Telling My Faith Story - I

Telling My Faith Story - I

Okay. I have written at least three posts on "telling our faith stories" - why, why not etc. It is time for me to begin to work on my own story. I am also sharing it here with you. There are many references in the Psalms and elsewhere to telling of the acts of God, his mighty works etc., in the congregation, to the people and to the nations. It is that path I am following here.

I believe in an earlier post I wrote about why I am a Christian that I alluded to my faith heritage as being a factor in that. That is the positive, the blessing, with which I can look back and say my life and my faith pilgrimage started from. I don't know about the faith of my ancestors prior to the Reformation. However, as an Anabaptist Mennonite, I know that I probably come from a pretty good line of faithful ancestors from then till now. I was blessed to have parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts who were mostly staunch members of this faith community in which my roots are. They taught me as much by example as word about it what it means to be a follower of Jesus and to have a relationship with God. There example, their teaching, their prayers - and one can never underestimate that - as well as that of the faith communities to which we belong both guided me as I grew up and kept me from falling into many traps that could have led to more negative outcomes.

If we look at the beginning of my life, my expectant mother (and I) were at her parents’ place, my maternal grandparents, in the Burwalde district in southern Manitoba when she went into labor. There was evidently a snowstorm, it being almost the end of October, which could have had disastrous consequences on the prairies. My mother's family knows from personal experience what happens when neighbors get lost in a snowstorm and freeze to death. However, we made it to the Bethel Hospital in Winkler, 5 miles away.

Then, and I don't know if my mother's physician or she knew this, but I presented for delivery as breech, or feet and rear end first. This in itself can be a dangerous situation, as a baby's head is the biggest part of the body and if the rest is delivered but the head gets stuck, well, you can imagine what could happen. Being a firstborn child added to that risk because who knew how wide my mother's pelvis was going to open. Thirdly, I was being delivered by a family physician in a rural hospital which could also be an issue because they would not have the same training and experience as an obstetrician in larger centers such as Winnipeg, which was over an hour's drive away. Indeed, in those days, it seemed much farther than that. However, rural physicians in those days also became quite accomplished in some of these areas simply through necessity and experience.

So, things worked out and I was delivered all right. Then, some two months later, I guess when I was deemed old enough to travel, mother and I set out on the return trip to join my father many miles to the north in Oxford House, Manitoba. Grandfather, mother and I took the train to the place where we would catch a plane to the community to which we were headed. When the aircraft finally took off from this place, The Pas, it needed to make a stop in Norway House. I almost met a premature end there because the pilot mistakenly at first thought that the people that were waving evergreen branches were welcoming him down to a landing strip on the frozen lake. Actually, they were trying to drive him away, because that was an area where they had just been cutting ice to use for storage and whatever had frozen over after that, would not have supported our aircraft. We landed safely farther away.

The next big event where I would say I remember God's hand being on our family was some six years later. Our youngest brother, not even six months old, was not doing well. We were then living in Grand Rapids, still an isolated community at the mouth of the Saskatchewan River and Lake Winnipeg. We were fortunate enough to get an aircraft to fly mother and Lloyd to St. Anthony's Hospital at the Pas, where they diagnosed that he had what they described as a large cyst on his kidney.

Our whole family then went down to Winnipeg, where Lloyd was operated on to remove this cyst, which resulted in him losing one kidney as well. This was done at St. Boniface Hospital by a Dr. McNamara, I believe, and it was evidently the first time such surgery had been performed in Manitoba on an infant. Lloyd's life was spared again within the year when our family was enjoying some tobogganing on our riverbank on a cold winter day. We were all walking back to the top of the hill after a run when we noticed Lloyd was nowhere to be seen. We looked around and there was his snowsuit-hooded head bobbing in our open waterhole. In those days, we got our water from the river by keeping a hole open in the ice. We grabbed him from that freezing water and rushed him into the house, stripped him and warmed him up and he was all right.

It was around that time, and I am not sure of the exact dates or whether I was six or seven-years-old. Our parents regularly read stories from the Bible or other Christian materials to us at bedtime before they said our night-time prayers with us. I don't know what triggered my behavior on this one particular evening. However, I remember breaking down in tears and crying because of my awareness of my own sinfulness. Our parents comforted me with the words of First John 2:1 and 2: “But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world." Our parents explained this to me and told me what I could do to set things right between me and God with a prayer to him and I decided to do this. My sister decided she wanted to do the same, and we both were "born again" that evening.

I can say, that since that time, no matter what has come my way in my life, no matter what questions might have come up in my mind, God has kept me from straying from the path that he helped set me on that day, and for that I give him thanks. Of course, I am also thankful to my parents and all those around me who had influenced me by that time and continue to do so for their role in helping keep me in The Way since then.

