50 - Source to You
B-RAD with Brad Toews
It is the dynamic interplay between spirit and matter that provides the flow of energy in my own life, and I believe, this is the spiritual movement of the whole universe.
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49 - Imagine That
B-RAD with Brad Toews
Literalism helps us explain the world. Know the world. Name the world. But it bumps up against its limits when it meets a more powerful tool of language - metaphor. What does this look like in the context of the Christian faith?
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48 - Unknowing God
B-RAD with Brad Toews
Our claims to knowledge (what we know, how we know, the extent of what we know) changes over time. At least it does if we're growing and evolving.
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47 - Past Lives
B-RAD with Brad Toews
We all have past lives, a collection of moments, strung together that make us who we are.
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46 - Something to Say
B-RAD with Brad Toews
I'm learning how to communicate better, both on this podcast and in my personal and professional life. I'm learning I have Something to Say, and how to say it.
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45 - Back-to-School for Adults
B-RAD with Brad Toews
Something about the shift in season, summer turning to fall and kids back in school, inspires an air of possibility for new habits and making change in your life.
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44 - Follow You
B-RAD with Brad Toews
I have a strong tendency and bias to depend on outside information and inputs, constantly seeking more knowledge to inform my choices.
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43 - When Marriage is a Let-down
B-RAD with Brad Toews
An interview my wife Dawna about her perspective on expectations, disappointments, and the let-down’s of life, in the context of marriage and our closest relationships.
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42 - Find your Frequency
B-RAD with Brad Toews
As if integrative medicine, transcendent spiritual experiences, and quantum physics weren't interesting enough in exploring energy and frequency, let's add harmonics theory to the mix.
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41 - Make Some Noise Drew Brown
B-RAD with Brad Toews
In this interview Drew and I sit down in his kitchen to talk about music and being a musician. We talk about how writing, playing, performing and producing honest music tells the story of our lives and gives expression to a re-imagined faith.
info_outlineLike many people who grew up in a religious context I was taught the purpose of our faith, the meaning of life in fact, was to know God.
Not only was this the goal but it was actually achievable by getting saved, reading the bible, having a personal relationship with Jesus, going to church, praying, participating in Christian community and basically following the path laid out by church traditions and authorities.
Pursuing this mission - to know God - would set you on the right path.
In the Christian classic "Knowing God", influential evangelical scholar and teacher, J. I. Packer, says it this way.
"Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God most of life's problems will fall into place of their own accord."
Wow. That's a confident claim overall, but maybe the most bold and perhaps presumptuous part of that idea is the assumption we can actually know God.
Can we know God? Really? Is that even possible?
I don't know.
But what I do know is that our claims to knowledge (how we know, what we know, the extent of what we know) changes over time. At least it does if we're growing and evolving.
What happens when what you experience doesn't fit into the box of what you know? Maybe it's an experience of God, or Ultimate Reality, or Love or some other deep truth.
What if that experience takes you outside of your current frame of knowing? What if life, usually great love or great suffering, rocks you to the core and what you thought you knew, about God, others, the world, or yourself, you no longer know.
What happens in the unknowing?
Join me in this episode as we talk about the well-trodden path of order, disorder and reorder (and its many synonyms), read the words of an old monk who calls us "to never stop loving no matter what comes your way", and challenge ourselves to experience God as The Great Mystery to endlessly know and un-know, discover and re-discover.
Shownotes at Brad Toews.