Today I found a message floating
In the sea from you to me
You wrote that when you could see it
You cried with fear, the point was near
Was it you that said
"How long to the point of know return?"
Point of Know Return-Kansas
Before leaving the church we last attended I was having lunch with a friend of mine who I enjoys theological discussions as much as I do. When the topic of Mormonism was introduced I asked,
"What of Joseph Smith? I saw a documentary about it one time and apparently his mom was one denomination and his dad another, he was desperately trying to find the truth, the One True Religion. An angel told him that neither of his parent's faiths nor anyone else's for that matter were right and that he would be shown the correct one. I always felt so sad for him. He was seeking with all his heart and God allowed him to be deceived? Doesn't Jesus tell us to seek and we'll find?"
"Oh, I think he was just wackadoo." she said dismissively.
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Wackadoo!?
At that something inside me switched and I began to wonder. Who knows who the wackadoo ones are? Sure Mormonism is pretty strange to those of us who have nothing to lose by picking it apart, but what about our respective flavors of Christendom? When I was a Catholic I had to (though never really did) believe that Mary was a perpetual virgin and was somehow born without the stain of original sin. As a dispensationalist, I accepted a system that said God put a huge gap in prophecy in order to make the prophecies that were never fulfilled look as thought they still may happen. As a Calvinist I had to try to come to terms with the fact that God chose not to save some people (and by default send them to hell forever) just because (the "U" in TULIP). As a Universalist I did other types of scripture selecting to get around some uncomfortable parts that seemed to say that some people are lost. Finally, when warming up to preterism I found a whole new world of theories, one in which there was no physical second coming of Jesus expected at all...it's all spiritual now.
I sat there in her living room thinking...I can't do this anymore, it's making me crazy.
I honestly wished I could be one that could go to a nice women's Bible study, learn some selective (Titus 2 or Proverbs 31 perhaps) scripture on how to be a better wife and mother and then go home and sing "Jesus Loves Me" and feel good and not think about the details.
But I just couldn't.
I had to be intellectually honest. I had to find a way to deal with all my doubts about the Bible and the faith if I was going to keep trying to hang on. Trying to fit everything into varying and hodge-podged systematic theologies just wasn't working anymore. I had to make the whole entire Bible make sense to me if I was going to keep believing any of it. I considered the possibility for the first time, that maybe, just maybe, the Bible wasn't without error.
I didn't know where to go from there.
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