Some months ago I was led into a deep e-discourse about heaven and hell with a bright young woman named Hope from Hope Lounge. I found her to be so refreshingly honest and searching that I’d invite her into Therapy and share her with you.
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Pistol Pete: When did you start blogging and what motivated you to do so?
Hope: Probably somewhere around 2005 I started some small blogging. It wasn’t anything fascinating or anything, I just liked to be able to look back and see my thoughts as the days went by. I started off basically it just being a journal (basically my only motivation), and slowly…as I learned more about blogging I have tried to elevate myself into actually attempting to get some, if any, publicity or making people want to maybe slightly want to read my blog.
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Pistol: Name three of your favorite movies.
Hope: OH! Wow…thats tough. I’m such a movie person.
1) The Lion King is definitely my all time favorite movie.
2) Tommy Boy: There is no way I can not laugh in it….absolutely hilarious. Chris Farley was the man.
3) August Rush? I dunno…thats a tough one. August Rush I personally thought was a great movie, but that’s probably just showing a bit of my nerdy band side.
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PP: You say you love music – who are some of your favorite artists/performers?”
Hope: That’s such a broad question, I could sit here for hours. My favorite composer is Frank Tichelli. His best piece (in my opinion) is of course An American Elegy. If you haven’t heard it and you like orchestra type stuff, check it out. I am definitely a huge Eric Clapton, The Beatles, Shinedown, Rascal Flatts, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen fan… I’ll stop right there with that though.
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Pistol: You call yourself “An Agnostic Seeker”. What do you mean by that?
Hope: It’s actually pretty simple. I don’t know if there is a God or not (Agnostic) but I am constantly seeking to figure out/decide whether or not there is one or not. Honestly, the more and more I ponder it the more and more confused I get. There are a lot of things that really and truly support both sides…I’m just basically a deer in headlights on whether or not I really and truly feel there is a god or not. But the term “Agnostic Seeker” in of itself is really simple and not as complex as some might think.
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Pistol: I really enjoyed your post – “A Prayer, A Movie, and a Thought“. Can you describe what happened and how this impacted your view of God.
Hope: Well Pistol, it started off with a prayer. My boyfriend, John, has been really trying to get me to believe in God lately and so he had me pray with him because he could see that all of my thoughts were so jumbled around…that I was clearly confused. So in short, he held me tight and prayed for me because by no means was I going to pray for myself. And after that prayer…I’d always had this “weird” feeling about me. It really made me feel odd and I wasn’t sure how to respond to it. So, I didn’t.
Next came the movie. John and I went and saw the movie Expelled and found it fairly intriguing.
I don’t think the purpose of the movie by any means was to convince people of the fact that there may be an Intelligent Designer…but it surely made me go down that thought process. It really just seemed to click in my head that it only made sense for there to have been something that originally created (intelligently designed) the original form of life. No, no…I don’t mean in the Biblical sense where God created everything in 6 days, but I mean the original cell, or energy that began the process of evolution. It only makes sense…I mean, where else could that have came from?
But then of course the question comes into place: Well…then…where did god/that creator come from? And well, I don’t have an answer to that question, which of course, has brought me back to the same ‘ol confusion as before.
Pistol: What do you now imagine God to be?
Hope: That’s a tough question. I don’t know if I really think you can have personal connections with god. To me, if he does exist, it would seem that it/he is merely a “thing” (I mean, what do you call god?) that somehow created us. Clearly, I am still very confused.
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Pistol: You’ve written some about prayer and its impact on you. How does prayer affect you? What do you see as the purpose of prayer?
Hope: Prayer is a rough area for me. As I said before, I’m not sure you can have a personal relation, discussion, etc. with god. Every time that I am engaged in prayer, I will admit, it makes me feel weird…and that term “weird” is very broad because I can’t find a word to describe what I feel when engaged in a prayer. When I do pray, I’m usually trying to comfort myself in some way. Almost as if I’m talking to myself telling myself that everything will be ok.
Pistol: Well, Hope, I really appreciate your thoughtful responses. I’m going to pray that God lead you along your special path, that you come to know the Way to abundant life – forever.
meet some other friends in Therapy….
“Laurie Kendrick (and God) Come to Therapy”
What a great and winsome dialogue!
P.S. Tommy Boy rocks! You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’s an all-around great movie.
Pistol Pete, thanks for inviting Hope into Therapy and to Hope for sharing a part of herself with the NT readers.
To Hope, I pray that your search for answers, does one day lead you to a relationship with Christ Jesus.
Grace and peace be with you all.
Add me to that list of people who will be earnestly praying for Hope… when she feels that “weird feeling” while praying, perhaps it is the Holy Spirit, knocking at the door of her heart?
Keep in touch, Hope!! (BTW, that’s a truly lovely name you have….)
P.S. I have to agree w/Hope about the movie, August Rush…I saw it approx. one week ago. As the credits were rolling, I wanted to watch it all over again!
Thanks for the interview PP, I appreciate it tons!
Neil: Yes, yes…Tommy Boy is an all-time great!
Hi,
I stumbled across you site when I was humbly searching the net for my own name `pete´. So it came to pass that I created my own wordpress site. Meanwhile I realized I am a huge fan of yours and I have to ask, do you actually try to be funny in your posts or does that come naturally? Also disturbing is the fact that there are more similarities between us; mental health issues and so on. So I hope you check out my site and maybe you get a fresh view of things similar to your situation, or then again maybe it might actually make your mental health issues worse… Jesus help us.
The Pistol fires back: Pete, I very glad you dropped in. I hope you have as much fun with your blog as I have with mine. Just be yourself and enjoy. I’d be happy to check out your site, but your URL didn’t come through. I’ll e-mail you.
I wanted to say hello and that I used a portion of your history lesson on my e-blog? it has bearing on the crusade I am doing for Peace all over the world and the justice that is a driving determination in my soul to get the knowledge out there so that people will understand what is truely happening this world also tell Bob Dylan hello for me I was the strip tease dancer in Anchorage at the sprotsman two club that met him in the early 1970’s i was very tall with blond brown hair and a true Alaskan pioneer woman who was very taken aback by Bob, i was just shy and concerned that he would trip over his shoelace? i should have stayed a little while longer but I sing the songs of the past with the god given gift of a voice that echoes the truth and the light.. Live and let live and the past becomes the future in the Wink of an eye.. love and Light my friends we will over come the worlds pain and then Heaven on Earth will come to pass.. My name is HOPE my cb handle is ccryderzz ( grateful dead and ZZTOP) My bad company friends in Alaska follow your written word.. Love and HUGs from IRELAND AND SCOTLAND and all over the world my postings are being read and teh pebble has been thrown into the POND of the collective voice we need to Listen to the wind and see the flower blooming and the garden coming into Focus// the awake the sea is crashing into teh mountains. and the sun is setting in the East i shall be going to the one I love for he has saved my soul and my forgiveness of the ones that hirt my family are forgiven.. My love is for the taking for one man who is saved is one more to fall into Gods loving arms and the shelter from the storm.. ccrYderzz… HOPE Dozgs in heaven we shall have PEACE ON EARTH>> follow me.. they have not seen anything yet.. DEBBIE hugs all around the world… exit stage left.. and shes gone… on a plane of another world that is very dear to me…
I think that if agnostics could truly see the “plan” in motion around them, the blessings, the miracles, they would understand without someone pushing them…being invited from within, not forced from outside. Faith in believing and letting it work.