Crazy For God

I have been on call so much lately that my reading has dropped off a bit. But my duties have lightened a bit now, and I picked Crazy For God back up. This book is so full of the same feelings that I have had for the last 20 years that I feel I could have written it. The details, of course, would be different, but the emotions and the feelings that Frank Schaeffer puts out there of being trapped in a religious system that you didn’t create and don’t own are identical.

Last night I was reading about how he came to see prayer as practiced by the hyper-Christians (my terminology, not his) around him. He describes what seemed to be the “logic” behind many of those prayers. His description is contained in a “reading between the lines” prayer. On page 151:

“Dear Heavenly Father, in Your Word You say that when two or three are gathered together, You will be in the midst of them. Well, we’re gathered here, so do what we’re telling You to do because we have you over a barrel and can quote your own book back at You! And in case You’re thinking of weasling out of this deal, we claim your promises, and because You can’t break any of those since you wrote them all in the Bible, You’ll do what we say and You’ll do it NOW! Amen!”

I don’t know how many times, countless really, that I have heard a prayer that seemed to be saying exactly that. I have become so frustrated with the fact that we try to use God as a tool to accomplish what we want, ordaining what we do with his stamp of approval. It makes me sick.

On the same page and continuing onto the next, the author continues, this time describing how none of this talk and prayer about God really seemed to match up in his mind.

“Theologically speaking, we believed in an absolutely powerful omnipotent and sovereign Lord. But in practice, our God had to be begged and encouraged to carry out the simplest tasks…

How exactly was this supposed to work? God was in charge, but he wouldn’t do anything for us unless we believed he would do it. But if he didn’t do anything, what reason was there to believe?

We lacked the faith to pray effectively and make God do stuff. So we prayed for the faith to make God give us the faith to make him do stuff. But getting enough faith was the biggest problem, so we prayed for the faith we needed to pray for faith. But how much faith did it take to pray to have the faith we needed to pray for faith? And if God knew you wanted faith, why didn’t he just give it to you? It was like spending all your time calling directory information for phone numbers that you aren’t allowed to call unless you can guess the number right without asking.”

These words exress very well the frustration that I have felt trying to juggle all the pieces of theology I was handed and expected to keep properly lined up so that they would fit together and have God all explained in nice packeage that I could then hand to others. Eventually, I gave up trying and have deconstructed my faith in a search for the pieces that really have something meaningful to which to cling. I continue to maintain and believe more and more that one of the most important aspects of God is mystery, the fact that God can’t be completely explained, and that it is in this tension among this mystery that one finds the most genuine relationship with that God on a life-long journey of discovery.

The Bible, Death, Evolution…You Know, All of that Mess

A discussion I had last evening with a group of friends that has prompted me to tackle this very slippery topic. While eating a light supper with a group of individuals that I frequent with regularity, I was asked to restate my view on death as it pertains to God and creation and Christ’s defeat of it with his work on the cross. The previous night, the church we all attend discussed the fact that Christ defeated death finally which brings about the Christian hope of ressurection. I was asked to restate my previous stated belief in order to reconcile it to the teaching that was given at church. My first thought was that this was a big topic and a very slippery slope and to be careful and gracious in my response.

The individual that asked this of me inquired in a curious way. She stated that previously, she had thought that a “Bible believing Christian” could not believe in evolution (pertinent to the topic because death is somewhat of an assumed part of evolutionary theory) but added that “we have Doug,” at leat implying that she was willing to consider it differently. Two things came to mind. One, what does she mean by “Bible believing Christian,” and second, I actually felt complimented that I had somehow spurred someone to consider a topic that can be so volatile to consider it differently, and I know that she did not mean her statement in any negative way anyway. Likewise, she should be complimented for her willingness to re-examine and refine her belief. Plus, I somewhat relish the role of the slight rebel so to take it as a compliment comes naturally.

