I Had To Get A New Set Of Glasses

Without getting too bogged down in the details, I was having problems with the book they called The Bible.  Its local advocates claimed that God was somehow responsible for its contents and that He had chosen to reveal a part of Himself and of His will to people through it.  God did not appear be a very effective author because some parts of His book did not make sense to me.

The Bible claimed that God could not lie, yet certain of its passages contradicted what I knew for a fact to be true.  Other parts seemed to contradict one another.  If God can do anything, then how is it not possible that He might lie? 

Perhaps the most obvious example of The Bible's apparent flaws, to me anyway, was its claim that Jesus had said that it was more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35).  In my seventeen vast years of experience, I never had found that to be true.  I always enjoyed receiving gifts.  I found even a modest amount of pleasure in receiving clothes for Christmas or my birthday presents.  I certainly found that more satisfying than than giving away anything. 

My simple mind offered only three possible solutions to this dilemma:  (1) Jesus was wrong; (2) The Bible had not accurately recorded Jesus' words; or (3) there was a very slim chance that I might not be one hundred percent correct.  The last of those options was the least likely to apply because I was absolutely certain of what I had seen, heard, felt and known up to that point and all of those things screamed to me that this part of The Bible had to be wrong. 

I was troubled by the obvious limitations exhibited by any deity who was not be able to maintain the integrity of his own publication.  Since by definition an all powerful being could not be subject to limitations,  that lead me to focus my attention on the unlikely integrity of the book itself.  If God by definition was not fallible, then it was impossible for Him to author a flawed book.  If any portion of The Bible was unreliable, then I could perceive no way to have confidence in any of it. 

There are few events I am likely to remember until my dying day, but this almost certainly is one of them.  I was driving home from work one afternoon stewing over this dilemma when the thought occurred to me, "Why don't you try it and see what happens?" 

For perhaps the first time in my life, I acted on a good idea.  I gave and I liked it!  Giving did not have to mean that I had lost something.  Done with the proper attitude it could be a rewarding experience.  So I elected to give some more.  The results have far exceeded the pleasant feelings the practice generated.  The list of benefits is extensive and far exceeds the purpose of the present post. 

The primary point is that I actually had been wrong!  Me?  Of all people!  As absurd as it seemed at the time, what I knew I had seen, heard and experienced was not necessarily the most reliable source of information for making some decisions.  If this change of approach had been able to alter the results in one decision making area of my life, was there a chance that it might impact other areas as well?  My experience since that date suggests that the answer is yes!

I had been experiencing the world through lenses that were filtering what really existed and were allowing me to see less than the entire picture.  I did not know what I did not know.  This was my first step toward trying to identify and discard my self-limiting filters.  The process continues so long as I will remain active and attentive to it.

I Was Stuck On Stupid.

My mother did not tell me that story until I was much older.  I had no idea what was going on outside of the limited capacity any teenage boy can muster.  I did not know what Jesus himself had told my mother, so how could I care?   


What I did know was that I was terribly frustrated.  I wanted to be a good person.  I took no joy in harming others.  I was by nature empathetic.  At the same time I was naturally inclined to act in the most selfish manner available.  None of that made sense to me. 

The culture where I had grown up told me that good people obeyed the ten commandments.  I had no problem during my early teens with things like murder, adultery or worshiping grave images, but some of the lesser crimes on that list seemed unavoidable. 

The people at my church told me that Jesus had an important part to play in my well being and that he had died in my place.  Some well-meaning bozo showed me a place in The Bible where Jesus said I would obey his commandments if I loved him.  (John 14:15 and 23, perhaps.)  No matter how hard I tried, I could not follow his simple instructions. 

Like Bre'r Rabbit, I'd already stuck myself to this particular tar baby and there was no way of letting go.  I found it impossible to improve my performance and equally impossible to ignore my dilemma.  This thing was impossible to understand but equally impossible to ignore.  I was absolutely unable to avoid a handful of meaningless activities that, according to this Jesus, demonstrated my ingratitude for what he had done for me. 

How could any good person behave like that? 

Something had to give.  Nothing would.

What happened to me? I was apprehended!

To this point we have endeavored to discuss the problem, its causes, and my participation in both.  Paul Simon probably said it best in The Boxer in 1968: "Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."  We filter what we see and hear, giving attention to what we are predisposed to like or to believe while vanquishing the balance to categories labeled "Ignore" or "Explain Away."  Most of us invoke that process without being aware (a) that we are doing it or (b) the values and processes we are using to differentiate these types of information.  We do not know why we tend to lend credibility to certain information types and sources.  We just do it. 