Telling Our Stories – Why I Haven’t Done So

[Disclaimer: Looking back, I realize I said much of this in my September posting, but here I think I am being a bit more personal as I work on this]:

Christians are generally of two kinds: First, those who have grown up in the faith and carried on with it as their own without any major deviations from the path in which they were reared. The second group are those who come to Christianity from other places or from a place to which they have sorely strayed. I suppose the same could be dais for other religions.

I would have to say I come from the first group. One of the differences that sometimes seems to show up is in respect to carrying out one of the evident tasks of being a Christian. This is obedience to Christ’s command to bear witness to him and his gospel.

Sometimes individuals in my camp, myself included, are not sure what kind of witness we can bear. Perhaps that is because we think too much of what faith has done for us, about our experience. If we have not come from some ‘other’ place, we are sometimes guilty of thinking we don’t have much of a salvation story to tell. As I began to allude to though, bearing witness is not all about us and our experience. It is the story of the gospel, of who Jesus Christ is.

Here we run up into a problem in our society. Western individuals generally do not want to hear about your religion. They don’t want to be spoken to about matters of faith. It is an individual matter in our society. However, you are freer to talk about your experience. No one can really deny that. The catch for some of us believers then is that when we don’t think we have a very dramatic story to tell, we are not sure how we can ‘witness.’

Quite some time ago now, the fallacy of this thinking was gently pointed out to me.  A wiser more mature believer pointed out that maybe people such as I had an even more important story to tell.  We have a story of how we have walked in righteousness our whole life. Righteousness simply means in right relationship with God. This story includes how God has perhaps kept us from yielding to serious temptations of one kind or another, whether it be to fall into bad behaviour or drift into some other brand of faith that is not Orthodox Christianity. It can also include the many individuals and events that have been a part of our continuing walk of faith, helping us stay on the ‘straight and narrow.’

Here I run into another problem. As good as I believe my faith community to be, we have lacked a certain emphasis on this kind of witnessing, which is essentially verbal. Thus, even though I was told what kind of story I might have a long time ago, I have never really taken a good look at my life to see what that story is. We don’t emphasize practicing such things as a rule in our congregations. I am referring to what in the past was referred to as the Kirchengemeinde Mennoniten, which really simply means the Mennonite Church Assembly. That might sound a bit presumptuous but until in the mid 1800s it was really the main body of the Mennonite faith in Europe. After immigrating to North America and transitioning into English it became the the former General Conference of Mennonites (GC), then Mennonite Church Canada (MC-C), currently devolving into Regional denominational divisions in Canada.

Many smaller groups broke off from this body over the years, most notably the Mennonite Brethren (MB), as they came to call themselves, in 1860, still in Russia (now the Ukraine). Most of these schisms, like this one, occurred because it was believed the main church was no longer faithful enough. They did not emphasize salvation, witnessing and being born again in the way those of Baptist and Alliance persuasion who encountered the Mennonites believed necessary. The old church was not mission-minded enough.

Perhaps this whole area has been more of a struggle for me because my father came from MB background. His upbringing and even post-secondary schooling fostered the understanding of Christianity I referred to in the last paragraph. Naturally, since he was my pastor, Sunday school teacher and summer Bible Camp director for many of the first 16 years of my life, I absorbed much of that. It seems to me that many of my peers who grew up totally within the GC/MC-C sphere do not have this issue to the same degree I do.

So, what is your story in this regard? Where do you fit in?

Don't 'Dis' Me. I Am a Person. Full stop.

This is one of those mornings when I again woke up 'early' (5 am) and my awakening brain made me decide it was not, at least easily, going back to sleep. Ideas such as this title were percolating so what else to do after some 20 minutes of struggle but get up and put it to print.

To begin with, let me parse my title for this posting. Indeed, by the time I have done that, I will have well introduced the ground of what I want to convey with this document. 

an exercise in academia, as the title should suggest. Allow me to continue.

'Dis,' of course, is as the On-line Etymology Dictionary [https://www.etymonline.com/word/dis] elaborates: 

dis- 

(assimilated as dif- before -f-, to di- before most voiced consonants), word-forming element meaning 1. "lack of, not" (as in dishonest); 2. "do the opposite of" (as in disallow); 3. "apart, away" (as in discard), from Old French des- or directly from Latin dis- "apart, in a different direction, between," figuratively "not, un-," also "exceedingly, utterly," from PIE *dis- "apart, asunder" (source also of Old English te-, Old Saxon ti-, Old High German ze-, German zer-).

But then, as my heading indicates, there is now another definition of the same 3 letters:

dis (v.)

 [https:dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/full-stop] expresses that 2nd definition well: 

"used at the end of a sentence, usually when you are angry, to say you will not continue to discuss a subject" This is indeed the plea many persons who are 'dissed' make. 

OK, now that we have our terms sorted out, what was I going to say? I'll get to that yet, indirectly. It will be worth it. And if you are a boomer like me - my we are getting distracted aren't we (indeed, my wife often thinks I have ADHD, which is, according to some, another one of those 'dis'es - a 'disorder') - that phrase will take you back to 1967 and Eric Burdon of The Animals intoning in "San Franciscan Nights:" "Save up all your brand and fly trans love airways to San Francisco U.S.A., Then maybe you'll understand the song, it will be worth it..." LOL.