What I had previously discussed with her was that I believed death to have been a part of creation when God said it was good even before the events that describe mankind’s falling away from proper relationship with God. If it didn’t exist before this schism, then one has to believe that the separation changed not only the relationship but also the entire way the world operates including an entirely different set of physical laws that govern what goes on here. I find that a bit of a stretch. So I think that death has been a part of this creation all along and that the narrative in the first portion of Genesis instructs that it now had a different impact on mankind, a different significance. The work of Christ then restored it to its original place. To summarize, the way we view death and interact with death and what it does to us is the thing that has changed, not death itself.

But let’s back up a bit because this topic is much bigger than just my view of death. In order to look at death that way a few other things have to be in place first. One of those things would be how the Bible is to be understood. We recently took our boys out of a fundamentalist Christian school and put them in the outstanding quality public school system in our community (As an aside, their education has taken off in many ways since the change. They were falling through the cracks at the school that of course was supposed to be the best for them and everyone else.). One of the statements in the handbook for that school to which we were supposed to agree to was that “the Bible is the source of all truth.” Well, that is a nice, safe, comfy statement that is just not true. It doesn’t take much to look around you and see that the Bible says nothing about math or gravity or weather patterns or climate changes or any number of other things that are obviously truths in this world. So how do I think the Bible is to be viewed?

Well, I don’t think the Bible should be made something it is not. It is not a book of facts. It is not a science text. It is not an almanac or encyclopedia. Rather, it is a book that is mostly a narrative that reveals some things to us about how God interacts with his creation. It does contain truth, but it is not the ultimate source of truth. It is not the answer book to every problem and should not be read in that manner. It is one of the ways that God speaks to us. It is full of the biases of the people that wrote it. It is full of the understanding people had of their world at the time it was written. It is a narrative of how a few groups of people through a specific historical time have interacted with God. I believe the message of the Bible in the end is that God loves us, something that is much more easy to believe from a narrative reading than from a literal reading.

With that in mind, what I think the first part of Genesis is saying most importantly is that God is responsible for this place. He made it. How? That is partly for us to discover the best we can. A tremendous amount of really good science and really bright minds have discovered in the last 200 years that there is this process at work in the world that we have come to understand as evolution. And more and more work, including the extensive work done on the human genome project, points to this. I believe that this is the process that God has used and continues to use to create. Evolution is as much a force in the world as gravity. Now there is still a whole lot of work that still needs to be done to understand this better. And whether or not humans came from apes or monkeys is not really the issue. That is not what evolution is about. What it is mainly about is a rational explanation for the diversity of life. And if I someday find out from our Creator that I came from an ape, I will not be offended.

So I do believe in the Big Bang and a 6 billion year old earth and the evolutionary process. And it all fits very nicely with Genesis actually. If you need a very rational explanation to get past the “6 literal days” I would recommend that you read Genesis and The Big Bang by Gerald Schroeder. As a Jewish PhD, he does a really fantastic job with a line by line reading of Genesis and showing how it can very clearly be interpreted as epochs of time and how the laws of physics and the theory of relativity fit very nicely with this interpretation. But in a nutshell and in minimally scientific terms, the following is how I see it all working out.

God said it and the Big Bang happened. The earth formed, cooled, and became hospitable for life. God created by the process of evolution over billions of years. Whether life all started with an amoeba (another somewhat offensive idea to many Christians) is really not relavant to me (just as the humans coming from monkeys issue is really not relevant to me). The fact is, we don’t know that level of detail about it, and probably won’t for a long time. But it doens’t matter at all. The important thing is that God was behind it, and that is the main point that I think Genesis is trying to get across. But I digress. Continuing on…

As evolution hums along we eventually get all sorts of plants and animals and then humans. Death has to be a normal part of the process or this blue ball would have been overpopulated in no time. God takes a couple of people and adds something, and this is where the second of the two creation stories in Genesis comes in play. He “breathes life” into them to use the traditional Christian language. In essence, he plants his soul within them and all that this entails. To me this explains how we are made “in His image.” It also explains why those two may have needed a garden, may have needed separated out for a bit. They were now different. They realized different things than the other human types they resembled physically but were far different than spiritually and mentally and consciously. Again, the rib thing and the dust thing are not the important parts. The fact that God did something different with a couple of his created beings to bring his creation to the state in which he wanted it to exist is the key to the story.