Having tried to explain most of the filters I had subliminally accepted as I began to enter adulthood, it seems fair that I explain the one intentional filter I have chosen for straining observations in order to get to the truth as best I can perceive it.  Here it is: I have been apprehended by Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 3:12)


I was not looking for this thing to happen.  Like many others, I had a general feeling that there must be something more to life than what I was seeing, but I had developed an expectation that whatever it was must be found in those things I had learned to value.  Perhaps my least selfish perception at that point was that this greater thing might lie in helping others attain the same things I had learned to value.  I was living my life, doing all the things I had come to enjoy doing, when Jesus confronted me and gave me a choice. 

Some recoil at the suggestion that a person has to make a decision to avoid turmoil in whatever form it might exist.  I do not perceive the choice I was offered in that way.  I think that perception is a misleading result of the misunderstanding I suffered (and that perhaps many others still suffer) before I made the choice I was offered. 

I now understand that my problem at the time was that I had no options - no choice - before Jesus apprehended me.  I was doomed to the limits created by those limiting filters I had placed over my eyes, ears, head and heart.  I had no choice before Jesus gave me one. I was doomed to keep doing what I always had done and getting the same results I always had gotten. I was stuck and did not know it. I did not know what I did not know.

Jesus came to me and, in his own way, said, "Follow me and I will show you a better way." 

I am not suggesting that I am a relatively good person because I made this choice, nor am I arrogant enough to believe that the choice was offered to me because I was a relatively good person.  On the contrary, none of this started with me. 

In fact, I was totally unaware of the first evidences of this part of the story when they took place.  God was moving before I even knew that He existed.  Unlike many powerful and influential people, God is a gentleman.  He does not force himself onto anyone.  He asks permission.  He appears to respect each person's "right" to be left alone.  He does not bust down the door like the SWAT team. 

God sends his son Jesus, and Jesus stands at the door and knocks.  Evidently he also respects parental rights, because that is where the part of the story I do know begins: with my mother.  My mother relayed this story to me years later. 

Sometime before I turned five years old I almost died.  How it happened does not matter.  That it did happen does.  My older brother and I were the only two children our parents had at the time.  My mother's baby was about to die.  My mother prayed in the hospital waiting room with the unselfish love that perhaps only a mother can truly experience.  She prayed to God for her baby's life.  God answered.

I did not see or hear any of this.  I was knocked out in an operating room with tubes running in and out of me to and from who knows where.   When my mother prayed, Jesus appeared to her.  He told her I was not her child but his.  Then my mother did what perhaps only a mother could do.  She said, "Yes, Lord," and gave me back to him. 

None of this had anything to do with any good or evil I ever had done.  None of the credit or the blame could possibly lie at my feet.  I was not aware of it at the time and my mother did not tell me about it until many years later.  Many years after I had told my mother that I had met Jesus, she finally told me this story. 

A reasonable and responsible person easily could conclude that a desperate young woman could imagine almost anything with her child at death's door in the next room.  I certainly would not blame you if that were your reaction to this part of the story.  I would not ask you to take my word - or even my mother's word - that this story is true.  I would implore you, however, to keep an open mind.  Please try to remember that you don't know what you don't know.  Please keep your mind open to the mere possibility that such an event really could take place.  For your own sake, please do not reject it until you have collected some more information. 

Remember that the best evidence available at the time taught men that the earth was flat well into the 15th Century.  Everyone believed that time was constant until Albert Einstein proved that what everybody knew to be true was false.  Many people who know that "the theory of relativity" exists do not understand that time one of that theory's non-constant things. 

Please, keep an open mind.  That's all I ask.  What could that really hurt, anyway?

"Glenn Beck is a racist."

       - All of Glen Beck's detractors every day since July 28, 2009 



"Barack Obama is a racist."

          - Glen Beck, July 28, 2009

I disagreed with Beck when he said that.  I still disagree with him.  But I have listened to Beck explain his position several times and I can understand (a) that he did not draw that conclusion without having some evidence to support it and (b) why he might have reached that conclusion.  I have no reason to believe that President Obama is a racist.  Even if he is one, what real difference would that make.  Would that totally discredit every other word the man said or every political or social idea he supported? 

I'm not really sure why Glen Beck's detractors in the media think he is a racist.  I honestly stopped listening to most of those people long ago.  I have listened to why some of my friends think Beck is a racist.  I can understand (a) that they did not draw that conclusion without having some evidence to support it and (b) why they might have reached that conclusion.  Even if he is one, what real difference would that make?  Would that totally discredit every other word the man said or every political or social idea he supported? 

