Personal Faith Experiences & Presbyterian: Mutually Exclusive Terms? Nah...

Mention "personal faith experiences" or "spiritual experiences" to a group of Presbyterians and odds are that some of them will, as we say in my neck of the woods, look at you all funny like. At least that's the impression I've gotten from almost 60 years as a Presbyterian.

They are not, however, mutually exclusive terms. All of us, as Presbyterians, have had them. We still do. Maybe some of us just still think it's a little uncouth to talk about them. Truth be told, I'm much more comfortable talking about personal faith experiences now than I used to be, even when I was serving as a pastor.

When I was in college — an evangelical Christian school in Columbia, SC — I was, to be honest, a bit put off by all the experiential language, by my roommate, classmates and speakers in chapel talking about these personal faith experiences. We never did that in my home church of First Presbyterian of Anderson, SC, much less in my home. I do think my Presbyterian birth and upbringing had a lot to do with that.

When I got to seminary it seemed we never talked of such things, our conversation, rather, being filled with ethics and apologetics and biblical/systematic theology and exegesis and polity and who was "liberal" and who was "conservative."

But yet, all of us have had — are having — personal faith experiences, or, if you prefer, spiritual experiences. If nothing else, my experience as a hospital chaplain confirmed that.

For us Presbyterians — well, we very often begin our religious life with a personal, very personal, faith experience. We are baptized; the majority of us as children.

Mine occurred way back in 1952 in the sanctuary of the First Presbyterian Church of El Paso, Texas. The Rev. Mr. George Burroughs placed a handful of water on my head as my mother held me and my father stood by watching. Regardless of what meaning we may impute to that act, it is personal, it has to do with faith, and it is an experience.

I often wish we Presbyterians had a ritual, practiced often, to remind us of what is often our first personal faith experience: our baptism. My more liturgically minded friends have the Asperges, during which, Sunday after Sunday, the priest or bishop, using the aspergillum, throws drops of holy water on the assembled worshippers while they sing a prayer based on Psalm 51. I always find that so meaningful when I join those "high church" friends for worship. Heck, we do good to have the Lord's Supper once a quarter, but that's for another discussion. When I recall, during that ritual act, my first personal faith experience of baptism, my sense — not my knowledge of, but my experiential awareness of God's presence — my sense of relationship with God is invariably enhanced.

So yes, personal faith experiences, spiritual experiences, are part of the warp and woof of Presbyterian life. We begin with one; we have them throughout our lives; more often than not, we end with one. And I'm inclined to think we're becoming a little more comfortable talking about them.

David R. Gillespie lives in Greenville, SC, and is engaged in the private practice of providing pastoral caregiving and spiritual direction for Christians who feel neglected or marginalized by the Church. He is a member of North Anderson Community Church, Presbyterian (USA). He's also the author of numerous essays, articles and book reviews, with a few short stories and poems thrown in, and blogs regularly at Southern Fried Faith.

Call for Contributors!

To avoid blogger fatigue, we like to shake things up from time to time here at the unofficial PC(USA) Blog.

Are you interested in contributing for a while? You can welcome new members weekly, write a feature about your experience with the church, talk about seminary life, or discuss another church-related topic that specifically interests you.

Are you willing to take on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly commitment?

In particular, we'd love to find someone new to post a weekly Lectionary Ruminations piece.  Mark Baker-Wright has done a great job for the past year and a half and is ready from some well-deserved time off.

Shoot us an email at pcusablog@gmail.com if you're interested in helping out for a bit!

Children's Bible

Recently, my wife and I started reading to our two girls from their Children's Bibles every night. Our kindergartner is in Logos now, so we thought that reading the same Bible that she's studying there would be good reinforcement. The girls both seem to be taking very well to a Bible story or two every night.

I've found it pretty interesting how Bibles for young children ("young" as in board books) tell some of the key stories from the Bible and what language they use. A couple of interesting observations from the first few books / pages:

• In general, the naming of God uses gender neutral language. Many more "God"s than "He"s.
• Adam and Eve both just happened to eat the apple from the tree. There's nothing to suggest that the snake told Eve and Eve told Adam. Just, the snake said "you should try it" and Eve did and Adam did.
• There are no qualms talking about death. God clearly asks Abraham to sacrifice his son. Joseph's brother clearly leave him for dead.

