Opening Thoughts

Welcome to Trying to Walk. I'm glad you're here. This is the very first post in this effort and I want to use it to explain a little about what will be going on here. That will be a little hard to say because it is something I don't totally know at this point, and perhaps that tells you as much as anything else I could say.

As you have probably already guessed, the name of this blog, Trying to Walk, is a reference to the song in the old church song books. The song begins with these words, "Trying to walk in the steps of the Savior, trying to follow our Savior and King. Shaping our lives by His blessed example, happy, how happy, the songs that we bring." Yes, a lot of what we will discuss will be related to those thoughts. How can we "shape our lives" to be more like God wants us to be?

But I hope to have readers who may not be "Trying to Walk" according to God's desires. I hope I have something worthwhile to say to them as well. Everyone is in their own place in their walk with God. You may not even have a walk with God. You may think there is no God you can have a walk with, anyway. You may be a 25%, or a 50%, or a 75% walker with God. But everyone is somewhere on the spectrum and I would guess that none of us would claim to be 100%. That means that we can all move closer to God and His Son as we try to walk in His steps.

For those of you who are not believers, I will be offering some propositions for you to consider honestly. I hope I can do this in a way that will catch your attention and cause you to seriously ponder some ideas that you might not have considered before. Yes, I want you here and I challenge you to engage your mind with the things that are presented.

If you are a believer who is not satisfied with the level of your faith (I'm quite certain this will be by far the largest category of readers of this blog), you will find Biblical thoughts and concepts presented in a way that I hope will be different than what you have encountered before. My perspective on God and His word is not guided by what others say, but in what I discover from my own time spent contemplating His word. I should quickly follow that statement by saying that we are discussing God's word and I respect it and realize that I must accept it without trying to change it. But I hope to present and discuss it in ways that offer insights that others have not offered, or leave out some ideas others have inserted by inferring things God never implied.

Of course, no one would "try to walk" without first believing, so by default the first two or three blogs following this one will deal with items regarding a basis for faith, that is a look at atheistic concepts as opposed to having faith. Then I hope to move on to other issues with these faith versus atheism topics interspersed from time to time. But we will always have as our goal to move closer to the person God wants us to be as we walk with Him from whatever place in which we currently stand.

Please join me in reading every one of these blogs. Subscribe so that you will be notified every time I post a new blog. You will have no other obligation from your subscription.

I would love to hear your responses to what you read and you may give those by sending an email to me at tojw@icloud.com. I may publish all or part of your email to me unless you ask that it remains private. I may respond in a blog to comments that appear to be especially noteworthy unless you ask me not to. When responding to an email in a blog, I will mention only your first name unless you ask me not to.

Looking forward to our next time together and the conversations that will begin but hopefully not end in this space.

-Jeff-