In A Mirror. Raed Mikhael

      Prologue

      Blessed is the Lord Jesus Christ, the source of all blessings and inspirations and the central character of my writing. I pray that the Lord may use the words of this book to bring perspective to its readers, changing lives where needed.

In A Mirror is a collection of essays on Christian terms which have lent themselves to many disciplines of philosophy and religion: destiny, desire, power, truth, faith, joy and righteousness, terms often watered down by frequent or abstract usage that take away from their original and intended meaning outside of the context of the word of God. The book’s objective is to present an introductory discussion that would help define the meaning of these selected concepts using the bible as the only reference, giving evidence of its sufficiency as the infallible word of God, for all teaching, edification, and correction1.

      A testimony written after decades of isolation, the book is inspired by the life of an individual whose introspection lacked Christ, before he was shocked by the image of a man whom he does not recognize. Swaying back and forth, by all kinds of doctrines, beliefs and traditions in which negligence to the presence of God distanced the world from a purpose to life, I waited thirty years before a close-up encounter with Christ. Prior years I have maneuvered my affair with a considerable distance from Christ, keeping separate my spiritual development while attesting to questionable paths bordering atheism. Many times I have disregarded life with a slight irreverence to the fleeting sense of time and the normalized imminence of death following years of aimless strife to survival. I contained my faith to the coping mechanisms in which reliance on human power dominated reason, resolving to my own strength to amend meaning to incomprehensible traditions. Disguised under traditions of growing up in a Christian family, I achieved a reasonable balance of faith in which I tailored God around my needs. While I retired my atheist’s pursuits by a more moderate agnosticism, lacking the Holy Spirit, a relationship with Christ was void of the elements needed for conviction. It was the late experiences of the Holy Spirit that brought forth the testimonies in this book, which attest to the powerful work of God through Jesus Christ to reach individuals like myself.

Revealing, truths by the Spirit of God is like standing before a mirror for the first time. Shocking, I am certain, such an experience would most likely require a renewed avowal to self-rediscovery resulting from the new awareness of the self, realizing God’s perspective has far deeper insights to life than the image we see of our own, putting to shame any efforts of achievements by the more likely dependence on the world. Limited to our own capacities, it is no surprise our lives away from Jesus Christ are reduced to a mere amalgamation of survival techniques which attempt to conjure an image about the self without introspection. Consequently, I find the exposition and experience of the Holy Spirit through God’s revelation to be more of a conviction preceding a cognizant, logical, adoption of perceived values, of which merits are not lacking in the example of Jesus Christ. I, therefore, did not pursue a proof of the divinity of Jesus Christ as the One True God, the human representation of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, although it is my utmost desire for such truth to embolden its features from the haze of misleading doctrines in the present day. On the contrary, I considered the trinity to be the priori truth of my writings, on which my readers have knowledge, regardless of their belief system; or perhaps, they’re destined by a similar calling of the word of God, ordained to salvation since the beginning of time2, to whom Christ revealed the mystery of salvation with an undeniable conviction.

Growing up as a son of a Seventh Day Adventist minister, I spent the early years of my childhood building strong attachments and fond memories of stories about God. My views of God were as varied as the denominations that represented Him, disconcerting by the numbers and variability of faiths. Further aggravated by my limited knowledge about the unity of God, it was consequential for my faith to partition my beliefs to a collection of ordinances disjointed in their agreement to my relationship with God, most evident of which was the dogmatic keeping of the fourth commandment regarding the Sabbath3, which strongly posed contradictory views when held next to Sunday’s worship services common in most other Christian churches. While the core principle values learned at Sabbath School were of no significant difference from other Christians, worship-day discrepancies mainly served to stray many away from the message of Christ centered on the love of God and those of our neighbors4. Comforting assurance always abounded in my frequent visits to neighboring churches of Catholic and Orthodox faiths where a greater fellowship with Christians overlooked any doctrinal differences with God, before complications of adulthood brought on a new meaning to rising denominational dissensions as the new norm that would cause many to ease away their faith in God.

      Doing the work of missionaries, my family uprooted from many towns where they were assigned to build churches, which made it difficult to establish any strong attachment to one particular place, aside from a hopeful sense of strengthening God’s outreach by unbounded measures—a “Christianity-Without-Borders”—a reality that would prove a lot more complex as spiritual sectarianism spread to the global phenomena we now live in. By relativity of faith, a greater freedom to exploration became a viable alternative to the more orthodox religions, giving way to a more convenient ideology by which a trend of a new world order emerged—a peaceful common humanity—which unified the world with godless tenets against the disregard of man, based on the most critical aspects of human identity, those related to origin, religion, faith, color, creed, etc., leaving only acts of labor to entitle them to an immutable birth right by virtue of being human. No greater constituents were more amicable than those of such an order, drawing many by its sacraments of free-will in spite of its marked dogmatic challenges which it continues to dismantle by unethical practices of an immoral system, replacing Christ from the center by a similar faith in the power of the collective-self—the safety in numbers—relaying on promises of a social order when Christ’s adoption is the only sacrificial sacrament required to eternal salvation. Inherent of western mythology and philosophy, a new world order had spawned multiple of deities which appeal to adherence by the common sense, that which parallels the diversity of human thoughts

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