So that kind of brings us up to the event commonly referred to as “The Fall.” It really isn’t part of evolution, but it is part of death so I will include it in this brief synopsis. As I get older and think about all this more and more and refine my beliefs and question and search and discuss, I find it harder and harder to believe that God actually set up a scenario with a talking walking snake, an apple, a tree, and his two now fully human humans. But again, the actual events are not all that important. It is the message behind it that is critical. The apple narrative is certainly something the people to whom the story was given 3,000 + years ago could understand. The story explains somehow that the relationship which God had with his creation was fractured. It broke. Why and how is really not all that important. But God then goes to work, as we discover in the remainder of the Bible narrative, to set it right.

So I think it may be time to wrap it up as this is getting a bit long as many of my posts tend to do. I hope that you take the time to put down a thoughtful response. Punch holes in it. Praise it. Question me. Tell me I am wrong. I am not claiming that I have the market cornered on the truth here. I am just disclosing a work in progress. A way that I am coming to understand the Bible and God and my place in this creation.

Physics, Struggle, Evil

I am working nights this week. Don’t really like it but only have to do it 4-5 weeks a year. It’s not all that bad as the overall workload is less, the responsibilities are less, and I am probably at home more. But it is nights. It gets my body all out of rhythm. I feel tired by the end of the week. But I have learned to make it more tolerable to doing things like blogging, looking at triathlon websites, reading, etc. I do like going to my office at 11 or 12 PM and working on my computer and reading. I keep the lights low and listen to the radio while I am fiddling around. Generally, I can get 2 or 3 hours of broken sleep, and there is nothing like getting paid for sleeping. I still to not find myself able to sleep in the hospital, left-over baggage from those dreadful residency days of continual overextending one’s self, so I have a little cot that I set up in my actual office which is right next to the hospital. So it’s all bittersweet, some things I like and some things I don’t. As I was driving in tonight to deliver a baby, I was praying and thinking, and that has led to this post.

Lately, I ‘ve been thinking a bit about how life on this earth under this set of physics is based on struggle. I really cannot think of anything in this world that gets better, that progresses, that improves, that does not involve struggle. It is just a fact of life. And when you try to circumvent that, when you try to get the benefit without the struggle, in the end that scenario costs you. I challenge you to produce a scenario that does not work this way. This I have blogged on before. No surprises.

But tonight I made a couple other connections and came up with a couple other questions, which as many of my questions seem to be lately, are largely inadequately answerable. For the most part we are, as humans, in search of peace and happiness. We want to be at a place of comfort, rest, happiness, peace, fulfillment. Natural to want that. And when we get there, we then want to stay there. Again, very natural. In fact, maybe it could be said of you if you didn’t want this in some form that you are a bit off, crazy, loco. So tonight I was thinking, with the struggle principle in mind, how we really can only experience happiness and peace if we know what sadness and unrest actually are. And the opposite is true too. We can only know sadness because we know happiness. Taking this a bit further, it would seem to me that the more severe the sadness is that we have known, the greater the happiness that we can experience. Or at least the greater the sadness that one is willing to risk, the greater the happiness that can be known. So if this struggle principle is true, it would then mean that we cannot, once we are in a place of peace and happiness, continually exist there. If we do, then we would get numb to it, wonder where it went, and then we wouldn’t be peaceful and happy anymore. At a minimum, the dulling of the state of peace and happiness would become a new norm and then not seem happy and peaceful anymore, necessitating a struggle to advance to further happiness and peace. And we wonder why God just doesn’t keep us in a place of happiness and peace all the time. Well nothing in his world the way it is currently set up works that way. We can’t stay that way. It’s impossible. The system demands it.