I can imagine that there could be a lot of controversy over anything that an author does in retelling Bible stories at a young child's reading level. It's also a very important job! If other studies on learning are any indicator, we develop some fundamental beliefs very early in life. How we talk to our children about the Bible is likely to have a huge impact on their development of faith and beliefs.

How To: Apologize

I apologize for missing my weekly Tuesday Personal Faith Experience post this week. (You'll note, though, that I back-dated this post just to make sure it showed up under Tuesday. I'm really writing this at 1:00 AM on Wednesday.)

So inspired, this post is about the act of apologizing.

I did a quick search on how to apologize, and was going to reference some of that material here. There's so much information, though, that I thought I'd just link to the Google search results instead.

With regard to my own views on apology, I've posted in the past that I used to have a hard time with prayers of confession. I think that my ego and fear of being something less than what I thought I was used to get in the way of confessing my short-comings. As if, confessing something out loud would somehow make me more guilty than I already knew I was. Strange perhaps.

Ironically, I am a very apologetic person in other contexts. It is a very important point of contention and position of power for many people, though. I'm not sure what other non-apologizers avoid apologies. Here are some ideas, though.

• Admitting you've made a mistake announces it to everyone, including those people that wouldn't have otherwise known you'd made a mistake.
• Admitting you've made a mistake is simply a sign of weakness.
• Admitting you've made a mistake emphasizes the mistake and makes it worse than it really is.
• Admitting you've make a mistake is an overt act of asking for forgiveness, when you may not think you deserve it.
• Admitting you've made a mistake is unnecessary because everyone already knows you've made a mistake.
• Admitting you've made a mistake opens up the opportunity in conversation for someone else to criticize or scold you for something you already know you did wrong.
• Admitting you've made a mistake represents a deeper deficiency in your whole self.

I'm sure there are others. As I think through those, one great thing about faith is acknowledgment that many of those things are true in the eyes of God and God is OK with them.

• We are imperfect.
• God does forgive us.
• God knows when we make mistakes, even if no one else does.
• God loves us, unconditionally.

Amen.

Prayer

It's either that I'm getting older or that I'm more spiritual or that I have kids now. In any case, I find myself praying more that I ever thought I would. I remember that during my confirmation class (in the UCC church), we had to write some thoughts about our feelings and beliefs about faith. Mine took the form of a technical essay that posed uneducated hypotheses about such things as "what is the afterlife like" and "why we fold our hands when we pray."

I still don't know the answers to those questions. I do believe in the importance and value of prayer. Though I also believe that some prayer is good and some is not so good. I don't know the exact criteria, but I think that it probably depends on the context and the intent.

Here are three short stories about prayer:

For the sick
At 12 weeks, my wife and I took our still small 8 pound daughter to the hospital for open heart surgery. While in the hospital, prior to surgery, one of our pastors came, prayed, and gave us a prayer-shawl/blanket for her.

We sat with her through the night, watched the nurses prep her, and carried her down to the pediatric surgical area. My wife handed our tiny daughter to the anestesiologist, we kissed her, and walked away... I always assumed that we were walking away for good. After 5 hours of surgery, it was done and things had gone smoothly. I didn't think of it at the time, but we later learned that many were praying for our family.

As soon as we could, the prayer-shawl/blanket made it's way onto our daughter's ICU bed. 5 short days later, we were out of the hospital and at home again.

Over the next few weeks, we learned about all of the prayer circles and friends and pastoral prayers that had mentioned our tiny daughter. It means a lot to me to know that so many people were thinking about our family.


For the injured
Several years ago, a good friend in the church lost her husband in a sudden and violent crime. In the subsequent months, she received continuous pity from those around her. The crime made state-wide news and, as a result, our friend began receiving unsolicited emails of condolence from across the state stating that "I am praying for you and your family in this time of struggle." Few ever confronted her directly though. How does one politely ask "what's it like to have your husband die and to suddenly become a single-parent?" Instead, she got hushed whispers, warm "greetings," and a good deal of awkwardness.

