Site Search Sidebar, Cat Hair, and Christian Apologetics

Helen, my daughter-in-law, works as a free-lance graphic artist and yesterday one of her clients flew her up north for a consultation; that left my son, Donald, batching it for a few days and he joined my friend Wes and me for breakfast and a three-hour gab fest on Christian Apologetics.

Great fun!

Before I recount the highpoints of our conversation, I’d like to point out three interesting bits of computer stuff:

First: This morning Donald added a search box to the sidebar of my blog. That way, if you want to read something I wrote about in the past, all you have to do it type in a key word and hit the search button on the sidebar to get a list of postings.

That’s so cool…

Or it would be if I could remember what it is I wrote about in the past.

I can’t always.

Second: Sunday Wes posted his first ever blog entry. Yes, under my evil influence, he has started his own blog. He calls his blog I think, I Believe and you can find him at http://ithinksoibelieve.blogspot.com/ .

Third: Helen (the DIL who flew out of town) has fallen onto hard times and has been reduced to peddling cat tee-shirts. Although she is an accomplished graphic artist and web designer, she has taken to drawing pictures of her cats, CC and Perl — both named after computer programs — and selling them to make a living.

How sad.

But, if you are ever in the market to buy a tee shirt covered with cat hair, please visit her site at http://www.cafepress.com/ccandperl . To see other examples of her work, please check out her graphic art site at http://www.elemental.name/

Anyhow, with Helen being out of town, yesterday Donald joined Wes and me for one of our bi-weekly talks on family, life and theology — with a smattering of jokes unsuitable for mentioning on a G-rated blog. Like the one Wes told about the three rednecks finding the Dr. Pepper bottle on the beach. All three of us, being rednecks ourselves, enjoyed that one.

By Christian apologetics I simply mean reasons why we believe the things we believe. We are always to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is within us.

Donald broached this subject by mentioning a recent sermon he’d heard refuting skepticism; he felt the preacher’s arguments were weaker than they could have been.

Donald said feels that much of our unbelief stems from a desire to be in control, that when we realize that we are not in control of most things going on around us, then we clutch at mastery and can not relax in God’s hand.

I said that I’ve encountered people who get mad at God over some pain they’ve experienced, say the death of a loved one. They imagine God as being one sort of being and when He lets them down, they feel disappointed and renounce Him. They say He does not exist.

I think they are right.

I think they have a perfectly valid point.

The creature they imagined does not exist.

Imaginary creatures don’t.

Wes said that my teleological and ontological (good words to try on that search sidebar) thoughts about God constitute an argument leading to the “highly probable” rather than a solid reason for belief. He said that we need to examine how we can “know” anything.

Wes said the most solid reason for believing in Christ is that God has chosen to reveal Himself and that by examining the Bible and applying Greenleaf’s laws of evidence, we can arrive at a confidant conviction.

(I hate to admit it, but I’ve forgotten what Greenleaf’s laws of evidence are; I think Greenleaf was a Harvard Law professor).

After kicking this ball around the field for a while, the three of us arrived at an interesting conclusion — that reasons and arguments matter little in witnessing to Christ before the skeptics of this world, that our living is more important than our talking.

While some people come to Christ on hearing a sermon or reading a book or sensing guilt, most of us become Christians because we’ve met someone who had something we didn’t have.

We crossed the path of some person who reflected God’s presence in their lives.

That dim reflection of the divine attracts (or repels) us. We want that undefined something for ourselves. And when we question the person whose life attracted us and they tell us that it is Christ in them the hope of glory, that’s when we begin to search for reasons why there has to be some other answer.

It’s that control thing again.

And that’s the point where knowing reasonable reasons for our faith come into play.

Our main duty is to walk so close to the Lord Jesus that something of Him rubs off on us. So that they see Him more than they see us. He attracts people, we don’t.

Like that old song says, “Oh Thou Spirit divine, all my nature refine, till the beauty of Jesus be seen in me”.

Wes, Donald and I also agreed that we are altogether unconscious and unaware of having anything in us that the world sees as drawing them to Jesus. It’s there but we just don’t know about it. We can take no credit at all.

Here’s a case in point:

I vaguely remembered this incident and used that search box thingy on my sidebar to look up this diary entry. It’s from my diary on May 20, 1999:

As Gin & I walked home from the bus stop, a lady we have never spoken to but seen around in the neighborhood rushed out of her house waving her arms and yelling for us to wait and yelling back toward her house for “Lloyd”.

I thought there had been some kind of medical emergency and she needed help.

Not exactly...

Lucille, who lives on the corner, has watched Ginny and me as we walk to the bus stop, grocery store, church, etc. We hardly notice but it is often our custom to stroll along holding hands; and we almost always kiss hello and goodbye at the bus stop.

Therefore this lady, Lucille, has decided that we are the most loving people she has ever seen and she wanted to photograph us!

I felt so stupid and embarrassed standing in her yard against a background of flowering bushes while her husband, Lloyd (who was just as embarrassed as I was) had to find their camera, focus and snap pictures of me and Ginny.

Oh well, I supposed there are worse reasons to be photographed.

When I told the couple that any love we enjoy is just a reflection of the love that Jesus shows towards people, Lucille nudged Lloyd in the ribs and said, "See there. I tolt you it was something like that"!

Then our conversation veered into favorite quoted from that noted skeptic Mark Twain; my own favorite was, “Yes, the meek may inherit the earth, but they won’t keep it for long”.

So as steel sharpens steel, our minds whet each other.

Three guys sitting around, coffee cups clutched in our hands, Wes and me smoking our pipes and Donald puffing his cigar, joking and talking about things that matter to us, gossiping about absent friends, discussing personal problems, venting frustrations, and knowing that Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them”.

If church were more like that, I’d like to go more often.