by Wendy Elizabeth Middleton
For God is not a God of disorder but of peace. 1 Corinthians 14:33
I have been researching the history of isms. Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Baptism… Actually I started by looking up the Puritans and why they came to America. Religious Freedom led me through the different isms and why they became chasms. Which led me to start thinking about why I believe what I believe.
My mother introduced me to the Bible and the Bible introduced me to God. But I don’t believe in God just because my mother told me that I should. I was raised in the Baptist church and it has always bothered me that I don’t have a ‘come to the pulpit’ testimony of sudden conviction. Honestly I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t rock solid sure that God was in the room with me, even when I was doing something that I would rather He not notice. I was also raised in an ‘evolution proves that God didn’t create the world’ school. And again, honestly, I cannot remember a time when I didn’t question the ‘facts’ of evolution.
The question is why?
Right Brain: God makes sense and men make mistakes
The answer is that God has always made sense to me even when, or especially when, the world does not. I find pre-knowledge in the Bible concerning things that the world has only recently figured out. Pig meat is the big example. Pigs and humans share diseases. Their bodies react to things in much the same way that ours do. The prohibition against pig meat came long before the knowledge of germs and viral transmissions, not to mention cholesterol. Pre-knowledge argues for a something knowledgeable.
Men make mistakes. All through school the earth kept getting older. The textbooks were filled with ‘possibly’ ‘probably’ and ‘the experts agree’ but the experts in one textbook did not agree with the experts in the next. I learned early to take human ‘facts’ with a grain of salt.
Then I learned about Galileo and the Inquisition. Galileo was persecuted for proving, mathematically that the Earth revolved around the Sun. I don’t remember the textbook but I do remember the sentence: “The church is wrong,” because at the time I thought “no, the church was wrong, in that instance but ‘is wrong’ implies that it is still wrong, or is always wrong.”
That’s when I learned about the fallibility of interpretation. The men who interpreted the Bible were wrong and the author of the textbook was wrong in his interpretation of the meaning of the facts. Or to give the author the benefit of the doubt perhaps he just miswrote.
Around the same time as I had this epiphany I learned about the subconscious, which records everything and accepts it as true, and the conscious which filters, analyzes and makes connections with the raw data that the subconscious has recorded. Problems arise when things dumped into the subconscious are never evaluated by the conscious, they are simply rolling around in the mind, accepted as true, and sometimes they bubble up to the surface in thoughtless ways.
That is why a victim of abuse becomes an abuser. For this person abuse is normal. That is also why not every victim of abuse becomes an abuser. For this person abuse is evaluated and condemned.
I began to evaluate everything I read, everything that I was told, everything that I believe to be true. I read the textbooks. I read the Bible. The Bible makes more consistent sense to me than the textbooks, especially when I compare one book of the Bible to another, and compare one textbook to another.
Now, having deliberately accepted the Bible as true, I evaluate everything else in the light of that truth.
That is my right brain, logical reason.
The Left Brain: Connect and disconnect
But the more compelling reason is left brained, the intuitive side of me, the part of me that sees connections between a butterfly in Africa and a hurricane in the Atlantic (Chaos Theory). Or the disconnect between the biggest single population segment (the Baby Boomers) deciding that if they collectively sneezed they could move the world – and failing to move the world with a sneeze.
I was born at the end of the Baby Boomer age. I spent my childhood watching an entire generation drop acid, drop out, and work hard to tear down every institution they could get their hands on without any clear notion of what to do once the institution was gone. It seemed to me that they were forever replacing something with – nothing.
The Founding Fathers tore down the institutions under which they lived, but they also had a clear idea of what they wanted instead. The Baby Boomers never did. Their ideas were nebulous “Peace, man” which is great as long as ‘the man’ isn’t a tyrant who has no interest in peace.
Flowers have no Power
I watched a wide-eyed teen place a flower in a loaded gun. Three days later a gun just like it fired into the crowd at Kent State and five students died. That flower had no power to stop that gun.
Thousands of college students protested the war with sit-ins around the White House. They risked nothing by doing this; they changed nothing by doing this. Civil rights protesters staged sit-ins in ‘White Only’ establishments. They risked being beaten or hanged. Martin Luther King advocated peaceful demonstrations and died for his beliefs. They changed the law of this land.
Connect and disconnect. It is the difference between standing for something and falling for anything.
So what, in all of this, made me so certain of God?
I grew up angry in an angry world. The generation that fought World War II, a generation that went to war to fight for freedom, raised a generation that waged a war against – war. They went to war and seemed to be fighting for – nothing.
Literally, it seemed to me that they wanted to sit around wasted and do nothing! Build nothing! Stand for nothing! It isn’t as simple as that but then I was only seven years old when the Kent State Massacre took place. This is the world I saw then, it is the world I see now.
Heroes and Superheroes
There were no heroes in my young world. Superman, Batman, Captain America, Sergeant York, Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, these grew out of the Great Depression and World War II. They fought the Nazis and carried America through a World at War. They stood for Truth, Justice and the American Way.
Sergeant York, Winston Churchill, and Douglas MacArthur were real men. Do you know why they were heroes then? Do you know who they were? Real heroes are forgotten and the superheroes Superman, Batman, and Captain America are all tortured souls now, dark and brooding.
Our heroes have become American Idols; they walk down runways and pose for photo ops. Where is the hero who saves the day? The hero used to do the right thing and get rewarded for it. Now the superhero still does the right thing but it seems that he is always losing something of himself, something precious.
Jesus has always been my hero. He is the man I look up to. He is the man I want to be like. He chose to die a horrible death so that I wouldn’t have to. AND HE LIVES to raise my life form the angry muck of existence to the hights of heaven.
The world wants to take something and turn it into nothing. God took nothing and built the world. It is the difference between Chaos and Order. I choose Order. Right brain – Left brain, both agree order is better.
Why do I believe? Because God makes sense to me. Because without Him I would still be in an angry brooding place of despair. The world hasn’t changed. But I have. What I learned growing up was that I cannot change the world by yelling at it, but one person can make a world of difference, not with anger but with peace. Jesus showed me that. Martin Luther King lived it out in my lifetime.
Simple – Ain’t – Easy
Sometimes the cost is everything
Wendy
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