The next question that then came to mind as I was thinking about this was that maybe this helps answer the question of evil. Why it exists. Why it is here. Is it all just because there has to be counter to good in order for us to understand what good actually is? Does a good God in fact need evil in a sense in order to stand against it? If so that seems a bit cruel to humanity to subject us to all this potential evil and actual evil just so we can understand that God is good. I don’t really know the answers to these questions. They seem to be questions for which a good answer is impossible to devise. So as I was driving I was thinking about this and praying and asking God why humanity is not yet free from this evil if his kingdom is continually advancing in the world since Christ’s death, another thought came to mind.

I have been taught first of all that the bible is to be taken literally. I don’t think I any longer agree with that, but what I have understood about evil is more clear if for this discussion we assume that to be true. In a literal reading, I have understood Satan to be a fallen angel and for evil to have originated with him. He, at some point, decided that he wanted to be like God. God didn’t agree with him. So he is now Satan, and evil exists. But that is really just too simple. And it is probably impossible. In order for Satan as an angel to make a self-centered decision like this, evil had to already be in existence. If evil didn’t already exist, he would not have been able to decide to do this. He wouldn’t have even know to do it. So them I am left with a God that I learned is good and responsible for creation to himself have also created evil.

I really don’t know what to do with all that. Somehow, it actually feels reassuring to me, but I confess I do not have the slightest idea why. I’m sure there are books about this which theorize this and that, but I can’t really think than an adequate explanation is very possible. Sorry to put something down here that is just more questions than it is explanations. And I am also sorry if my blog of late seems to be a bit all over the place with a bunch of crazy statements that seem like just one big mess. I don’t really feel like a mess at all. I feel pretty solid actually which I think shows me that the finding really is in the searching more than it is in the answers. I think I’m feeling less like I need to know all the answers. And that is peaceful.

On The Nazarene Denominational Theological Box

A friend of mine gave a prophecy about me a couple of years back. He actually called it a prophecy at the time, and I hadn’t ever been prophesied about before or since. It is my sole prophecy experience. From time to time I have remembered it. Something sparks a memory or a situation at hand brings it to mind. I find it more in my mind over the last few months and weeks and wonder if that indicates anything. Mostly I have felt my friend was likely a false prophet :) but I have not forgotten. This post is a stab in the dark about that prophecy.

My friend told me that he foresaw me as someone who would someday help Nazarenes break free from the walls and chains of the theological box. Well, that is in essence what he was saying. I don’t recall the exact words. But this is the idea. Prophets are more idea people than they are detail people sometimes :). That is what this post is about, reaching out to people who may be feeling the ways I have felt. Let me be clear that this is not a thrashing of Nazarendom. I am grateful for the foundation that it has given. But there are problems inherent to any theology when it gets taught and treated as dogma. It is that box from which I have escaped, and from which I would like to help others break free if they need freeing. I do not also mean to imply that everyone needs freeing from that box. We are all different, and there are probably many who function just fine within those walls, feel safe and peaceful within them, and find that it works very well for them. This post is not for those people, and I am sometimes envious of the peace that they feel. Unfortunately, my journey to peace (which I am still on) has been much more convoluted than that. So if you are comfortable with your theology you may want to stop reading here. I do not want to confuse you. But if you are a Nazarene who is struggling or if you find your self within some other denominational theological box and are struggling, maybe I will say something that you find helpful.

Just so you know a bit about me I will explain how deep my Nazarene roots run. As soon as I was home from the hospital as an infant I was in church the next Sunday. My dad is a retired Nazarene minister so Nazarene is all I knew for 38 years of my life. My grandpa, dad’s dad, was a Nazarene minister who led the denomination as one of its General Superintendents for over 25 years. I attended and graduated from a Nazarene university where I met and married my Nazarene wife who grew up in as solid of a Nazarene layman’s home as it is possible to be. My sister is married to a Nazarene minister, and most of my extended family is either in the Nazarene ministry in some form or is employed by a Nazarene organization. At this point, I am the sole outlier. Currently, I and my wife do not attend a Nazarene church. We actually attend a very small church that is not tied to any denomination and which is more about traditional orthodox Christianity than about the more recent evangelical ideas. Oddly enough it is full of a bunch of denominational misfits much like myself which makes me wonder if God kind of led us there. It has been a place of healing for us and continues to be.