The unrelenting attention and charity being offered eventually lead her to the painful decision that she must leave the church and her community in order to make any progress .


For the jobless
This past week, the company I work for "incurred a reduction in force" -- as we say. After the notifications were made, and those employees who did not lose their jobs recovered from the emotional intensity of watching their colleagues get walked out the door, one of the first reuqests was for a list of employees that were impacted to prepare a prayer list.


Blessings to all in need.

Bound, Bound, Bound and Rebound

As a parent of young children who are moving through development stages so quickly, I'm often amazed at how little perspective I have about the bigger picture of life. There are times that I really struggle with whatever challenges we're facing as parents. At those times I think to myself that things are horrible, are a struggle more often than not, and that this phase might NEVER END! And in direct contrast, when my kids do things that warm my heart and make me glow, I know in my heart that they're the perfect gift from God. I'm not truly bipolar. I have learned during my brief 5 years of parenthood and spiritual growth to remember that life comes with ups and downs.

This weekend, we went together as a family to see the latest Disney Pixar animated film, Up!. It reminded us how much we like the Pixar Shorts. In fact, we have a DVD collection of them. One of our favorites, because of both the relevant message about weathering the ups and downs of life (and, for my pride in my childhood home state's unofficial mascot, the jackalope character) is a short story called Boundin'.

Enjoy this for your somewhat non-traditional Tuesday devotional.

Bible Study & Fellowship

I'm not surprised to see how excited I am about my church's upcoming Bible study. Based on my experience with Bible study before this spring, though, I am surprised to see how many people are attending! Maybe it's the format:

6:00 PM
Delicious home made dinner, served family style, in our cloisters / gathering space. (Including dessert! All for an insanely small suggested donation.)
6:30 PM
Clean off tables to nearby dish carts.
Drop off the kids in the nursery for play-time.
Move into chapel for a lecture/conversation style Bible study.
7:45 PM
Pick up kids.
Hope they fall asleep on the way home, but if they don't it's past their bed time, anyway, and the bed time routine starts up right away when we get home.

Our attendance has been between 50 and 80 people. I think the fellowship of dinner and the setting in our new chapel make for a surprisingly intimate conversation at a group of that size.

Are there other styles or augmentation of Bible study that seem to attract large groups of people?

Spread the Word to End the Word

...not The Word. The r-word.

President Obama made a controversial comment as Jay Leno was giving him polite praise for working to improve his bowling skills. Some people saw the comment as "people in Special Olympics are bad bowlers;" and some saw it as "we praise effort in Special Olympics, not an absolute measure of achievement."

I believe that, as a Christian, I'm asked to "praise effort" as a general course, not just in the case of those that don't perform at a level generally accepted as typical or successful. I love watching my young, intellectually disabled daughter try to learn and do new things, even when she isn't successful, even when she's 2+ years behind her peers. It is frustrating. Sometimes sad. Sometimes scared. Every single time, though, she deserves my praise for the hard work and effort she put into trying. Only when she doesn't try am I disappointed.

The same goes true for those that we sometimes declare as successful or label overachievers. If they aren't pushing themselves to achieve their fullest potential, then they aren't contributing to their fullest. I believe that is what God asks us to do - our best and our fullest. We when do, we should praise each other for that as well - not just for the achievement; but also for the effort, dedication, inspiration, and courage that lead to the achivement.

Pandering or PR

In the past couple of years, I've had a few of experiences with church PR that have made me jealous -- and made me wonder if I should be jealous of another church's PR skills or if they're just pandering to a particular audience:

The first was the UCC comma logo, and the motto "God is still speaking." I love the message of a living word and world in which God is still working with us and continually giving us new experiences to help us understand the message. The oversized comma makes an easily recognizable, powerful, and very simple logo that is easy to produce and very versatile. You see commas every where you look!

The United Methodist church up the street has a "progressive" service that they refer to as Ignite. I've never been to the service and don't know if I agree with the message or not, but they've done an outstanding job marketting it. They have a great logo and a powerful, single-word message that seems exciting!

