Faith

After having such a close brush with death, I had to reevaluate my life as I already know I won't be around for long. It was a long overdue self-evaluation as I discovered I'd been running on autopilot for years, perhaps decades.

I quit the Christian faith back around 1992. I had witnessed far too much church corruption and it was wearing on my soul. Between the issues I had found in my own religious studies, the apathy of the church clergy who were supposed to help me, the hypocrisy of my own peers within the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship that I was very active in, I realized that I could no longer believe in the Christian faith. So I left and was turned overnight into a pariah (save for one stalwart friend).

Never again, I said. Took me nearly 6 months to stop saying grace automatically at meals.

After 23 years, I'm returning to the faith after an intervention by one of my friends and it was a good discussion. As strange as it sounds, I think that my hiatus from God actually drew me closer to Him because now I know how it feels to be so utterly alone.

Do note that I'm still a scientist and I don't intend to compromise that. My current position is pro-choice on abortion, LGBTQ-affirming and pro-science. It doesn't mean that I won't change those positions in the future as I study the Scriptures but even if I did, I still intend on following the "live and let live" policy that's been in place for decades. If I am to draw people to God, it'll be through His goodness and purity shining through my life's example. Between recovering from my hospitalization and the chemo side-effects, I simply don't have the energy to do any more anyways.

I don't take the Bible literally nor do I consider it to be God's Big Bumper Book of Facts. I do believe as a tenet of my faith that as the Word of God and as a book of moral teachings that it is the truth and is error-free. It doesn't mean that it's easy to understand and it doesn't mean that it doesn't contain what looks like contradictions. The latter really stuck in my craw back when I was younger but to my joy, I'm finding that I'm able to logically reconcile these contradictions as I go through the Bible these days. Perhaps I'm a little older and wiser or perhaps the study resources are far, far better these days than 20+ years ago. Or perhaps God has just granted me some wisdom to understand His Word a little better.

I'm not planning on posting a lot of religious content here. Probably none, in fact - it's out of scope for the intent of this blog.

Regardless, I'm at peace now which isn't a bad place to be for someone with a fatal disease.