as a shadowed pool of mists and more.
I've been tossed in your raging torrents
and lapped on your slower peaceful shores.
Time, from futures uncertain you've created to last
more enduring than diamond the unchangeable past.
Beginning. Beginnings begun.
I have a friend who, in his forties, shared with me the story from when he was a teenager. He went with his father to a Wednesday evening men's prayer meeting at the Baptist church their family used to attend. He was the only teenager among a group of men ranging in age upwards from their twenties. The prayer meeting ended with an invitation to come forward and make a commitment to surrender one's life to Jesus. To him it seemed the invitation continued unduly long. He began to have a nagging suspicion that this lengthier invitation was being done so that he would come forward.
In telling the story, he gave a little half-laugh, and said that he went forward. His father proudly accompanied him as he did so. He said, "Y'know, I had no business going forward at that time because I had no idea what I was doing, except that I had pleased my father in doing so."
In concluding the story, he reflected with somberness, "Still looking back over all the years that have passed since then and my later commitment to my current faith in God through my belief in the saving grace represented by the Christ of the cross, I cannot say that my going forward that evening was not significant in shaping my life and in my adopting my current religious faith."
I have often wondered about the roots of what I have come to adopt as my own belief system, especially the fact that I have come to adopt a theologically-centered weltenshauung. I have a memory similar to my friend's. I was still in grade school, I went forward at the altar call at the end of a Sunday morning service in the Holiday Park Baptist Church. This resulted in my getting dunked in the baptistry a Sunday shortly after that. Reflecting on these as one connected event, I feel that I had no more business having gone forward and having gotten baptized than did my friend in going forward at the prayer meeting. Much of the life that I have lived between then and now reflected a person more at war with God than one who believed a loving relationship with God was possible.
Still, as was the case with my friend, I cannot say now that God was not faithful to what that event should have meant to my life nor that that those moments had no effect in shaping the faith that drives my life now, almost 50 years later.
this is true for me also. maybe it is because even though we believe, we take the rest of our lives to understand what this truely means and how to live the life of our belief.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous: Thanks for your grace in being willing to include me into your own experience.
ReplyDeletePart of me so wants to adopt your analysis. However, the more I consider its applicability to me, the more I am sure that I would be lying in adopting it -- at least in the manner presented.
I accept that I lacked proper understanding as to true meaning at the time. I cannot, without more information, accept as applicable to me the logic of the progression implied in your statement from that initial level of ((if I may be so brash as to label it and thus be guilty of imposing some meaning to it beyond what I seek to say directly)) "intellectual belief" -- at least some minimum level of intellectual belief -- which probably existed in my case. This is not to dispute your statement's applicability to yourself.
I say this in my case in significant part because:
I feel I would be lying about the struggle between my trying to find in the intellectual belief an experiential belief, and
when I felt close to finding an experiential belief, about the struggle between trying to force God to fit my image of Him and accepting the truth of God as I have a sense of experiencing His presence at this end of my life. Some of this arises from self-desire, and some of it arises from those whose authority I trusted who insisted teaching traditions and defining Scripture through those traditions rather than teaching Scripture and defining the traditions by Scripture.
In recognizing the nature of those early struggles, I cannot help but wonder, especially to the extent I find myself now disagreeing with much of the "tradition" to which I was exposed and had accepted early in my youth, to what extent that to which I am now convicted comes as well-grounded as it should be or is rooted in personal hubris of one kicking at the goads.
Your comment has certainly changed the way I was going to follow up these thoughts. Thank you.