God gives meaning to the meaningless

  This morning, my pastor was preaching out of Ecclesiastes 2. One of his final points, amidst Solomon proclaiming everything to be meaningless, was "God gives meaning to the meaningless."
  I put forth one Tony Nolan. His mother was a mentally insane prostitute, had no father. He was adopted out of the orphanage he was placed in, and abused by his adopted parents. Tony literally had no future - until he found God. Now, he's an accomplished writer and speaker - and has a very powerful testimony.
  My next piece of evidence is Peter, James, and John. Three poor, ordinary fishermen. Day after day they would go out onto the Sea of Galilee, catch fish. Eat what they needed in order to live and sell the rest - if there was any left. Then, Jesus came along. Three years later, they were leaders in the church - Peter even (according to tradition) founded the Catholic Church. Pretty hard to make more of an impact than that, huh?
  Even Jesus was born into a poor family, in a region that was actually referred to with scorn by the rest of Israel at the time. People back then would say (with the appropriate scorn in their voices), "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" No one expected the son of a carpenter from Nazareth to be the Messiah.
  Now, to bring it back to Solomon: he experienced all the worldly things that are supposed to bring pleasure, and experienced them much more fully than most people have the opportunity to. At the end, he said it was all meaningless, and like chasing the wind. However, the things he said were meaningless are only meaningless apart from God. If you amass wealth for yourself, what's the point? You'll die, and somebody else will get control of the money. But God can take that money, and use it to bring eternal good to others, and to bring Himself glory.
  Solomon also tried sex, and apparently lots of it. Which you can do, when you're the richest guy in the world and have 300 concubines and 700 wives. Having 1000 women willing to sleep with him, he still said it was meaningless. But God can take sex - within the proper confines of marriage - and turn it into something beautiful that brings the husband and wife closer to each other and God.
  For those of you who don't know, Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived. However, perhaps most surprisingly, he said that even wisdom was meaningless, since both the wise man and the fool will eventually die and be forgotten. But God can take a person's wisdom and use it to impact the world forever. Look at Descartes, or Newton - two very famous people, one in the field of philosophy ("I think therefore I am") and one in the sciences, and both were devout Christians. In fact, Descartes' famous statement is only the very beginning of a philosophical proof of the existence of God; and Newton wrote more theology than he did math or science.
  God has always worked in the small things, in the people who were (or thought they were) meaningless. Just because we think we're normal doesn't mean God doesn't have a purpose for us. Don't ever think that you're meaningless, because God gives you meaning.

God's Personhood

  "...Moses rediscovered a fundamental fact about God forgotten during the four hundred years of silence: God is a person." - Philip Yancey

  Sometimes I have trouble comprehending God's personhood. I mean, God isn't just this impersonal force or the "great watchmaker" that set the natural laws in order and then leaves us alone. And He doesn't just sit up in Heaven and watch us, or carry out his plans with no regard for us. God has many of the same characteristics that we, as humans, have - which makes sense, since we were made in God's image.

  For one thing, God feels emotion. The Bible shows God getting angry at people that sinned, being sad for the people who don't believe, he felt satisfaction and (presumably) pleasure when he created the world - "and God saw that it was good".

  But not only does he feel emotion, but humans have actually influenced God's decisions! Abraham went back and forth with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah - "if there's 100 righteous people, will you destroy it then? what about 50? or 10? or even 1?". Moses pleaded with God not to wipe out the Israelites after they worshiped a golden calf while Moses was on Mount Sinai, even to the point where Moses said "Look God, take me instead, but don't wipe out these people!"

  Several of these characteristics of God's personhood are blog posts - or several blog posts - by themselves, so I will come back to many of them. But for now, I have one final point: God's main desire isn't for service, or our money, or our time. He desires a relationship with us. He loves us and wants us to love him back and know Him better. Isn't that a distinctly personal trait? I still marvel at how the God of the universe actually wants to know me, a screwed up and distinctly normal teenager.

Footprints in the snow

  "We're more than carbon, than chemicals - we are the image of the Invisible! So we sing out this, our canticle: we are the image of the Invisible!" - Dustin Kensrue

  One of God's attributes - and one that trips people up quite a bit - is that He is invisible. However, if you've ever seen a movie where someone wears an invisibility cloak or some other thing rendering them invisible, you'll know that they are still present and still make a visible mark on the world. For example, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry's feet still leave tracks in the snow.
  Just like those tracks in the snow, God still leaves visible evidence of his existence - the remarkable beauty of a sunset, the irreducible complexity of the cell, the amazing odds necessary for our universe to come together just right all on its own. Or, in a more tangible example, people have had their lives directly touched by God - some people have experienced miraculous healing, or a sudden change of desire (specifically relating to addiction). These are all God's "footprints in the snow".
  Sometimes I wish God weren't invisible. I wish he'd sit up there in the sky and show himself for all the world to see. You couldn't claim God didn't exist if someone else could just point to Him. And it would be so much easier to remain faithful to God if we could see Him watching us.
  Or would it? Jesus' disciples had "the visible image of the invisible God" and they still didn't believe, which is something I don't understand at all. But since God is invisible, we have to seek Him. You have to want to learn more about Him and His nature. And if you seek, He reveals Himself.
  For now, I'm going to continue seeking and continue looking for more of His footprints.

Who is this God I serve?

Hello internet, I'm Josh. I'm a college freshman at the time of this post, and I'm a Christian.

I say that so you'll understand where I'm coming from - I grew up in the church, got saved at a very young age, was pretty sheltered. As a result, I realized fairly recently that while I have this knowledge of the Bible, I don't really know a lot about the God that I serve. Hence this blog: I decided to spend time learning more about God, and in an effort to keep me at it, I'm going to chronicle my findings here.

Hopefully, you find this interesting, maybe even helpful. Comment, spread the link around if you like what I have to say, if you disagree with something I say, tell me. I'll be happy to discuss what I believe with you. All I ask is that you be respectful. If, by some miracle, people actually read this and start being jerks in the comments, I will delete said comments. Discussion = good, arguments/insults = bad.