Looking For Life In Stones

I love my dad. He's the best dad I could have ever asked for. He's taught me so many important lessons, I'm grateful for my dad.

My dad is not an astronaut. This isn;t an insult, it's nothing personal and I'm sure he won't mind me telling you that he isn't. He's never been into space.

If I found out that my sister had been going around telling everyone that our dad was an astronaut and that he'd done spacewalks and landed the space shuttle, I'd wonder what's wrong with her and if maybe she'd been smoking something special. This doesn't diminish the fact that I love my dad, this doesn't diminish the fact that my sister is still my sister, it's just that if she went around telling stories like that (which she doesn't), I'd be cringing an awful lot.

This is exactly how I feel when I read this story, about a man who found a picture of Jesus in some granite and wanted to buy it. Jesus has better things to do that draw pictures of our perception of him in bits of stone.

Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated case. People have found pictures of Jesus in tomatoes, crisps (potato chips to our American friends) and garage floors. Oddly, this isn't even limited to Christians since Muslims have celebrated seeing the name of their god in various fruit and vegetables.

But back to this story; why are people always looking for things to validate their beliefs in such crazy ways? Do we really think that finding one little thing that could be something would convince the rest of the world that we have the right belief and they should follow us? Does anybody expect the world's atheists to look at the stone and say "well, if you put it that way, I guess you're right"?

But here's the crunch, we hear news like this almost every day and not always from the religious people. How often have you heard scientists get all excited because they found something in a rock that looks like it could have been a worm from Mars therefore proving that everything they've ever said about GM crops is probably right? How long do they spend looking for stones to show the rest of the world that because there was a seashell on the seashore, riding on the back of a cellphone-savvy dolphin fifteen million years ago, every monotheistic faith must 'clearly' be wrong - simply because they're right (Does it have to follow that because a scientist is right about something, a theist must be wrong)?

I believe in Jesus. Not because I saw His face in a cloud, in a cucumber or on the grain of a piece of wood. Neither is it because there's an ark shaped object up a mountain somewhere and the Turkish government won't let me see it. Neither is it because I have a lucky charm around my neck that protects me. Neither is it because I think He's sending dead relatives to look after me. I believe in Jesus because I have a relationship with Him and that's it.

I supposed, to close this the way I started it, if I'd never met my dad, I wouldn't have any reason to believe anything about him. Sure, he was 'there', but there'd be nothing or nobody in whom to have any kind of belief. But because I know him, I know he's my father and that ongoing relationsip I have with him keeps the whole relationship relevant for me today.