Stick Around for the Punch Line

My new Nerf bars arrived.

I bought some used Westin Nerf bars off Craigslist, but I regretted it. They didn’t look that great, and they didn’t extend to the rear wheels of the truck, so they were useless for getting into the bed. I decided to order new ones.

I struggled with this, because I want to fully accept the reality that every dime I have is God’s, and I don’t want to run around wasting money. I figured I’d be a good steward and get used bars. But it was a lot of aggravation, and it didn’t work out well.

Robert Morris says you can have a “poverty spirit” that screws up your ability to spend and enjoy. I guess that makes sense. Christian life has to be balanced. Not ascetic, but not self-indulgent. I tried to save money by buying a used truck, and it worked out well. Maybe I should have been less stingy on the bars.

It took two hours to install them, and they still have the plastic wrap on them. I underestimated the installation time, and I had to zip off to church before I could unwrap them. I had a GAP (“God Answers Prayer”) group meeting to get to. I was fifteen or twenty minutes late. Really embarrassing. It’s extremely disrespectful to be late; I hate it. To make matters worse, the place was packed, and they pulled up a chair at the pastor’s right hand. So the irresponsible late guy ended up at the front of the room, displayed prominently.

The meeting was wonderful. When I used to go to physics lectures, I enjoyed it because it was like having fireworks go off in my head. A teacher would talk about a given concept, and it would relate to another concept, and I would get blasts of intuition, and I would see things in my mind. I can’t describe it any better than that. It was wonderful. I never had that in law school. Law is not exactly boring, but it’s not exciting or challenging. Whose land did the limb hang over before the apple fell? Where did it land? Do the math and decide who gets the fruit. Not the kind of thing that makes for thrilling stories or intense mental workouts. Some areas of law are fairly hard, but they are still hard to get passionate about.

Tonight, I felt the way I felt when I studied physics. The pastor was talking about legalism, and how it gets in the way of love. He talked about his hope of winning a hundred thousand souls in Dade County. It turns out these things are related in many ways, from a spiritual standpoint. As I sat and listened, the different ways became apparent to me, faster than I could have explained them had I been talking. The pieces of the Jesus puzzle spun and shifted in my mind, making sense in every configuration they assumed. This is the kind of thing creative people get off on. You wouldn’t expect to encounter it in religion.

I used to say Christianity wasn’t cerebral. In the way I meant it, I was right. You don’t have to be a 180-IQ Yeshiva-grade scripture scholar who can ace the LSAT, in order be a fantastic servant of God. The Holy Spirit’s guidance is more important than knowledge, and anyway, it’s usually pretty easy to see when you’re going wrong. But it turns out Christianity can be cerebral. Seeing the connections between the concepts is like sitting in a math class and understanding that vectors and matrices express the same ideas as multivariable calculus or differential equations or expanding functions in series. I don’t know if God has any interest in showing this aspect of Christianity to every Christian, but I can see how it would be useful and enjoyable for a teacher.

I have no interest in classical Christian scholarship. The examples I’ve seen were weak and misguided. Guesswork, based mostly on limited human intelligence making faulty deductions based on misunderstood scripture. The Holy Spirit, not the mind, is what makes scripture understandable. If the mind could unravel it, Satan (smarter than any human being) would be able to understand prophecy, and he isn’t. If he had understood the second psalm, the crucifixion would never have occurred. It’s about the crucifixion; it explains what happened, a thousand years in advance. Satan couldn’t figure it out, but a plumber or a grocery clerk, aided by the Holy Spirit, could see it immediately. I saw it. And I found that many other people had seen it before I did.

Brilliant people say a lot of dumb things about the Bible, because it hasn’t been illuminated for them. When I say Christianity is cerebral, I’m not talking about stale, ancient, error-filled tomes written by people who had no divine guidance and whose unaided logic was generally sub-par and warped by fear and bias. I’m talking about a deductive and intuitive process guided by God himself. He shows you a bit here and there and lets you connect the dots. The glory is all his, but he lets you do enough to make you feel useful.

