One argument that atheists use against Christians is the apparent inconsistency of the Bible. However, Christians believe the Bible to be true and not inconsistent. And yet we all interpret it differently. For instance, to use an old example, when slavery was legal in the United States, Christians on both sides of the debate would use the Bible to support their cause. This didn’t make the Bible wrong, but it did divide Christians. Jesus doesn’t want His children divided.
Over and over again I have found myself hearing the words, “Well, I believe…” tied to a perspective on theology. I’m not talking about someone’s religious beliefs of another faith. And I’m not necessarily talking about the beliefs of specific denominations within Christianity – that would be “we believe…” I’m talking about the personal confusion that many people have about certain matters of theology. How can the layman tell? Many people do not want to be told what to believe, but I felt more and more certain that someone had to tell me because there was a right answer out there, not just an “I believe.” It had to either be someone with more education and training, or else someone who was divinely influenced. Preferably both. Otherwise, knowing exactly what God wants would be impossible.
More and more I was drawn to the idea of a pope, a council of leaders, a tradition leading back to Christ himself. I could not explain it that way at the time, but I wanted unity within the church.
Summer turned into fall, and I went to Louisville. I was alone for months on end out there – and I was choosing not to go to church. Because I found church to be about music and people, it did not make sense for me to get attached to a church I could not return to, or go to a church where I knew nobody. In addition, I thoroughly believed I would just spend Sunday mornings in a Bible study devotional, but that rarely materialized.
I grew lonely and hardened to God for the first time in my life – a dark night of the soul. I started crying out in the night for Him to come back to me. I will never forget the words of a Catholic friend, who spoke to me as I silently cried on the stairs of my hotel loft. “You keep digging for buried treasure in all these different places, but I’ve found it. I keep trying to get you to see that I’ve found the hole, and that the treasure is over here, but you just keep digging new holes.”
That weekend I went out and bought a book called, “The Dictionary of Saints.” It had a short paragraph on pretty much every saint recognized by the Catholic Church. At the time, I couldn’t have explained a saint to a Protestant, other than by saying that these were people the church believed to be in heaven.
Their stories were similar. Many were martyrs. Others were women who ran away from their rich families to become nuns. There were priests and monks, too. A few were married people. Short as each paragraph was, and similar as the stories became to each other, I could not put it down. I read it like a book, rather than a reference. I found myself longing for that kind of life. I wanted to be a saint, not to be put in some kind of book, but to live the kind of life wholly devoted to God! I didn’t know if I was ever going to get married or not, but if not, I wanted to be a nun! (Being a nun as a last resort for unmarried women is the wrong attitude to have, by the way, although I didn’t understand back then).
I was challenged to purify my life, and am continually challenged to this day to live in the world but not of it. One challenge was movies. I found it hard to “not get” to watch PG-13 movies, or felt guilty for doing so. “Who,” I wondered, “can go through life like this? No wonder Protestants are not legalists, we would all be Puritans.” But I realized that if something would bring me closer to God, then I could not excuse myself from it with a clean conscience. Bad movies would have to go (could I watch them with Jesus in the room anyways?). In addition, I needed to make a greater effort for prayer time. I have felt these spiritual revivals come and go in my life, and I know that God uses some of our hardest times to call us to him. However, I did find a new perspective that helped keep the momentum going.
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