So this doesn’t get too long, I will try and just briefly summarize what became a problem for me. If the response is favorable in the comments, I will post subsequently in more detail and could even deal with specific issues that anybody puts forth. I think the problem for me can be best described as a disconnect between the culture of the church and the denominational statements of belief of the church. They didn’t match up very well by my observation. I think most people would say that the belief that identifies the Nazarene denomination is that of holiness, more specifically, entire sanctification. I don’t know how many times I have heard it said in Nazarene circles that the message of holiness needs to be preached. I have heard it as the reason to plant a church across town and to send missionaries to Africa. And I think many in my generation for sure, probably in others too, understand that the end result of this entire sanctification is a sinless life, especially the ability to live sinlessly (I don’t think that is even a word, but you do know what I mean I am certain).

Since college, this has been a gradually increasingly problematic theology for me, largely because of the disconnect I have seen existing between the message preached and the life being lived out by those who preached it. Not that these are not good people. The large majority of them were and are good people with nothing but good intentions. But in the church that was telling me to live sinlessly I witnessed lying, stealing, cheating, gossip, marital infidelity, self-righteousness, pride, envy, gluttony, elitism, racism, sexism, pornography, judgment, etc. You name it, and it is there. Many of these things would then get rationalized away as mistakes. Not sin. Just mistakes. Well call them whatever you want to call them. Give them a different name. They are what they are. And whatever they are called, they fail to meet the burden of “sinless.”

After years of wrestling with this disconnect, I began to see it as something different. The doctrine, as it is lived out in the church culture, is dishonest. None of us is able to be sinless yet we go around preaching to each other that we are sinless. We pat ourselves on the back for being sinless. We tell others that they can be sinless too. In a way, this stunts our ability to mature in relationship with God. We are dishonest with ourselves. We are not sinless. We can’t be sinless. If we think we are, really believe we are, we are living a lie. And living in a lie hinders our ability to go deeper with anybody including God. So then I began to wonder what else we in the Nazarene church may be lying to ourselves about. I was at a crisis in my thinking and theology that I could no longer ignore.

So I broke away. My wife and I broke away. Near this time we were actually told, when we began to voice some questions that were specific to some situations in the Nazarene church we then attended that were pertinent to the disconnect of which I speak, that we just needed to let our leaders lead. We were in essence, shut down. No room for challenges to theology. No room for challenges to doctrine. No room for different thinking. No room for even asking genuine questions. We were shut down. That wasn’t going to work for us. We had towed that line for too long. So we left that box. We went out into the unknown wilderness to find the answers we needed, ask the questions we needed, and get out of that box. And man am I glad we did.

I think I will wrap up this introduction for now. There is a lot in here. There is a lot that this just barely uncovers. And I fully recognize that there may be some trauma that is felt by others who have found themselves in similar situations. If any of this sounds familiar to you, even if you are not Nazarene, please reach out here and share your heart. I want it to be a safe place for that. This is my attempt to tease out whether or not my friend’s prophecy is true, at least at this point. Maybe it’s not. But for some reason, I feel in my core that it is. And I feel that this may be a purpose for me in life, to reach out to and somehow help people who need to heal in this way. If you are one of those, hang in there. I know how you feel.

Me

As many of my regular readers know, I am in the beginning stages of training for my second Ironman race. The race date is Nov 22 in Phoenix, AZ. The rest of my season is geared towards getting me ready for that race. I am racing in the Kansas 70.3 (Half-Ironman) in June and the Redman 70.3 in OKC in September. I may do the Pikes Peak Ascent in August but haven’t decided on that one yet.

