Thinking
Have you ever been accused of thinking too much? I have. “You think too much,” they say. But it’s never a teacher who says it. It’s always someone who is sick of my hypothetical questions. “What if….?” “You think too much.” And I suppose I do. I’ve imagined all sorts of terrible and wonderful things happening to myself or someone in my family. But even my imaginings have to have a strain of realism through them. It has to be stuff that could really happen. I don’t worry about being kidnapped by aliens and I don’t dream about playing in the world series. These things won’t happen to me — I know it. But every conceivable death and glory have been mulled over in my mind — and that’s just the thinking I do about me and my family! That doesn’t even count all the thinking I do about God, Jesus, and the Bible.
Sometimes I wonder why I believe. I ask myself this question often because I never want the answer to be, “because I’ve always believed,” I never want it to be a cop out… “I can’t stop believing because my life has been wrapped up in this.” Often I can’t really answer the question. I’m not sure why I believe. I’ve forgotten, for a moment, the prayers answered with miracles and with the closeness and certainty I feel God moving in my life and in my brain. And I think to myself, “Well, I don’t lose anything by not believing. And I lose everything if I don’t believe and it’s true!” That makes it convenient, but that’s not necessarily entirely true. Sometimes people treat me oddly because I believe…. oddly an sometimes even become unkindly. So I lose that. But the other stuff I “lose” is of the most worth to me… the strong ethics and honesty that I might lose were I not Christian. In losing those things I might have gained more worldy goods (and who wouldn’t want more worldly goods ;-)), but what good does it do a ‘man’ to lose his soul but gain the world. Of course that only means something to you if you believe in the Bible.
I wonder sometimes why non-believers are honest and ethical. Why in the world would people not get all they could unless there was some negative consequence from it? I mean I wouldn’t want to end up in prison or anything, but there are plenty of legal ways to have gain via dishonesty and unethical behavior. Do non-believers keep themselves in check because they just don’t want to do what’s wrong? Or is it because they don’t want to feel like a bad person. Is it because they want to do what’s right? That used to be my reason, but then I thought, what decides rightness? And somehow I knew, deep down inside, that rightness was a scale created long ago and implanted in us like instinct. That made it fairly easy to take the next step and believe in God.
What I wonder more is why did I fall away for so many years. I strove to be a somewhat good person, but I was so fallen. I guess other, transient things seemed more fun and certainly seemed easier. And I guess I believed that God would forgive me or maybe I believed that He just wasn’t an issue in my life, only after death. That seems so unfamiliar because now He is the center of my life.