Queen for a Day

We have a gentleman in my office who is from New Orleans. In celebration of Fat Tuesday and Mardi Gras, we had beignets and King Cake at work.

I found the baby in the King Cake, and that means I am Queen for a Day.

I told my co-workers that they could come around and swear fealty whenever they’re ready, but no one has stopped by yet.  I guess I have some beheadings to plan now.

Typos that aren’t words, but should be

My co-workers are constantly coming up with cool new words.  Bonus points if you invent a definition for them:
Exipartion
Oleoconduit
Affliatate
Subsidairies

Personal Jesus

I wrote a post for my opinion ‘blog, A House Divided, about how you can be a Christian and still believe in science, like evolution.

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback – positive and negative – about it since then.  The main complaint being that I appear to be picking and choosing which parts of the Bible I want to believe.

What I don’t say in that article or in my responses is that there’s a lot of the Bible that I question.  But I still believe in God, and Jesus, and consider myself a Christian.

My issue with the Bible is that it’s been filtered through dozens of languages and thousands of years of oral tradition, tightly controlled, first by the Jewish rabbis, then by the Catholic monopoly.  As I’ve asserted since I was in high school, it’s the word of God as interpreted by Man.  God may be infallible, but Man more than makes up for it.

And when I say those kinds of things, I know most people look at me and think, “What a terrible Christian,” but it’s how I feel.

I don’t always trust the Bible (Peter’s systematic denigration of women comes to mind, Jesus didn’t have that problem, but Peter codified it into Church doctrine still practiced today), and I don’t rely upon it as my sole source of faith.

I fully believe in the power of God and Jesus.  I believe in Him (when I say Him, I mean the collective Him, the trinity) and His continued existence and influence on the modern world.  I believe these things because I see them at work in my church, and I’ve experienced it first-hand in my own personal life.

I don’t need the Bible to reinforce that.

I do believe that there is much in the Bible that is true.  There is much in the Bible that is accurate.  I believe that the Bible can and should be used as a guide for how to live your life.  But nothing should be accepted without asking questions first.

God gave us our ability to think and reason.  Why would he suddenly expect us to throw those abilities out the window in favor of the words of men long dead and buried?  If you cannot defend your faith more effectively than just saying, “The Bible says so,” then how do you expect to sway the mind or touch the heart of a disbeliever?

Yeah, yeah, I’m a heretic.  I know.  Go get the brush and start the torches.  Bob has some rope in his garage.

So, how do I know it’s real?

There are a couple of incidents, but a few really come to mind.

Every two years, my church has a World Conference, where members from all over the world converge on our headquarters in Independence, Missouri for a week of business meetings, workshops, and worship services.  It’s exciting, fascinating, and quite moving.

Most services are held in the Auditorium, a huge oval-shaped, domed building.  The roof is copper, but age and weather have turned it green, and it dominates the Independence skyline, looking for all the world like a giant turtle (which is what we always called it).

When I was very young, like seven, we were at the opening service for the conference.  It’s huge.  The auditorium seats 5000 people, and it’s always packed to the rafters (and there’s usually two services that morning, so close to 10,000 church members show up).

We would always sit in the balcony, because we liked to be able to look out over everything.

It’s traditional to serve communion at this service (we normally only serve it on the first Sunday of each month).  It’s quite the logistical feat to serve communion to so many people in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time, so it’s kind of fun to watch.  Of course, I’m seven, so I’m bored.  But while I’m watching the priests snake their way through the throngs of people, I look across the auditorium and I see a figure, hovering sort of, above the balcony on the other side.

It didn’t look human.  It actually had no face at all and a strangely shaped head.  It blended in with the gray hue of the ceiling.  I didn’t see wings.  It was just floating there.  It almost seemed two dimensional.  But it wasn’t scary.  It filled me with a sense of peace, and curiosity.  I asked the family memebers on either side of me if they could see it, and they couldn’t.

It stayed there, I guess watching the service, but while I was distracted by standing and singing the closing hymn, it disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.

When I was talking to my mother and father about it, afterward, they did not tell me I was imagining things.  They took it seriously, and my mother actually suggested that I might have seen an angel.  Not the streaming glories from heaven, archangel with a firey sword type of angel, but a quietly observing a solemn experience, trying to be inconspicuous sort.