Training is going well. My week is oulined like this:

Sun: Rest

Mon: Long Run, TaeKwonDo

Tue: Yoga, Swim

Wed: Bike Intervals, Leg Strength Routine, TaeKwoDo

Thur: Run Intervals, Upper Body Strength Routine

Fri: Long Bike, Swim, TaeKwonDo

Sat: Combined Bike/Run (BRICK), Upper Body Strenght Routine

I have been trying this schedule out for a couple of weeks and feel that it will work out well. It incorporates interval training which works on speed, core strenghting and balance, general strength training, transition from bike to run, and endurance training in each discipline which is the key to successful completion of this length of race. The one thing I haven’t incorporated which would be beneficial is massage which I know JohnT thinks I should place higher on the list. I am tracking my caloric intake and expenditure both to make sure I am getting adequate nutrition and to trim down about 10 pounds or so to be at a better racing weight. Also, I am getting 7-8 hours of sleep most nights and working in a brief nap as often as I can even if it is just 30 min on my office floor over the lunch hour. I think this plan is good overall.

One thing that I am noticing about my life is that other than my wife and family and being at home with them, triathlon is the thing that brings me peace, contentment, happiness. My occupation does not do that for me. In some ways that feels twisted to me because it seems like the American way is to “love” your job. But I don’t. I don’t love my job. I love triathlon. Not my job.

And then I feel guilty. I’m a doctor. I’m supposed (I know, Dr. Paul. Bad word) to care about my job. I spent all this time and money and work learning how to be this thing. And all it is is a job. I don’t love it. I do like helping people. But I don’t enjoy doing it so much in this way. I’m not sure why that is. I think that it is because of the way the medical system works. The expectation is that you will work yourself to death, be available all the time, sacrifice your own health and wellbeing, and relish it. And I am not that. I refuse to be that. So I am continually battling against the current. The thing I love is triathlon, and I am not about to sacrifice that for my job.

I recognize that my job allows me to afford to be able to participate in triathlon. Is it OK for me to look at my job that way? Is it enough for me to just go do this work when I am not all that fond of it because it allows me to do the things that I do love? Can I be at peace doing that? I want to be. I want it to work that way.

I don’t know why a lot of me seems so unsettled these days. I’m ready for that to end.

Glimmer

I just started the book “Crazy For God” by Frank Schaeffer. I don’t know if anyone out there has some opinion of it or not. I chose it because of the blurb on the front after it was recommended on a blog that I follow. That blurb is an indicator that maybe Mr. Schaeffer understands some of the same things I am currently going through. That blurb is this: “How I grew up as one of the elect, helped found the religious right, and lived to take all (or almost all) of it back.” Hmmm. Sounds like I might identify in some ways with him.

I am 50 pages into it and am not let down. Even little phrases and the way he says certain things speak to me. I understand what is behind what he is saying. I have lived much of what he is talking about to this point. Not the locations and things that he did. In fact, I think we are interested in way different things. Our likes are quite a distance apart. But the thinking behind the life is that with which I can identify.

There is a quote in the introduction that clarifies nearly exactly how I feel about my recent search for how God wants me and him to relate to each other. On page 5, “My life has been one of all-consuming faith – not my faith, but the faith of others that I seem to have caught like a disease and been almost obliterated by. What does God want? I am still trying to find out…Every action, every thought, every moment I stumble into is judged by an inner voice. Everything seems to have a moral component. Eating…sex…what I write, don’t write, who I talk to, don’t talk to, and how I raised my children, their characters, accomplishments, failures, whether they ‘love the Lord’ or not…”

Man have I felt that and still do. What it feels like to scrutinize nearly everything you do or say or think for purity or rightness. And it feels like no way to live. It feels like a way to die. I am eager to find out where Mr. Schaeffer ended up on his own personal search. Maybe it hasn’t ended. But I see a glimmer of hope for me in his words thus far.

Black Days

Strange day today is. I’m not sure what to make of it. For some reason, I want what I believe about the world, what I believe about God, to be solid. I don’t want to hang on to a bunch of fluff. As my friend, Josh, from decon said recently, it needs to be true. I want to think rightly. I want to believe rightly. I don’t want to be hanging on to things just because they are tradition or just because so and so said it or because I am fearful. I want to be solid.

