Unexpected encouragement
Gosh it's hard to get back into blogging! I sit cross-legged on the floor with a pot of mint tea beside me, my computer on my lap, and a general idea of what I want to say but no idea how to begin. I should think this wouldn't be so hard. After all, I'm pretty sure I lost all of my small readership in the months between August and May when I posted nothing. How hard is it really to write to an audience of none?
I wrote in an earlier post about questioning my beliefs. At the beginning it was hard to question things. Is it ok to question what I was told growing up? Does it make me a horrible person to not question? Should I just muster up more faith from somewhere so I don't have questions and doubts anymore? I mentioned Frank Schaeffer's two books that I read over the summer and how they helped me become ok with the fact of my questions. At no point thus far has my journey been easy. I've had help and encouragement along the way though...and from some unexpected places.
Last autumn I began attending the new young adults group at the Pentecostal church which was just down the street from my grandma's apartment where I was living at the time. I questioned myself constantly about whether I should even be going there or not. I really only went to get out of the house and see other faces...but when I'm busy questioning the christian beliefs I grew up with, do I really want to be hanging out with christians? One morning Grandma roped me into helping for a half hour at the church stuffing envelopes with newsletters and flyers that would later be mailed out to people who likely open the envelope to glance through and throw everything (hopefully!) into the recycle bin. After all the envelopes were stuffed and stacked and ready to be sealed, I wandered down the hall to the youth/young adults pastor's office to see if he had some time to chat. Dustin invited me in and I told him about my questions. I mainly had (and still have) two:
- How can any religion so adamantly believe that it has the truth...the only truth...and all other religions and beliefs are wrong?
- How can anyone confidently believe that the Bible is without error and is truly the word of God? How do we know the right books made it into the Bible? How do we know we're not missing any? And what was the agenda of the people who did the deciding?
It wasn't until about a week before this little chat in his office that I even became comfortable with sharing my questions with him. Miss Judgemental thought "He's a new youth pastor fresh out of Bible School...my questions will just get bookish Bible School answers and I don't want those." The week before this chat I heard Dustin say that he had questioned Christianity, the inerrancy of the Bible, and even the existence of God for a while and that, while he had searched and found answers that satisfied HIM, anyone who had questions needed to do their own searching and their own research. This he strongly emphasized in our chat in his office and sent me home with a book on world religions. True, it was written by a christian, but he said it was one that really helped him with some of his questions. Surprisingly I quite enjoyed the book. When presenting the history and beliefs of each religion, Winfried Corduan speaks ONLY about that religion. "This is the history of Islam. These are the basic beliefs. These are the main branches of believers. Here are the main differences between their respective beliefs. This is how islamic beliefs tend to look in the average muslim's life." Only after he has spent pages and pages and pages explaining Islam does he finally bring Christianity in at the end. And that is just a small part...often only a page or two suggesting what to do and not to do when evangelizing to a muslim.
While Corduan's book didn't answer my SPECIFIC questions, it DID give me a better understanding of what a lot of other people believe. I have a better idea of what else is out there. Some of my "options".
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