What does seem (to me) to make a difference is that, rather than engaging in an honest discussion about the very real political issues facing our country the people on both sides of all of those issues waste their time and ours bickering about things like this that might not exist and would not make any real difference if they did. 

Another thing I've noticed is that all the people who articulate a belief that one of those two men is a racists will defend the innocence of the other man with equal vigor.  A similar dynamic seems to be present with respect to almost every one of the issues (both the important and the not so important issues) that exhaust our nation's capacity to talk about our political and social differences.  We seem so intent on demeaning our opponents and defending the public figures who purport to reflect our existing thoughts and feelings that we have no mental and emotional energy left to contemplate the wisdom of our existing positions, much less how we came to land in those particular places. 
It seems to me that an open-minded person who is sincerely interested in discerning and understanding the truth of things would ask herself or himself a number of questions after making these observations.  Some of the more obvious questions might include:
 
How can two groups of people with no apparent learning disabilities with equal access to the same information draw such remarkably different conclusions? 
 
Does that apparent paradox reflect a healthy condition in our society? 
 
What, if any, conclusions could be drawn by the vehemence and polarization that seems rampant within our society? 
 
What if any of my existing perceptions and conclusions am I unwilling to relinquish in order to accurately and objectively divine the truthfulness of any of these issues or questions?  For that matter, can any person ever find the truth if he or she is not willing to abandon any existing conclusion, perception or fundamental assumption that refuses to yield to objective observation? 
 

Those last two might be the most important questions any person must ask upon realizing that he or she does not know what he or she does not know.  Those likely also are the two questions most neglected by every person who comes to that realization.

"If it feels good, do it."

         - Anonymous, circa 1968

"Turn on, tune in, drop out"

         - Timothy Leary, 1966

I suppose it was inevitable that sex, drugs, the sixties drug culture and drug music had to be mentioned somewhere in this process. Given a person with my dispositions and confessed background they seem almost mandatory.

My experience with any of those things other than the music was limited at most. Let's just say that the statute of limitations ran decades ago on any crimes of indulgence I might have committed and that I have tried to make personal amends to any individuals whose trust or personalities I might have violated. Up to the point that finally I partook of those forbidden fruits, however, their allure was ever present.

How could any young person not find appealing the suggestion that enlightenment and understanding could be obtained at the mere cost of a pill or a puff of smoke? Where could the harm be found in the comfort and fulfillment granted by the passionate embrace of another person who deems you a worthy candidate of her affections? Maybe that Bible they told me about in Sunday School banned adultery, but I wasn't married. If a person kept his consumption of mood and conscious altering substances under control, where did the Bible condemn those things?

Still I had some nagging sense that both were somehow wrong. Worse than that, I dreaded the disappointment my father would suffer when I eventually got caught. (I always got caught. I did not know then how fortunate I was to get caught. I just always did.)

While the youth of America frolicked all the way from The Summer of Love to the gruesome murder at Altamont, I suffered in a hippie hell of my own creation. Because I kept listening to the music and watching the movies and reading the books, I wanted to participate in all the indulgences those genres romanticized and glorified. At the same time something inside me held me back. I would like to think my reluctance was due to some virtue, but the real restraining power was nothing less than fear. Fear that I'd get caught. Fear that my father would be disgraced or humiliated. Fear that I'd go to hell. Fear of whatever other unknowns were out there. I was paralyzed by fear. Stuck in limbo wanting to tune into whatever felt good, doing it, and dropping out of the guilt associated with all those feelings.

It was at this point in my life that the vague, powerless message I heard at my church became almost less than useless to me. By this time my family had moved to a different congregation; one that at least had the good sense to teach that there were consequences to one's actions. If they ever explained how to deal with the guilty feelings associated with my past actions or how to get help avoiding the same mistakes again in the future, I never heard it. All I heard was "Guilty!"

In an environment like that I suppose it was inevitable that I eventually would give in to my baser desires. Absence might make the heart grow fonder, but abstinence only made me want all the more the things I could not have that others were enjoying.

My stint of unbridled self-indulgence was longer than it was deep, but it evntually was as thorough as I was able to make it. After a few years I thought I understood Solomon's words, "all is vanity." Unfortunately my dilemma was magnified. At that point I suffered the vanity and frustration of the emptiness my egocentricity necessarily generated but I also had accumulated a number of unhealthy habits along the way.

