This is my first blog and I feel like the person being dragged onto some stage by family members who really think you are a musical genius, but you know they think that because they love you and you know there will be people in the audience who really CAN PLAY THE PIANO. But you decide to do it anyway and completely humiliate yourself because YOU love THEM too and you really don’t care what anyone else thinks of you, (yeah right). So, for my nieces, nephews and my kids who have encouraged this, onward and downward.
Okay, to the point, twenty years ago our daughter, who is a beautiful, world-changing doctor, began working on a high school science project under the guidance of a great teacher, Mr.Reames-I had been “warned” about him by some well meaning Christian friends. As it turned out he became a wonderful influence in her academic life and indirectly, mine, which I’m sure he doesn’t know to this day. He recommended some books to her, which I read-these encouraged my journey to harmonize what the bible,which I”ve come to believe is amazing, says about the REAL God–and the truth about the origin and nature of the REAL world. I had grown up in a “fundamental” church and had heard things from wonderful people I loved and respected which I knew just weren’t true–Like when this special speaker(Ken Henderson) came for a youth rally and held up a pen and joked about how “scientists” wanted us to believe that the entire cosmos had been contained in something about the size of the tip of said pen to which the church erupted in laughter–and I sat there thinking, “well we Christians believe that our God (who has to be ‘bigger’ than the world) once existed as a single cell-a fertilized egg-in a little Palestinian girl,” so it seemed like size probably didn’t matter that much to God and the scientists had figured this out pretty damn well. (Oh yeah, once in a while I use “damn” or “hell” or something like that)-it just means I am terribly upset because I’ve seen Christians-and scientists- give people the idea that there is some conflict between the bible and science and they generally do this to raise money, appeal to the “base” or just seem “in the know” with their peer group which we all should have outgrown by the fourth grade and this causes people like the incredible kids I’ve known in youth groups who go to college to think they have to choose between science and God, evolution and the bible, what they know to be true about the world and what they were taught to believe.(Did I mention that I have high blood pressure and I’m supposed to avoid stress?) So this is what I want to write about, this is what sometimes wakes me up in the middle of the night, this is what I fear: winning some fake, religious battle and losing the war-the very critical war of ideas that actually directs how we live and the future of our culture. Yeah, it really is that important.
Though not my intention, this blog is going to offend some of my Christian friends who will think I no longer believe the bible. Hopefully it will encourage others to question, find real answers, believe. I am not a brilliant scientist,(and I don’t play one on TV), but I read what they write and I will pass it on; nor am I a brilliant theologian, but I have taken classes by some, read their books and do believe we can and must “try this at home”.
One of the best verses in the bible is the encouragement to question, probe, unravel the mysterious that IS our God and his world: “The glory of God is to conceal a matter. The glory of man is to search it out.”
So I will use the familiar pounding in my ears to decide it’s time to close, calm down and stop “warming up” this coffee.
I will always sign out with,
“I’m just right”, which I will explain in my next blog
deb
