HIS WAY

I think God cares whether one believes the whole of what He's said, but he's not going to change Himself, His standards or requirements if one doesn't--patient and loving though he may be.
As a parent, my child simply wasn't going to tell me what to do, how to feel, or what to be. I established rules and expectations that I fully meant for her to follow, and live up to. Fortunately, she exceeded them AND is a believer in the God I love. Now if she'd chosen NOT to be saved; NOT to believe in God; NOT to adhere to His word, I would have been devastated, but I wouldn't have stopped loving her. I also wouldn't have adopted a "good people go to Heaven, too" philosophy, or petitioned God to alter His word to accommodate her rebellion and rejection. I may have been praying profusely like a freakin' maniac that she would change her heart and accept God's mercy and grace, or that she WOULD hear the words of someone else who could better articulate God's love for her, but thinking that God would change to appease her decision? Naaah.
The last place I want my child to go is Hell. No. I don't want it to even be on the list of destinations. I spent 32 days in Louisiana in May. It was some kinda new hot down there. I spent 10 days in Cairo this month, and to say its climate was hot would be a gigantic understatement. Just about everyone was smoking, and between the exhaust from vehicles and the thick air, it's official. I don't want to go to Hell, either. When I tell you I love my daughter to pieces, I mean it. If she weren't my daughter, I sure would be honored to have her as a friend. Knowing that she would be destined to eternal torment is the worst thought ever, so training her up in the way she should go, was ALWAYS the plan knowing full well, of course, that a relationship with God was ultimately her choice.
The Bible says "There is a way that SEEMS right to a man, but in the end it leads to death." Sometimes people get mad when they realize that their way is not THE way and God has no intentions of humoring them or accommodating their ideas. HE is God. Perhaps that's our biggest problem. We want to be the gods of our lives, and want Him to cosign what we do and say. When our ways clash with His, we get amazingly creative with the Bible; downright arts and crafts-y. We have questions, we don't like His answers, so we get our scissors and white-out. We tear out whole pages and specific passages and glue them back together so they will be more appealing and congruent with our choices. We reduce God to an inept, confused being who desperately needs us to give Him a makeover. "He couldn't possibly have meant THAT", we say. So we justify how we play with His word--to our own peril.
We have such a problem when people want to make us into something we are not, flat-out lie on us, or put words into our mouths--and Heaven help you if you mess with our children. What makes us think, then, that God gets a kick out of that? Like it or not, His way--not our interpretation of it-- is right. We just need to get with His program, not the one we proposed for Him to adapt to so we'd feel better.