By the way–this is a non sequitur–I realized something this week. Spirits apparently alter archaeological sites. How do I know this? Because Satan tried to claim the body of Moses. One explanation of his dispute with the archangel Michael is that Michael had been sent to conceal the location of the remains, while Satan wanted them to be found by the Jews. Another is that Satan wanted to physically take the body for his own purposes, possibly to revive it as a sort of golem and make it denounce God. Either way, think of the implications. At the end of the line of reasoning that follows, the conclusion is that faith will always be essential. It seems paradoxical, but faith is more trustworthy than proof, or at least what we think is proof. Maybe that’s because proof is about the past, but faith shapes the future. The past doesn’t exist any more. Memory creates the illusion that it exists, but there is no past. If it existed, it would still be here, right? The future is what’s actually happening. We tend to think of the past as stable and the future as something that shifts, but maybe we have it backward. Maybe the past seems to change, as miracles distort the evidence. Maybe it does change, when God decrees it. In any case, maybe it’s not reliable. I have witnessed at least one example of a thing that had been moved from its prior location, with no natural agent involved, and so have many other people.

Angels also opened the tomb of Christ. And the Jews say the gate of the Temple opened on its own, not long before the fall of Jerusalem. Some Christians interpret this to mean God had abandoned it.

God has a funny way of doing miracles, sometimes. Think of the loaves and fishes. Do you think people saw fishes and loaves growing and dividing in front of them? I doubt it. The gospels would have described that. Sometimes God shapes the present so it seems consistent with the past, yet it is clear that a miracle has occurred. Think of the widow who fed Elijah, or the famous miracle of Corrie ten Boom’s bottle of vitamin oil, which sustained a barracks full of women before running dry on the day more vitamins arrived. Do you think the widow looked in the barrel of flour every day and saw that it had more in it than it had the day before? I’ll bet if you could interview her, you’d find that every time she took flour out, the flour level seemed to sink by an appropriate amount, and that the next day, it seemed just as low, and that somehow she was still able to continue taking flour out of it. It was probably the same way with the vitamin oil. God does that kind of thing to people all the time, with money and other things. He did it for the Hebrews in the desert with Moses, making their shoes and clothes last forty years. They probably seemed to wear normally during each day, yet weeks later, they had not grown more worn, and the Jews were probably unable to reconcile these observations. God is able to make reality like a dream. In a dream, it can be Tuesday and Thursday. You can be at home and on an airplane. Miracles can be very subtle.

Maybe God really can make a rock so big that he can’t lift it, and maybe he can also lift it. It’s a sophomoric question, because it turns God into a cartoon and posits a childish definition of omnipotence. It’s a very stupid puzzle on which to base your decision whether to believe in God. But maybe he can do it. I don’t really care. If lifting rocks is what gets you excited when you shop for a supreme being, you are an idiot. I’m more interested in things like healing and freedom from self-destructive behavior and attitudes.

I don’t want to get into the mental meandering that led me to it, but the stuff we talked about at the meeting tonight caused me to think about prison ministry. The short version is that the discussion of legalism made me realize it is possible to turn God’s own law into an idol, and that got me thinking about bondage and iniquity, and that made me think of prisoners. We have a guy who is trying to put together a prison ministry, and unbelievably, I went up to him and talked to him about it. I know I sound crazy, but my logic goes like this: if God can deliver me from bondage to food, he can deliver prisoners from bondage to drugs, alcohol, violence, and so on, and maybe I can help them find that out. I couldn’t resist. This is completely unlike me. I’m not an outgoing person. But he has my phone number now, so maybe I’m on the roller coaster and the little restraint bar is locked in place.

We are both very confident in Robert Morris’s teachings. We mentioned that independently at the meeting, and he agrees that it ought to be applicable to criminals.

How did I get here?

I wrote all this stuff and didn’t even scratch the surface of what went on tonight. Sometimes life is too rich to share effectively.

Good night.