And today, I got a provocative flyer in the mail today about the opening celebration of a new church in St. Louis that really spoke to me. It simply says "church." with the "ur" offset with a different color scheme. So, the message is "u r church." I don't know much about this non-denominational movement either, but I do know that it caught my attention enough to make me visit their website and post this message.

This kind of PR excites me. The contrasting feeling I get, though, is one that hesitates to believe that some of these can possibly be backed up by a sound system of faith and beliefs. I want faith that I have to chew, not faith that melts in my mouth. If a church is putting so much energy into the face they show the outside world, can they possibly be putting enough energy into understanding and practising?

Do I have the wrong impression of churches that put that much energy into PR? Are there examples of really solid, hard-working, learning/service focussed churches that have also been very successful from a formal PR perspective?

Fireproof

Our Sunday school class happens to be a group of 30-40 something couples, most of us with young kids. This year, we've been using a marriage enrichment program for our curriculum and, as part of that, decided to do a movie-night where we all watched Fireproof together.

If you aren't familiar with the film, it's the story of a young couple struggling to understand what it means to be in a covenant marriage together. To be honest, I was very unsure of what the quality of the movie would be and how well I'd be able to hear the message amidst any politics or faith that might be a bit too conservative for me, personally, to identify with.

I was right about the quality of the acting, with the exception of less than half a dozen main characters who were excellent actors. Rather than being a distraction, though, the fact that all of the actors were real people (mostly church and community members) impressed me greatly. Likewise, the message had just the right tone for me to really identify with it.

It was a excellent movie with an excellent message for anyone in a covenant relationship. I don't even think that you have to be having a rough time with your marriage or be struggling with issues to get something out of the film. I highly recommend it!

As a quick preview - here's a light hearted "cliff's notes" version of the film that the actors and director put together as a "refresher." It makes an hilarious preview, but is even better if you've already seen the film.

JESUS

I'm in IT management and that means I spend some of my time meeting with account representatives from staffing/contracting companies. It's nice because they always take me out to lunch at places I wouldn't typically go for lunch. Not Ruth's Chris, but more than I'd typically spend on lunch.

A couple of years ago, I was chatting with one of these account reps over lunch and we started talking about our church lives. I mentioned that I'd just gotten back from a mission trip to southern Mississippi, following hurricane Katrina. It was such an incredibly fulfilling trip and I really felt like I was able to do even just a little something to help the people whose lives were (and still are) devastated.

My lunch guest reciprocated with her "me, too" story about a mission trip that she had coming up to Costa Rica. She told me all about the hotel that she and her husband were going to be staying in (in Mississippi, our accommodations were military tents) and how proud she was of the clever service that she would be able to provide the people of a nearby village: salvation.

"See," she explained to me. "There's a local man in our church who makes these 'JESUS' road signs."

I'd seen those (like the picture in this post) around.

"He's making some especially for my mission trip." Big smile on her face. "What's really clever, is that he's making some that have a Bible verse in Spanish on the back! They wouldn't be able to be saved if it were in English."

I tend to find that kind of language "being saved" uncomfortable. So, I changed the subject to the kind of mission work we did in Mississippi and opened the door in our conversation for her to respond with the mission work they'd be doing. All I ever got from her was how they'd be sharing the story of Jesus Christ with the people of this small town. I hope everyone found Jesus somewhere along that journey.

It reminds me of one of my father's favorite jokes:
"Have you found Jesus, yet?!"
"Found Jesus? I didn't know he was lost!"

Liberation

In my own personal faith journey, one of my favorite revelations has been to see the presence of God in my life as a source of liberation -- in particular liberation from fear. If we trust in the fact that God is always with us and that God loves us, then there's no reason to fear what might be.

Some people sometimes abdicate responsibility for their own actions with the flawed explanation that "if God didn't want me to do it then why would God let me do it?" What they don't see is that God has empowered us to make our own decisions. We're expected to make choices in an effort to be as Good as we were created. We're also expected to make mistakes, and this is where God's presence can liberate us from fear. We are expected to make mistakes... and it is OK to make mistakes... God forgives us and will always be there to show us another path. If there weren't hope, then fear would rule. But with God, there can always be hope, and there's no need for fear. Liberating!

