Stumbling Toward God?

I am the most ignorant of men;
I do not have a man’s understanding.
I have not learned wisdom, nor have I knowledge of the Holy One.
Who has gone up to Heaven and come down?
Who has gathered up the wind in the hollow of his hands?
Who has wrapped up the waters in his cloak?
Who has established all the ends of the earth?
What is his name, and the name of his son?
Tell me if you know!
–Prov 30:2-4

There is a song that I often hear on Christian radio with the line, “Out of all the voices calling out to me, I will choose to listen and believe the voice of truth.” I hate that song. First of all, the style of it does nothing for me, but hey, you can’t win them all. The real issue is that every time I hear it, I just can’t help thinking, “For God’s sake man! We’d all listen to the truth if we bloody knew which voice it was!”

I began composing this post in my head one night over a month ago, as I lay in bed. I had come to a point where I simply no longer felt like I had any particularly compelling reason to pretend that I was a mature Christian. I have constantly imagined my friends and family watching me, wondering how long I was going to keep up this “Christian” thing. “He’s a smart guy… surely he’ll come to his senses?” I had to show them, with my web page, with my life, I had to prove something… and there can be trouble when I set out to prove something.

I think I have a reasonably decent understanding of Christianity, for the time I’ve spent on it. I can tell you the gist of what the Bible says, more or less. I can tell you what Christians believe. Do I believe it? Eh, who knows?

Like I said, I was tired of pretending. Who am I kidding, to think anyone actually comes to this page looking for truth anyway? So, I was ready to throw in the towel. I keep hearing that you have to be broken before God can use you. I always felt it took a far bolder person than I to pray for that. But I was tired of this crap. If I needed to be broken, so be it. Let’s get this over with.

I was awoken early the next morning by a phone call, and the day after, I was on a plane to Geneva. I really don’t know what I believe anymore, but there is not an atheist in the world who can convince me that there ain’t something going on here that isn’t explained in any physics book.

It was dark when I awoke. Gradually, I began to step through a series of realizations:
1) The phone was ringing.
2) At this hour, it could only be my father.
3) I already knew what he had to say.
4) I had better answer it.

With that, I slid from the couch and reluctantly started my way across the room. I was only half way when the answering machine kicked in, but my sister was already there. We would come to get him, she said. Of course we would. The others should be told… surely they must have heard the phone? We crept down the hall together and stood in front of the door for a moment. I knocked, she spoke. The words were few, I don’t remember.

After putting on my jacket, I stepped onto the balcony and gazed out over the sleeping city. I chanced to look down and imagined, for an instant, the horrible sensation it must be to fall those nine floors to the terrace below. Then my grandmother was there, barefoot in her nightgown. That concerned me, for it was barely above freezing outside. It seemed like I had to almost push her back indoors. Anyway, it was time to go.

We drove to the hospital, my sister and I, where my dad had been camped for the last week. The three of us packed up the clothes, the food, the books and papers, the flowers and cards…

There was something else in that room, something that looked very much like my mother. But I knew that it was not my mother, for she had already gone.

Do you ever catch yourself just waiting for things to get back to normal? Only when you stop to think about it, you can’t quite pin down exactly which point in your life was “normal”, and even if you could, there’s no reversing the series of events since then.

Sometimes I wonder about time. Why does it only go in the one direction? Why must we walk through life backwards, only seeing where we’ve already been? Yet even so, I am constantly asking, “How did I get here?” or “Didn’t I used to…”

It must have been three months. No. It’s been nine. That’s something, I guess. Today I finished with my first College Year at Cal Poly. I must say, it was not all that I ever expected it would be.

There’s a lot of unfinished ideas that I have wanted to write about for awhile, but the longer I wait, the harder it gets. Time keeps going, bringing many changes in its wake. Especially now, even if I said the very words I wanted to say before, they would be coming from a completely different place. The ideas I was hoping to get down now seem to range from foolishly insignificant to wildly inappropriate.

Hence the silence.

I needed a number off my old phone today. Of course, since I haven’t used it in half a year, the battery is rather dead. But I plugged it in, and I’m hoping it will turn on eventually. Right now the screen just reads, “Will power on automatically.”

I sure wish I had a setting for Willpower on.

This was a post I had planned to write last summer but never quite got around to it. Later, I knew that there were two things that I wanted to mention, but I could not remember the second one at all… until today.

Over the summer, there was a small group from my church that frequented the Redlands Bowl. Inscribed over the stage is the phrase, “Without vision, a people perish.” Growing up in Redlands, I had occasion to read this a great many times. However, one evening, a speaker there mentioned that the phrase comes form the book of Proverbs. It does? WHERE? For at the time, I was actually reading through the entire book once a month, and never caught it. The problem, I discovered, is that I was reading Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint (Prov 29:18), which, I dare say, is not quite the same thing.

