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?
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