Alpha week 3

I am late in posting week 3 due to other commitments, however, there has been no week 4, this will be next week.

HOW CAN WE HAVE FAITH?

Those who become Christians become a new person. A new life has begun and they are not the same anymore.

The first part of Alpha invites us to ask questions and discover the answers we are looking for about God,Science and History.

Firstly the talk was about 'The magnificent 3' The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we know the son is Jesus and the Father is God, but what about this Holy Spirit? Well the Holy Spirit comes from within, it is a sense and a feeling within in you, born out of love, and then the 3 becomes 1.

Basically explained by taking the meaning of water, which can become ice and also steam, but esentially water is one and the same, so the Magnificent 3 are 1 and the same presented to you in all 3 ways.

People who become new Christians can do so because they have experienced a revelation and know immediately that they have found God, but it can come to us gradually and we can be led down a path that we do not understand, but eventually leading us to our conclusion.

Going back to the paragraph about asking the unanswered questions, we all have a need to know the truth, but what is the truth? How do we know Jesus actually came, how did he know what was right and what was to be expected of him? How do we actually know the theory of relativity was measured correctly? Did Einstein have a huge ruler that he poked right out into space and then calculated the measurements? How did the math come about to take these measurments in the first place?

Also I find that each religion has a different view of looking at things, which all religions would say are wrong, but I feel that in our search for the truth we can then decide our own religion in which we need to believe,because everyone needs to believe in something, a man,therefore, thousands of years ago may have decided that he believes in order to get closer to God we need to sacrifice animals or cross our legs and hum etc, the main point being that we all need to believe.

The discussion was lead to the fact that we can have the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in our lives,but we still need the basics? What are the basic foundations?

MY PERSONAL FEELING

I felt that I should be asking the questions, I always felt that something in my life was missing, I commited myself to work, and relationships and pushing myself into fitness etc etc, but something was always missing. I have now discovered that was God telling me what I needed to know and I was just looking in the wrong place. I still need ambition and exercise and love and family, but God too, and now that I have accepted that, I have lost this longing for something and strangely lost this longing to know the answers, because the answers are there within you.... The Holy Spirit

There was no Alpha course this week due to some people being away etc, but we had house group and prayer, and I realised how much I had missed it, with that in mind I had arranged to go to a 'girlie' prayer group on Friday morning, here we had breakfast and chatted about what had been going on in our lives for the past week, followed by prayer, during the prayer I had my hands clasped in my lap and my eyes closed. I was told there was no pressure for me to pray out loud as I am still a little nervous in doing so and have,on occasion prayed out loud,but in very small gestures. Anyway I digress, during prayer, I had an amazing amount of pressure on my arms and I felt like I was fighting to hold them down and clasped in my lap, to the extent that my muscles ached in my upper arms,I felt that I had prayer to give, but did it silently, still the fight continued with my arms and eventually I thought "what am I fighting for, just let go" and my arms relaxed and I raised them up with open hands and it felt so much better that I sat there for some time.

When I opened my eyes 'C' said that she had a picture in her mind during prayer, of me and I was rowing a boat against the current and putting up a mighty fight and did I know what it meant?

I was so overwhelmed by what had just happened that I was totally hyper for about two hours! It made me shakey and quite teary......what do you think?!