Some people sometimes translate God's presence into "God won't give you more than you can handle." From the outside, that sentiment sounds very empowering: with God by your side, you can do anything! From the inside, though, it can actually evoke the opposite response when you're in a position that you know you can't handle.

Nearly six years ago, my wife and I learned that our daughter would have Down Syndrome and would require open hear surgery within the first 6 months of her life. Fear. Uncertainty. Shock. Wow! I'd never experienced anything like that before in my life, and haven't since. My wife and I clung to each other for guidance and confidence and love and comfort. We clung to our families of origin. We clung to our church family and friends. And we're doing fine, I think.

When people would come up to us and tell us that they thought we were such strong, brave, wonderful people; would tell us that they know they wouldn't be able to handle the situation we're in; and that God wouldn't give us more than we could handle -- we smiled politely and said "thank you." Then when those same people walked away and left us alone we give each other one of those knowing looks. There's nothing special about us. We couldn't do this on our own. It isn't because God wouldn't give us more than we could handle. It's because God gave us a community that loves and supports us.

The lesson for me has been - when you're on the outside of a fearful or uncertain situation, platitudes aren't appropriate; you need to step up and help. I see God's hope as people.

Achieving Perfection

This is the reprint of an advent reflection distributed at my workplace. Credit goes to Linda Mesenbrink at Mercy Health System. I've found the message and sentiment very relevant in a lot of ways over the past couple of months since I first read it. I hope you do, too.

Achieving Perfection

There are two classical concepts of perfection, one Greek and the other Hebrew. In the Greek ideal, to be perfect is to have no deficiencies, no faults, no flaws; it means to be completely whole, true, good, and beautiful. To be perfect, then ,is never to sin.

The Hebrew ideal of perfection is quite different. In this mindset, to be perfect simply means to walk with God, despite our flaws. Perfection here means being in the divine presence, in spite of the fact that we are not perfectly whole, true, and beautiful.

Our concept of holiness in the West has been shaped by the Greek ideal of perfection. Hence, holiness has been understood as a question of measuring up to a certain benchmark. Such a view is not without its merits. it is a perpetual challenge against mediocrity and laziness: we are always invited to something higher. But such a concept of perfection also has a nasty underside. When perfection means measuring up, we find it hard to forgive ourselves and others for not being God. We carry around a lot of discouragement, guilt and lack of forgiveness because of this.

What God asks is that we bring our helplessness, weakness, and imperfection to him. Like a good parent, he understands that we will make mistakes and disappoint him and ourselves. What he asks is simply that we share our lives with him and that we let him help us when we are powerless to help ourselves.

When perfection means measuring up, we find it hard to forgive ourselves and others.

Inauguration Speech as Prayer of Confession

It's hard for me to imagine now, but I very clearly remember a time when I resented the weekly Prayer of Confession. In my head, I thought:

You know what - I'm a good person and I'm doing the best that I can. All God asks of me is to do my best, and since I'm doing that, there's no reason for me to be reciting this guilt-laden prayer of confession. I've got nothing to confess; nothing to apologize for.

I like to think that 5 years later, maybe I'm a little wiser: My wife and I have shared challenges in our marriage. I've served 3 years as an elder. I have one daughter (who I was convinced wouldn't survive open-heart surgery as a 12 week old) who is registering for kindergarten tomorrow and another daughter who just turned two years old (and asked for fireworks at her birthday party!)

I think I've learned something about humility over the past few years. I've learned at least enough to realize that a prayer of confession isn't about disclosing to God all of the bad things that you've done. For me, it's about rededicating myself to doing what I think God is asking me to do, and to repent (re-think) the decisions I have made in anger or in haste.


Hearing the new President's inauguration speech made me think that we, as a nation, are also growing wiser as we move through the challenges and joys of life, and that we understand the value of the prayer of confession. I'll paraphrase with a few key quotes:

Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.

...the time has come to set aside childish things...

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

The me of several years ago would have said, I'm doing the best I can considering the circumstances. There's nothing to confess. It isn't my fault that the economy is cruddy and that we're at war. Why should I confess anything.