I want to write here about people, persons, who are too often disadvantaged, among other things, because they are categorized with not one but both of the 'dis'es I've defined.       Can we use autism for an example? This is a condition - see, I am already using a word that sets it apart from 'normal,' but which I would rather not do - that has been classified as a disorder, particularly by the medical profession, of which I am a member. 

You see, we human beings are the only animals who 'name' things. As some of you will quickly remember, that was a task given Adam by God, and popularized (distraction alert) in a Bob Dylan song "Man Gave Names to all the Animals" Indeed,  the 18th century Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus, as we know, took this to a whole new level with his "formalization of the modern system of naming organisms called binomial nomenclature" [thanks, Wikipedia]. For the uninitiated, that refers to all those two-word Latin names for organisms, such as 'Homo sapiens' for us humans. 

As many of you will know, there is subgroup of persons with autism that have been eponymously referred to as having, as being diagnosed with, Asperger's Disorder. Now, most of these individuals have average, if not above average, intelligence. And they are aware of what is going on and speaking out about it. They say, 'We do not have a disorder. We are normal. We just do things differently.' Indeed, some of them 'do differently' so well, they never get diagnosed. The current mayor of Taipei, Taiwan,  city of 5 million, is a self-acknowledged 'Asperger's.' In another life, he is/was a surgeon and the lead, no less, of a trauma team! This has led some to prefer the label 'High-FunctioningAutism" [HFA], which is still a label! Others, as some of us who know them will understand, do not function that 'normally,' at least as most of us understand 'normal.' So, what does that all tell us? Can we accept these people as variants of normal, as some of them are asking of us?

As many have discussed, who defines normal, and how, anyway? Maybe that is another of those areas where we should, at least in some of these 'cases' - and there's another word used to describe the abnormal - leave the judgment to God (I'm serious) and follow the  pro-active Golden Rule of Jesus in our behavior towards (I almost said 'treatment of,' which would again quickly lead us into the realm of 'treating,' as in a disorder, which is not where I want to go)  them: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." So often we narrow the meaning of judgment as used in the Bible to the moral and behavioral realm. Maybe we would be a lot better off if we left judgment in some other areas to God. Could perhaps save ourselves a lot of grief, and did not Jesus say he wanted us to leave our 'grief,' our burdens, with him?

Okay, finally, having gently (?) - and lengthily, I admit - introduced my main point with the example of autism, let me finally move one to what I really want to say here. Anyone guess? Especially those who know me and have read other of my blogs, especially the most-read one ever "A Nudge or a Slap."

I want to apply what I have said so far to how we relate to all those individuals in our world who, for now, are grouped into this huge, somewhat amorphous category, LGBTQ - and some even add other initials and punctuation now. It's a moving target, as we say. Unfortunately, for some, and this is not funny, they have been the fatally wounded target of many of the rest of us.  We have, if not killed them outright, driven too many to suicide. Merciful God, forgive us for what we have so wrongly 'done unto others.'

Homosexuality, represented now in that collection of letters by LG, for 'lesbian' and 'gay,' referring to females and males respectively, was, until 1973, a medical diagnosis, like autism. In that year, the American Psychiatric Association [APA], of which I was a dues-paying member for years when practicing, although not until some 20 years after that, decided to remove the label. In essence, they were saying, this is a variant of normal. Gradually, but too slowly for many - witnesses the homophobia still all too rampant in our world - we, more so in the so-called Western or 'developed' world, are coming to accept that.

So, without belabouring it further - here's my point - is it time to accept all of those other 'letters' as variants of normal? For those of you who judge them on a biblical basis - leave the judgment to God and remember what I wrote above about how to behave towards them? 

God appears to have given man the right to give names. However, if we want to continue in the biblical or theological realm, we know that the world is no longer the prefect world God created. I suggest this imperfection also applies to our naming of things.  

Names can have their benefits. One of the chief ones is that, once defined, others know more-or-less what we are talking about. This, believe it or not, is the reasoning behind many so-called diagnoses. As the APA's in-some-circles-much-maligned Diagnostic and Statistical Manual says, and I simplify, the 'diagnoses' here are, as many of us know all too well, fluid collections of descriptions, admittedly again, for something not considered 'normal.' These collections of signs and symptoms, as medicine refers to them, do not indicate anything about cause. We are not yet there in psychiatry, although great strides are being made in that direction. 

And we certainly don't know the cause(s) for LGBTQ etc. So why not just leave that issue to those who wish to pursue it and the rest of us get on with ceasing our 'dissing' and 'disordering' these individuals and treat them as persons? Like the rest of us? Stop the many 'ways' we 'name' them. Full stop.   

I could say more about what we can do to actualize the thrust of the last paragraph. However, enough for one 'chapter.' It's now 7:30, time to get on with other elements of my day for now.