Maybe that is asking too much. Maybe I’m searching too aggresively. Maybe that is impossible. Maybe I have just gotten myself confused. I don’t know, but today I have a profound, almost agonizing sense of loss. A sense of loss like I have never felt or known. It has waxed and waned throughout the day, and I am not at all sure why it is there or what it means.

It started this morning. I was asked essentially how I know Christianity to be true. My answer. I don’t. I don’t know along side any other religion or system of thought why it is more true than them. My Christian friends will say that no other faith preaches redemption by faith. But that doesn’t really prove realness or truth. I have Jewish friends who passionately feel that they do not need Christ. And they are good people. What is redemption going to do for them? I have atheist friends who likewise are good people. They are moral and compassionate and at peace with themselves and their lives. What does redemption mean to them? I have deist friends who likewise are very good people, at peace with themselves and the world. What does redemption offer them? None of these people need Christianity to have good, peaceful, happy, moral, rich lives. And in many cases they have been Christians and found it lacking. It doesn’t take Christianity for people to love and for people to be in community and for people to be moral and for people to forgive. In fact, since the same problems exist within Christianity that exist within the rest of the world, it doesn’t seem like Christianity is a solution for any of that. We may all look cleaner, but we aren’t, and that facade may even make the problems within Christianity worse.

Is all that Christianity offers a path out of hell? Is that all it is reduced to in the end? Is that the only difference? Is that all it accomplishes? If so all the talk about us loving God and God loving us seems like a big charade. In the end we are just beating ourselves about to save our own skin.

I don’t know why this came on me today so suddenly. I’ve actually been feeling pretty solid working through my beliefs and what I belief. In fact, I’ve been enjoying it to a large extent. Maybe I’m afraid of something, losing something. I don’t know.

It’s odd that I heard a song on Saturday that I had forgotten for quite some time. My ingenious little iPhone with the Pandora internet radio app played it for me. It is appropriate for today. Soundgarden. “Fell On Black Days.”

Whatsoever I’ve feared has come to life
Whatsoever I’ve fought off became my life
Just when everyday seemed to greet me with a smile
Sunspots have faded
And now I’m doing time
Cause I fell on black days

Whomsoever I’ve cured I’ve sickened now
Whomsoever I’ve cradled I’ve put you down
I’m a search light soul they say
But I can’t see it in the night
I’m only faking when I get it right
Cause I fell on black days
How would I know
That this could be my fate

So what you wanted to see good has made you blind
And what you wanted to be yours has made it mine
So don’t you lock up something that you wanted to see fly
Hands are for shaking
No, not tying
No, not tying

I sure don’t mind a change
But I fell on black days
How would I know
That this could be my fate

I’m not sure where to go from here. This is a new place for me.

Bias

Haven’t posted in a few days. Really just haven’t had much to say for a time. My soul feels quiet after the busy holidays. Just resting I guess.

But I did get back into a conversation on the de-conversion website this week. It is really a very interesting site. I have linked to it over there on the right. Be careful with it though. I think you need to be very certain of where you are in your faith to venture out there. The people there are very intelligent, and they know the bible front to back. If you think you are going to sign on and convert them back to Christianity, you have the wrong motive for going there. They will see through that motive in about 2 seconds. The reason to go there, and the reason I go there, is to help me see the things to which I hold that are really just extra baggage. There is something about being in the middle of the battle that is very cleansing. It helps me. But if you are not solid, it may shake your faith also. Please be careful.

Part of the discussion that I have recently been involved in centers around bias. A few of them called me out, claimed that I was holding my beliefs too close, claimed that I was dancing around the issues, and challenged me to just state my beliefs about God in their forum. So I did, and the conversation has been very interesting and enlightening I think for both sides. The conversation progressed through systematic theologies to evidences for or against God’s existence. Then one commentator said that they thought I was operating from the bias of believing that God exists and then looking for evidence to support my belief rather than starting with nothing and then finding God because of the evidence.