The me of today says that we all have cause to confess and to repent - because we have hope.

Puppet Ministry

Our church recently gained two new members who are trained and experienced puppeteers and are interested in starting a puppet ministry at our church. I haven't seen much puppetry, but I'm excited by the idea. It seems a little hokey, but I can absolutely picture our minister bantering from the pulpit with a puppet at the lectern across the way; or at our Logos evenings; or at our Senior High Talent show.

At the same meeting a new committee member introduced our staff person to the majesty and glory of Microsoft Excel. The idea of doing our budgeting electronically (rather than on paper and having an admin key it into the computer) was thrilling to this other staff member.

It's amazing the gifts that we bring to the world.

Our church does a great "gifts assessment" survey to help you identify your gifts. When my wife and I joined the church, we took our assessment and filled out a form indicating which activities in the church we were interested in. Well, I was "interested in" nearly everything our church does, so I checked all the boxes. Our staff member in charge of welcoming new members luckily recognized my misinterpretation of the question before I was contacted by every single committee in the church.

If Programming Languages were Religions

I realize that this post has fairly small niche audience, but for those of us geeks who also enjoy a little scripture with our code, here's a great post:

If Programming Languages were Religions

The PCUSA doesn't get a specific mention, but I'd suggest that maybe Python is also a good candidate for the PCUSA because it, unlike many languages, has specific rules about indentation and formatting to keep the code decent and in order.


On a barely related note I was thinking recently thinking about church finances and wondering how much money could be saved across all the churches in the PCUSA if we were to share some IT infrastructure. If every church spends $500/yr on web hosting, for instance, that would give the denomination a $5M/yr budget (across 10,000 churches) for a common hosting solution. Something tells me that $1M/yr would probably do it, and provide a more modern solution than most churches have today. Same might hold true for other technology solutions:

• Website hosting, including multimedia
  
• Email
• Conference calling
• Application hosting (finance, attendance, budgeting)

Why not?

Brrrrrr

Here, schools were closed today because of the cold weather and drizzly stuff falling from the sky. It was only down to 16 degrees. At my parents' home in Casper, WY it was -11.... -50 with the wind chill!! Brrrr. Yes. But Christmas is about cold and snow.

We have some wonderful family friends that live in Australia. Christmas isn't about snow, there.

It's amazing what an isolated view of Holidays and seasons we have sometimes.

Does Santa have to be a white guy with a big beard?
Why doesn't Santa look more like St. Nicholas?


I have a co-worker who is raising his children Jewish. The 7 year old isn't familiar with the Jesus story, yet. They were driving around looking at Christmas lights the other day and she said to her mom, "Look! Those people have some kind of little house in their front yard. It must be for their dog."

I guess I can imagine a clever Garfield cartoon where Jesus is depicted as a dog, and Garfield represents a religiously insecure artist's depiction of how modern society is neglecting and abusing Christ...

In contrast, my daughters got to celebrate Jesus' birthday at Sunday School this week. I'm not sure they get the significance of Jesus, but they definitely get the significance of birthdays! Cake!

Religion, Philosophy, Mathematics, and Science

Sometimes, I wish that I'd taken broader studies in school. As the only engineer in my "Argumentation" class, I successfully convinced the professor that Computer Science (CS) 101 should be part of every well rounded liberal arts education. (If you aren't a student of CS, please note that CS101 has nothing whatsoever to do with how to use a personal computer. It's a class on logic and programming theory.) At times, I find myself wishing I'd taken more classes in philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, though -- not to mention theology and religion.

Times very much like the past two days. A gentleman by the name of Daniel Slack, from New City Fellowship church in Chattanooga, TN, forwarded some blog posts that's made on the nature of faith, belief, doctrine, truth, and what is required to be Christian.

I'd like to take a minute to expand on some conclusions I came to from reading this post on The Algebra of Peace. One of my challenges in reading this article was the definition of "truth," hence my desire to go back to school and study philosophy a bit more. In lieu of another $40,000 in student loans, I relied on the Wikipedia discussion on truth. Very interesting.

In Daniel's blog post, he posits the following definitions:

Fact is a piece of information about circumstances that exist or events that have occurred.