Mother is the word for God on the lips and hearts of children everywhere. This was one of the better lines from the movie, The Crow. In fact, if you do a Google search, you will likely find it attributed to Brandon Lee. This is wrong. First of all, the quote is in the comic book that the movie is based on, so it really ought to be attributed to the writer, James O’Barr. It turns out, this too is wrong. Also last summer, I was surprised to read that quote in Vanity Fair. (The book, not the magazine.) I don’t know exactly when it was written, but I believe that Thackeray was a contemporary of Dickens.

…Conferring with the flowers,
Consulting with the rain…

I would not be just a nothin’
My head all full of stuffin’
My heart all full of pain.
I could dance and be merry,
Life would be a ding-a-derry,
IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN

I have been considering making a final recording of all my old songs- for posterity and all. Yet, thinking through Puppet Game, The Art of Letting Go to Wasting and Last Night I Slept in the Garden, maybe chasing it down with A Secret – I have to ask, “Who would want to listen to this?”
(Those of you who are volunteering out of pure curiosity, put your hands down.)
The point is, these songs are all the same. The first three are all in Em (the lowest chord you can play on a guitar in standard tuning), the next is close by in F/Dm, and well, I’m not even sure about the last one, but it’s awful dark. All <LiM> tunes have a tempo of 100 bpm, of course, and since I don’t actually sing, I could probably mix and match any mumbled set of lyrics with any song.

One would need a pretty stiff drink, I would think, to sit through a whole cd of that drag.

I have gone to half a dozen or so Campus Crusade meetings. Twice, the message has been on the same Bible passage that I had read that very morning. Last week, Jon Rittenhouse, who argued “pro” in the debate I mentioned, was a guest speaker. He did not actually base his talk from any specific passage, but at the very end, he made a reference to Pascal’s Wager, which just happened to be the title of the blog post I had made earlier that same day.

So, I seem to encounter the same or similar coincidences repeatedly in the same place. A coincidence of coincidences, or a meta-coincidence, if you will. It’s times like these that I think that Someone is trying to tell me something.

What if I stumble? What if I fall?
What if I lose my step, and I make fools of us all?
–D.C. Talk

Earlier this month I happened to notice that my archives run from April 2004 to April 2005. Curious, I clicked on the former to find out that my first post was on April 23. Today. So it’s been a year. (I’ve said that before, haven’t I?) I’m constantly amazed at how the days and weeks, sometimes even the months, can fly by, but the years still take… a long time.

I started this website with the intention of posting various musings and stories that ought to be thought-provoking and interesting, whether you knew me or not. I made it a blog because I thought I would be more likely to post more often if all I had to do was write and push “Publish,” with all the linking and indexing taken care of automatically. I’ve been dismayed for some time that what I have actually produced is but a pale, impotent version of what I intended.

This too is vanity, and a chasing after wind.

Tuesday, the Round Earth Society and Campus Crusade for Christ, my two favorite clubs, sponsored a debate entitled Does God Exist?
I do not think I could be very effective in recapping the debate here, so instead, I will give a brief explanation of why I’m not an atheist.

The real issue for me is that as an atheist, I had no reason to get out of bed. If there is no God, or more generally, no higher power of any kind, then there truly is no purpose to anything. Staying in bed all day is ultimately as equally useful as getting up. Yet, for some reason, I did get up. Everyday. Even though there were a great many days when I would have rather not. Why? Well, ultimately, it feels better when I actually get up and do things. If I get to the end of the day and don’t feel that I have really accomplished anything, I feel like I have wasted the whole day, and it feels bad. So what? Why does that even matter? If there is ultimately no meaning to anything, why is it “better” to feel “good” than to feel “bad”?

At that point, the argument falls apart for me, and I can go no further. I know instinctively that “good” is better than “bad,” and, working backwards, I ultimately arrive at the conclusion that there must be a purpose for getting out of bed.

Before the debate, the President of the Round Earth Society stated that, despite what people think, they are not an “atheist” club, but a “free-thinkers” club, with the goal of being unbiased. Having been to a couple of their meetings, I would say that they are not doing a very good job.

I come from a scientific background, and I believe that there are things that are, and things that are not. I think that the very basis of science is that things behave in a certain way and not in another. So if one person says that there is a God, and one person says that there is not, they can not both be right. They could, of course, both be wrong, with the truth lying somewhere in between, or somewhere else entirely that neither of them had considered. Yet ultimately, I believe that truth exists. Now, if one gets to that point and look around, they might notice that we are surrounded by people who claim to know what that truth is. Is it not worth while to at least find out what they have to say? Who needs a lecture on an open mind now?

If it so happens that Christians are wrong, perhaps it really is true that “following God” is a total waste of time… but no more so than anything else.