

• What do you find attractive about Christianity or religion?
• What do you find repulsive about Christianity or religion?
• What do you think is difficult about being a Christian?

The sophomore smallgroups, as usual, each did their own thing. From inductive bible study to discussion over a chunk of text, I'll just speak for my group.

First, we took a survey of people's relative stress level on a scale of 1-10. With a kid on the way (yes, that would be me), mine was a little higher than most (a 7 in case you were wondering), and some of the sophs decided they'd like to retract their original number and submitted an integer significantly lower. But after that, we each of us put a question on the table so that we could talk about them in the upcoming weeks:

• One question about God; something I've always wondered or thought or wish I could ask...
• One question about myself; "If only I knew this about myself," or could figure out this part of my life...

Angel Island this weekend for the frosh. Oregon vs. Cal also. Go Bears.

UPDATE: Got my phone back. It's a text-messaging machine

Questions for God

This past week in our freshman smallgroup, we asked the question: "If you could ask God one question and get an answer, what would you ask?"

After thoughtful consideration in smaller groups, some of the questions people brought to the table:

• If God created man in His image, why are we so messed up?
• Why is there so much suffering and evil in the world? Why do the good guys seem to lose, and the bad guys win? Why do people who try so hard end up failing?
• If there's a God, why did He create us?
• What's my purpose? What's my goal?
  
• Why does God allow violence in the world?
  
• What is love?
• Is God personal or obscure?
  

There were more, of course. But that's it for now. Maybe we'll have a chance to answer some of them this semester.

In addition to the "God-questions", I also left room for people to ask questions about our group and what we do in general. One of the guys asked, "Is it true girls aren't allowed at smallgroup?" At first I thought he was just joking. It reminded me of a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, but actually, I think he really wants to know. So I'll make sure we have time to talk about it at our next meeting on Wednesday.

On another note, looking forward to basketball on Saturday morning @ the RSF. The sophomores said they want a piece of the freshmen.