Dave, I hope you plan to continue posting Christian topics on a regular basis. While I may not always agree, I always enjoy your thought processes. You’ve also blown away my preconceived notions of what LCMS folks are like as well (just as “Real Live Preacher,” which I first read about here, has done for Baptists – well, at least some Baptists 😉

From a mainline Episcopalian, which in the Diocese of Dallas, makes me a flaming liberal…

Thanks. I think you’re right.

I have two questions for those who trot out that phrase. Do they put more effort into hating the sin or loving the sinner? And do they hate their own sin as much as they hate the sin they see in others?

I remember about 20 years ago someone asked the pastor who baptized me what would have happened if Eve hadn’t sinned. Pastor Wegener said, "Well, if Eve hadn’t sinned, then someone else would have. And if no one else would have, then I would have." That’s something we all need to remember. If no one else would have committed the first sin, then we would have.

The response was that most of the folks who trot this out simply want to use the word "hate" and still feel clean afterwards…

"more Christ and less religion" – I agree, strongly.

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I’m not what I consider a Christian. I am not an atheist, nor am I agnostic. I want to believe in God but I find myself unable to — I’m still searching myself for what will turn that key for me. I will not attend a church if I do not fully believe what I practice — I feel it is a greater offense to commit lip service to God than it is to not attend at all.

I’d rather be told the truth, no matter how hurtful, than to have someone lie to me to please me.

Don Francisco has a lot of songs that I truly love. Primarily because I first heard them at a point in my life when everything was stable and normal. Things — my family, my life, my school, my health — all seemed to be normal. One of the songs — most of which I think are Christian hymns of one sort or another, to be honest — talks about "not being able to see beyond your mind." I imagine he means seeing with your heart — and that is the path to finding meaning in life. I live in a turtle shell. My life hasn’t been fantastic — it’s certainly turned out well, I believe — but during the process of my life I came to have a few select gifts:

1) A great grasp of technology and its fundamentals and how they work. I retreated to technology often to hide from the warring figures in my life. Figures like Dave, Steve, Chuck, Charity, Stallion, Stormy, et al, from the local St. Louis BBS scene provided the stability I desperately needed while moving from home to home.

2) The ability to self analyze and understand what I do to a great extent. This is not self deception — two psychiatrists and three psychologists have told me this. (I had one laughing so hard she was crying after talking about a particular day when I just decided to start making people do things themselves.) When I do something I do so with the full knowledge of why, who it hurts and helps, and what the ultimate price will be. This ability came from needing to survive. If you thrust a young person into a desperately different situation every day of his life he must come to understand his own abilities in order to maximize himself. New schools, new homes, new parents, new siblings.

3) My wife and children. I don’t think I need to say anything more.

4) The recognition that friendship is more than what most people think. I don’t believe most people have true friends — they have individuals they like to laugh with, sure, but friendship entails being there for someone. I acquaint friendship more with the idea of a "best friend." The one you run to when you need aid, who’ll stand by no matter how stupid you act, or whatever. I don’t know how to explain this one; I only know that when I call you a friend I will do anything I can to help you in any way, bar nothing.

These things came with a price.

1) I can no longer express myself in person. I can type this message here on a board and be perfectly fine with it, but face to face expression of feelings, emotions, and "deep thoughts" makes me red with embarassment, stutter, and all in all I come out looking like a jerk. This is a result of the immersion of my feelings into a computer screen early in life.

2) The inability to realize and let loose feelings other than anger and laughter. I love my wife and children dearly, they are the best thing that ever happened to me — truly — but I can’t find a way to express that. I can scream at them in anger (don’t get me going on that) or I can laugh and play with them, but being affectionate.. seems impossible. My life has taught me that when you come to love someone and they know it, they leave you.

Some examples: my Dad leaving me at age 9. My Mom leaving me and my sister alone at age 12. My parents dropping me off at the other’s doorstep because they didn’t pay child support and I was expensive (I’m diabetic). My girlfriend of two years in high school engaging in sexual relations with her "male friend" that she assured me was nothing more than that — my first "love", if you will.

If they don’t leave you, ultimately, you leave them. I had moved over fifty times in the first 15 years of my life — before I was kicked out/moved out of my father’s house in a disagreement that left me homeless. A new school, new faces, new rules, new social etiquette, all of that… every day it seems.

3) An inability to truly commit. I have so many dreams and desires, and I can do them, but I can’t find it in myself to commit to them. I want to believe in God but I won’t commit to a search for my own core of belief because I’m afraid there will not be anything there. I want to write a book – a method of escape for those who live lives like mine, a way out of the screaming and yelling that may be prevalent in their world – but I’m afraid that I will fail. I want to write a game, to show the world that games don’t have to be about blood and gore and violence to be fun – but I’m afraid I’m not smart enough.

My father died four years ago. The falling out he and I had was over Christianity. He found and fell in love with a Christian woman, and became a practicing Christian once more. He came home one night and decreed that all of my abuses of privilege would end. See, when you live the life that I do there is ultimately only one person who ensures you go to school, you go to work, you do your homework, you stay out of jail, you do the right thing: me. From the time of my parents’ divorce at age 9 until I was 15 my life was plotted, determined, and driven by me and only me. That meant that a great deal of the things I did were not socially acceptable things for a child. I cursed (like a sailor, still do actually). I smoked. I stayed out till all hours of the night. I enjoyed the company of many women (yes, age 15, any participant in the BBS scenes back then would know what I mean I think). My father decreed that this would all stop, and laid down a set of rules that would be normal in any household in the United States, but not mine.

I refused. A fight followed, and I left. This is a crucial point in my life because this is where my path diverges. What would have happened if I had stayed? What life would I be leading now? Would I have finished high school? Would I have gone to college and graduated? "Don’t look back in anger…"

Instead I lived on the street for a few months until a friend of mine found me and offered me a place to stay. He gave me a place for several months, then my older sister – the one I’d been left alone with by my Mom when I was younger – said I could stay with her. Not only that, but she could get me a job. It was a fast food job, but a job nonetheless. I still carried my father’s work ethic within me — a job has always been important.

Over a great deal of time the family healed and I even spoke to my Dad. The birth of my son marked that — it’s a healing moment for any relationship I think. But then it was too late — Dad had cancer.

While I search for the ability to truly believe, I find myself looking back over my life and wondering. Every time I’ve come into contact with religion it’s ended in disaster; why is that? (I was a Mormon for five years when I was little – the running from the Mormon Church accounted for a great deal of the moves we did at the time.) Why is religion so full of complexity and politics?

I don’t think it should be. 🙁 Then again, I’m just being selfish. Maybe someday I’ll be able to make a determination and live my life to the fullest, without fear.

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Wow, that was long. Heh. >:)