I know, it seems like a pretty big leap, but my mother trusted me.  I was not the type of kid (at that time at least) that made up crazy stories to get attention.  She believed that I saw what I said I saw.  I actually doubted it more than she did.  I have gone back, year after year, and sat in the same approximate spot, under similar lighting conditions, but I have never experienced the phenomenon again.  It was not an optical illusion, something was there.

I don’t know why I was given a glimpse of the other world.  But I do believe that this is what happened.

Fast forward several years, and I’m now a teenager.  I’m not a bad kid, generally.  I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I’m not sleeping around.  I am a depressed kid, though…  Not in an Emo-self-mutilator sense, but clinically depressed.

My father died, suddenly, when I was 14, his mother, just a few months later.  Several other close friends and family members followed, culminating in the death of my paternal Grandfather when I was 16.  These were the grandparents who lived around the corner when I was a kid, where there was always chocolate chip ice cream in the freezer, Sprite in the fridge, and Sunday lunch after church was at their house, with Grandma’s fried chicken and homemade bread and butter pickles.

And it was my Dad.  I shouldn’t have to say more than that.

I attended close to 20 funerals for people I knew personaly in the span of two years.

I was mad at God.  Not just mad, freakin’ pissed off, never speak to me again, furious with God.  No omniscient, omnipotent, kind, loving creator would allow this to happen.  No way.

So I dabbled in alternative religions.  I had a lot of friends who were neo-Pagan or Wiccan.  I bought books on the subject and read them, wore a crystal around my neck… but the whole concept was a little too silly for me.

I read up on Eastern religions, like Taoism.  Which I honestly loved for their poetry and simplicity.  I actually subscribe to several tenets of the Tao te Ching in my personal life, even today.  But finding a place to learn from others or to practice any Eastern religion in small-town Missouri was next to impossible, so it wasn’t a serious option.

Keep in mind, this whole time, I was still going to church and Sunday school every week, going through the motions of faith, even though I no longer had confidence in it.

One rainy night I was at home alone.  We lived in a very old, dilapidated house.  It had a leaky roof in several places.

My mother had long ago chosen to sleep on a couch in a separate room from my Dad because my father snored… a lot… and loudly.  After his death, she saw no need to alter the arrangement.

I was sitting on her couch/bed, watching television, when a new leak literally sprang to life above me.

I was so angry.  It was just so unfair.  She’d lost so much already, and now this?  Forced from her bed by a house falling down around our ears.  So I threw a ridiculous challenge out to God (like this was his fault), fix the leak, immediately, and I would believe in Him.  Fail to fix the leak, and I was giving up for good.

In the instant that the words left my lips, I saw exactly what needed to be done, not to fix the leak, but to redirect it, so it wasn’t dripping on the couch.

I looked up toward heaven, and declared, “That’s not fair, you cheated.”

I know what the skeptics among you are saying right now.  The answer was there all along.  God didn’t tell you what to do, you just saw it for yourself.

But it wasn’t like that.  It was a flash of insight.  One second railing, unable to see a solution, the next second calm, my eyes open, seeing exactly what needed to be done.

Underneath that clarity was the feeling that it was most definitely not an internal realization.  It was from an external source.

I have to imagine that this is what the still small voice that you’re supposed to listen for really sounds like.  Nothing.  Just a bolt of pure enlightenment.

Before anyone starts to seriously question my sanity – Please remember these incidents took place about a decade apart, and have not really been repeated since.  I’m not regularly seeing invisible people or hearing strange voices.

I don’t know why God chose to answer that particular challenge.  I’m sure He had His own reasons.  But I know what I felt, and my rather rude, rather impudent, rather heretical gauntlet was picked up and the challenge fulfilled.

Since that day, I have know that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be…  Secure in the knowledge that there is a God, that He does listen, but that His reasoning is not always going to make sense to you or me.

I am not perfect.  I have broken some pretty major rules in my lifetime…  Big 10 territory…  And if we really have to follow all the rules from Leviticus, I am screwed.

The Bible is a tool to figure out how you need to live to be a good Christian, but don’t be afraid to question what you read.