My response to this was that I may very well be doing this to some extent (Luke I believe has challenged me on that same issue recently) but that I thought it was impossible to completely get rid of bias. We all have it. Theologians. Politicians. Teachers. Professors. Historians. Researchers. Doctors. Biblical writers (and I am reminded of some words Dr. Paul has said to me about this). It taints everything we do and say and read and interpret. Some of them claim that they have been able to get rid of their “god exists” bias and look at the evidence from an unbiased position. My counter is that while it may be possible to minimize a specific bias, I think it is unlikely for any of us to be able to eliminate it completely. And there may even be a danger of somewhat overcorrecting for a bias which introduces a completely new bias. In some respects, it seems like a very slippery slope, and I do doubt that our biases can ever be completely eliminated even when we are intentionally minimizing them.

In the end I think it is important to realize that we all have bias and that it affects everything we do and say and think. For that reason, we shouldn’t think to highly of what we do and say and think. And, for that reason, we ought to offer more grace and listen better to what others are doing and saying and thinking. We can learn an awful lot from each other if we are willing to sit down at the same table with respect for the truths that each of us holds without trying to prove ourselves right and others wrong.

Quotes For My 2009 Season

I am getting ramped up for my 2009 triathlon season. Formal training begins February 1, tomorrow by the way. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying out my training schedule to get a feel for the timing of it, and I think it will work well with just a couple of tweaks. I am fine tuning a few items in my equipment, replacing a couple of pieces, upgrading a couple of items, and dialing things in the way I want them. Gradually, I have been getting back onto my nutrition plan. And I’m feeling juiced. Ready to go. Wanting to race. And that must be a sign that I’m rested.

I was reading in my most recent issue of Triathlete Magazine and saw a couple of familiar quotes that speak well to both triathlon and life in general, and I’d like to share them. The first is by Lance Armstrong, 7 time winner of the Tour de France who is currently training for a comeback attempt. Whatever a person thinks of his personal life and decisions in that arena, it cannot be denied that he is probably the greatest cyclist of all time. Part of that is due to his work ethic. Yes he is talented, but he works harder than anyone. That is why he is great. Sure, he has paid a hefty price, maybe too much of price according to some, and his personal life probably manifests that. But Lance is well known for the mantra, “Pain is temporary, but quitting is forever.” How true is that, in racing and in life. You can never get that experience back. If you don’t finish, you can’t ever go back and do that particular race over. I thought about that during my first Ironman. I did not want my first Ironman to go uncompleted, and I pushed on through temporary pain. Life is so much like that too, and it is one reason I love triathlon so much. It mirrors life.

The second quote is by Rutger Beke, a top professional triathlete. He has won several Ironman events worldwide, and is a current top contender for the World Championships in Kona, Hawaii, on a yearly basis. Beke has recently taken Lance’s statement to heart. In the 2007 Kona event, he suffered to the point that he was forced to walk. During that race, he was asked why he didn’t drop out. His answer, as he was walking the marathon after darkness had already closed in on the field, was that to quit would be disrespectful to all the age group atheletes gutting it out to finish even though they were in pain. He recongnized it was a privilege to be there. He finished 898th place, and he honored all triathletes in that effort. He believes that once such a surrender is made, quitting due to temporary pain, a severe character flaw is created that becomes exceptionally difficult to overcome. I think I agree with that.

So I start off my training for 2009 recalling that quote from Lance and that performance from Rutger Beke. They will help me persevere when the doubts come, and they will come. They will help me choose tea over Mountain Dew, fruit over cookies, salad over a cheeseburger. They will help me get up at 5 AM when my bed next to Karmen feels warm and cozy. They will help me in my races when I begin to hurt. And I will not quit due to temporary pain. I will not disrespect the effort of everyone around me. I will continue on.

On a side note….I am now a yellow belt. Our little group of 4 did well in our forms, kicks, punches, board breaking, and sparring. We succeeded together. It was great fun, and I remain gently humbled.