Snow Patrol wrote this song called Open Your Eyes. It’s quite a pretty song really, pulls you along with a three something minute build up, then slices and dices you with a marvellous finish. It’s one of those songs that makes you want to sensationalise everything, uno, makes that little crush of yours suddenly become the most important thing in all the world. Drama for the sake of drama. What would we do without it hey?

Anyway my friend Steve says that the song was written for Asians. I laughed pretty hard at that. But then I had to tell him that he was a racist. We can’t have white guys running around saying stuff like that now can we? But we all still love Steve, even if he is a racist. I listened to this song while walking down the main road that connects my condominium block to the rest of Bangkok. I came out from my condominium for the first time that day needing a change in scenery. The condominium is nice but it can get a little stuffy sometimes and there isn’t really much to look at. My apartment faces inwards, so all I can see is the next door neighbour’s clothesline. It bummed me at first, but now I’m pretty used to it.

I ended up spending most of that morning reading the bible. I am going through a bit of a deconstruction of my faith at the moment. A big word for a simple process. I guess I’m just looking at my faith again, and trying to understand what it’s really all about. Even though I have been a Christian all my life, I have never read the bible from cover to cover. Waking up one morning this year, I can’t remember which one, I felt ashamed at that fact, and felt simultaneously inspired to change it. How can I really call myself a committed Christian when I haven’t seriously travelled through the complete article that my faith is founded upon?

A few songs later, I jumped on a bus, the 79, and headed for the main shopping district. Sitting across from me, on the other side of the isle, was a gleaming little girl who was in constant dialogue with her dad beside her. I had no idea what they were talking about. First of all I had my headphones on pretty loud, and well, even if I took them off, I probably wouldn’t have been able to understand the thai that they were speaking. But what I could tell was that this dad was telling his daughter the secrets of life. Why the trees were green, why the bus tickets were red, why the world was always a beautiful place when she was around. It really did make me happy, doing a bit of people watching, appreciating the love between a father and his daughter.

It made me think about God and us, His children. If you look through history, God made himself known through various ways, initiated and striked up relationship through different means. He seemed to be a lot more active in the Old Testament. I could be wrong, but that’s just the way I see it. Moses and the burning bush, guys like Noah and Abraham who simply just spoke to him, being so close and so tight.

Then there is of course the New Testament, where God actually takes the form of a man and relates to us that way. Take a look and you’ll see that most of the New Testament is either documenting God doing this or talking about it. This I’m sure was one of the most beautiful moments in all of history, God coming down to talk and be with man, to ultimately reconcile man completely to Himself.

And here we have now, the twenty first cen-ter-ree. How does God speak to humanity now? Of course there are dreams and visions and prophecies and ‘words during quiet times’ and apostles and teachers all speaking words of God. But what is the single thing that all of us can know God through, or rather, gives God the opportunity to strike up some relationship, do a bit of secret telling, just like that Thai father with his gorgeous little daughter? I realised what this was a little while ago.

If you’re asking all the big questions about God, what he is like, what he is doing and what he thinks about us, then all He would probably say to you is to go to the local bookstore and buy yourself a bible.

I’m sure God would want to travel on buses with us, telling us how everything works and the many secrets of the world. Instead, He decided that a whole bunch of words strung together would tell us these things. Now you may think, isn’t this terribly impersonal? You can’t exactly compare a book to a real living person. Well I agree, but I think God leaving us a 700, 800, 900 or 1300 page book, depending how big your font is, is something really BIG and beautiful and is something that we take for granted. I think God took incredible care in getting that book together, and it wasn’t made to sit next to Oliver Twist and Harry Potter on the shelf, gathering dust.

I believe He has put this together for us to read, and is something that He wants us to use now. I know this seems like it’s all commonsense, but how many of us actually read it? How many of us have read the whole thing from cover to cover? How many of us have looked to understand the different styles of writing within it, looked to see the beauty in the poetry, in the accounts, in the stories and letters?