Truth is not only a fact that has been verified, but also has an unconditional agreement with doctrine, with absolutely no contradiction that could be disputed in regard to translation or evidence.

Belief is an impression: a vague idea in which some confidence is placed

Faith is loyalty or allegiance to a cause or a person

Doctrine is a code of beliefs or "a body of teachings" or "instructions", taught principles or positions, as the body of teachings in a branch of knowledge or belief system.

I tried to understand those definitions in light of how I personally tend to think through what I do and don't believe about faith and religion. Here goes:

First, beliefs are creations of humanity, entirely of our own conception and choosing. I come up with an idea or hear something someone else says, and I can choose to believe it or not. As such, the collection of my experiences drives the beliefs I evaluate for selection into my personal doctrine. That is, based on my personal experiences, there are lots of things that I could choose to belief. My personal doctrine is defined by those things that I choose to believe.

An important thing to remember is each of is constantly imagining, evaluating, and either selecting or rejecting various beliefs into our own doctrine.


Second, facts are irrefutable observations about the past or ideas that are such simply through logical definition. "A circle is round" is a fact entirely because a circle is defined as a shape which has the property of being round. We could define a circle differently, but we don't. It is logically irrefutable. Likewise, "I woke up this morning" is also a fact because I wouldn't be writing this post if I had not woken up.

An important thing to remember about facts is that they are also always being created as time move on, as every event that happens represents a concrete fact.


Therefore, to say that "truth is not only a fact that has been verified, but also has an unconditional agreement with doctrine, with absolutely no contradiction that could be disputed in regard to translation or evidence" suggests something about the nature of a doctrine the hopes to be regarded with the attribute of truth. Remember that we've defined a doctrine to be a collection of beliefs. If we strive for doctrine founded on truth, then any beliefs that refute a known truth have to be eliminated from our doctrine, or set of beliefs. That is to say, we can't hold to beliefs that are contradictory to facts.

The fact that we can always imagine and create new beliefs as our experiences change, and we also continue to experience and understand new facts... it seems logical to conclude that doctrine is under continuous change. It can include beliefs that we choose to evaluate against the facts that we experience and understand; and must reject beliefs that are refuted by truth.

My conclusion is that life is all about the journey of new beliefs and facts straining against each other to define who a person is. It isn't about who you are, but who you were and will be.

All Rocks Go to Heaven

This would have been better to post about during the height of the campaign season. Still worth a laugh, though.

Presbyterian vs. Catholic church sign debate.

I didn't do enough research to figure out if the signs were made and photographed collaboratively, or if the pictures are faked (note that the cars in the background and lighting angle never change). Still an interesting way for two churches to debate over theology -- we have Methodists and Catholics nearly within spitting distance in our community!!

That said, my favorite local sign is the one that appears near the end of the month outside the nursery down the street from our house: "...Located 1 mile East of the speed trap." Unfortunately for speeders, the sign only faces the East-bound traffic.

Writings

It's November again, which means the leaves are beautiful where I live and the temperature is getting back down to "normal." It's also National Novel Writing Month, which means that my wife is busy working on a novel, and I'm substitute teaching our Sunday School class on marriage. This week: "What Men Wish Women Knew about Men." The answer (in part)... Ephesians 5:21-33.

If you aren't familiar with those verses, they contain the infamous "wives must submit to their husbands" line. Huh. I think I got the short straw.

I've done a fair amount of internet research on this and have yet to find anyone that can provide me with a reasonable way to get in touch with this message that I hear as sexist and take offensive with. I found several explanations that wanted to tell me the message was "husbands are supposed to be in charge" and that "that isn't sexist; it's just what the Bible says." I found a number that say "it's just a way for Paul to provide a relevance of his message to the practices of the time" (which were sexist).

Since I'm not entirely comfortable with just "throwing out" parts of the Bible to suit my fancy - I feel like there's got to be a deeper understanding.

One thing that I've considered is the idea that the real message to focus on is the fact that Paul is writing about the relationship between Christ and the Church. That's of his purpose in writing the epistle, at least.

Any thoughts to help me out with my struggle on this scripture?