One way or another, we are always trying to make sense of
being alive. And each day brings us new
ways to be bewildered, new things to wonder about, maybe to be deeply concerned
about. To begin with, a lot of things
depend on where we were born, and to whom, and where life has led us. Life is a very different matter for many of
us than it is for those who live in a Palestinian refugee camp, or an
AIDS-ravaged village in sub-Sahara Africa, or in earthquake-devastated Haiti .
Yet almost all of us have some basic concerns in common: Why
am I alive? For what purpose? How am I connected to others? Why do these
powerful emotions and desires surge within me and drive me to do what’s not in
my best interest to do? What am I meant
to do with my life? How am I meant to
spend my days? And why are things so
hard? Why sickness, suffering, tragedy
and loss? Why constant struggle,
conflict and fear? Why are so many
relationships unsatisfying? Why the injustices and inequities of
life? There are, it seems, a thousand
questions, and for each many conflicting answers.
I look in Scripture, and I find help. I remember what Paul wrote in Romans 7:15-19,
“I do not understand what I do. For what
I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. … I have the desire to do what is good, but I
cannot carry it out. For what I do is
not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on
doing.” And this makes sense up to a
point, and when I’m in certain moods.
But why? Why are things this way?
I think of life as I was growing up. We had made sense of it, after a
fashion. By we, I mean the adults in the
little churches I went to. Life was
about obeying God. Obeying God meant
being right on baptism, communion, church organization and worship, in fact, on
all matters pertaining to the church. And
there was only one true church – specifically ours. There were also lists of things not to do:
divorce, drinking, dancing, or really anything on Sunday other than church and
napping, which some did simultaneously. The
other kinds of questions didn’t matter really.
Life was just hard. What did
matter was that those who did these things correctly did not go to Hell. That was the purpose of life, to save one’s
soul from Hell, and of course, if one could, to save a few other souls too though
people were known to be stubborn. That
the story ended with vast numbers burning for ever and ever was thought to be
regrettable but not catastrophic. And
all of this made sense as long as we just kept talking to ourselves. But the longer I lived the more I realized that
much, much more is going on in life, that it does not make sense that the earth
with its six billion plus people is just a backdrop for a few hundred thousand
of God’s elect.
How did we ever, in a universe that seemingly stretches
forever, come to think in ways that are so small, so sectarian?
I have enjoyed your blogs very much, Dale. Keep them coming.
ReplyDeleteWow! That last paragraph intersects a lot with my life too, the first twenty one years, at least. I saw you around at Harding for a couple of years but the first time we communicated was on a spring break campaign in, I think, Peoria, Illinois in 1971. You then graduated and took off to Michigan for a year to study Psychology. Then the next time I saw you was in the early summer of '72 as we were at a camp in training to go to Campaign's Northeast which was organized by Owen Olbricht. Our modus operandi was to spend three weeks in a locale knocking on doors and engaging people in Bible Study. I clearly remember you opining that it was a lot to ask of people to change their whole way of thinking and their whole life after just a few hours of interaction with our point of view. That is one of those things that one reflects back on and sees as a critical point in one's life. That stayed with me all these years. It eventually turned out that the experiences of that summer ended up deconverting me from the sectarian view we were promoting at the time. I'm finding your posts to be very edifying. Thanks.
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