Keith Moon, who likely was the greatest drummer of the rock 'n roll era, already had gotten Peter Townshend's wish: "I hope I die before I grow old." Keith's body aged well beyond his years because he never found a way off of that same roller coaster. I was looking for a soft spot of ground where I might land relatively unharmed but I still could not muster the guts to jump out of the car.

I had proved the truth of the old Kinks' song, "Timothy Leary's dead." What a bummer!

Vanity, vanity. All is vanity. There is nothing new under the sun.

"Most people get their thinking in this generation like we tend to get colds,

through casual with complete strangers."

"We've got some world views, some philosophies we've got to get rid of. "
                                  
                           -  Stephen Mansfield, April 5, 2010



There is no way I can improve on that quote, but I will provide some information about its author.  Stephen Mansfield wrote the authorized biography of Derek Prince, perhaps the most important Bible teacher of the second half of the 20th Century.  Here is a link to his publisher's bio on him.  (How many people would have the guts to write books about the Faith of Barak Obama and about the Faith of George W. Bush?)  Here is a link to Stephen's website.

"A Shaolin priest can walk through walls.

"It is said that listened for he cannot be heard; looked for he cannot be seen; felt he cannot be touched."

                                             - Kung Fu the television series, circa 1972

I was raised in a mainline protestant church.  They taught me all the old Bible stories like Jonah and the whale, David and Goliath, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  I learned about Moses and the exodus of the children of Israel from their bondage in Egypt.  They taught me to sing "Jesus Loves Me" and the words to many traditional hymns.  There were a few people there who obviously loved me and everyone else with an unselfish love I could not comprehend.  By the time I was 13 or 14 I began to sense that something was missing. 

One day I something provoked me to read the story of how Moses was sent to confront Pharaoh.  Perhaps I'd seen a movie about the story that made me wonder about a certain part of what happened.  For whatever reason, I found the part of the story in Exodus Chapter 7 where Moses threw down his rod and it became a serpent.  The next couple of verses said that Pharaoh's magicians threw down their rods and they became serpents too.  Moses' snake ate the other snakes, but even a snake that could be eaten by a more powerful snake sounded a good deal more spectacular to me than whatever it was I was seeing around that church at that time. 

Even at that age I frequently found myself wondering what else was out there, what might be around the next corner.  I was just beginning to become aware that evil existed in the world.  I had experienced some disappointments.  Several friends had lost parents.  Many things did not turn out the way it seemed they should.  If God was good enough and big enough to turn sticks into snakes for Moses, why should he not be willing to do something similar for people today? 

I developed an expectation that there must be some sort of power in the universe, something more useful than the old stories and songs they taught me in Sunday school.  If God had been in the power business before, I saw no reason why he could not and should not be so now.  The people at my church either had no idea how to tap into that power or else they saw no need to grace me with their special knowledge.  Somewhere I had gotten the impression that shamen or other people who did wield this sort of power did exist in "the mystic east."  My ambition became to go there and study with those people and learn the knowledge of that power. 

Hindsight teaches me that my intentions at the time pretty much were all selfish.  I did not know any better.  I was a kid trying to find his way in a world that was getting bigger by the day.  That meant I was growing comparatively smaller.  I had no use for this powerless religion they were teaching me at that church.  I surmised it was good enough to hold me over and keep me out of hell-jail until I could find the real thing, but I believed there must be more something useful, more practical; and I wanted to find it. 

My perception has changed dramatically since then, but I think I understand better now what was happening within me at the time.  The people at that church were doing the best they could do and were sharing all they had with me.  The problem was that none of it seemed very practical at the time.  It might get my ticket punched to board the train headed up rather than the one headed down when I died, but what other use was it?  I needed help now.  I did not need ideas or stories about what God had done for some other guy who had died centuries before the language I spoke had even come into existence!  I needed something with some oomph to it and I needed it as soon as I could get it.  If these guys did not have it, I was willing to seek it among those who claimed they did. 

I also understand now that, as stubborn as I have been my entire life, I began to develop at that stage capacity to admit that I might be wrong about a few things.  How valuable that has been throughout the remaining years of my life. 

The Kung Fu television show did not appear for another several years, but something in the spirit of that show depicts what I had hoped or expected to find at the end of my search.  I did not know what it was.  I did need to believe that there must be something more than was being shown to me. 

Without being able to articulate it so effectively as my buddy Max Reed, I was just beginning to realize that I did not know what I did not know.