Locked and loaded

We're back from a wonderful month-long vacation to Ontario. We drove some 12,000 kms., traversing five provinces and six states. Our single most unique experience was to stumble across a virtually abandoned townsite called Ingomar, Montana. Twelve citizens are left from what was at one time a thriving little town with a major sheep-raising industry. We ate a delicious bean soup lunch in the restaurant, called the Jersey Lily, and had a great time chatting with the cook/server, Pam, and one of the customers, an outspoken old cowboy I'll call Wyatt.

Wyatt and another gentleman, wearing the obligatory stetsons, were having an intense time looking at a newspaper and discussing "g-dd-m cowardly sissies", which I gather referred to certain government folk, in very loud voices. A disparaging reference to former President Carter led me to ask if people in these parts were Republicans. "No, Wyatt replied, we're conservatives." At that point, I discarded any thought of raising gun control issues with him as a point of conversation.

My mind has gone back to that remarkable two hours in Ingomar many times in the days since we returned to beautiful British Columbia. My fundamentalist upbringing, which will always be a part of my makeup no matter how hard I try to shake it, made me want to dismiss the customers at the cafe as having any particular spiritual sensitivities, particularly given the language employed. I can just imagine what they might have said had I asked them if they were born again!

[As Ned Flanders' wife, Maude, said to Bart Simpson, "I went to bible camp to learn to be more judgmental."]

But I am trying to retain the good of my early Christian training (high view of Scripture, gratitude to God for his provision of salvation, a life of purpose and ethical/moral decision-making) with my newer conviction that one is a member of God's kingdom unless one ultimately chooses otherwise. In what way would someone for whom God's name is a convenient curse be born from above? Would he truly be a child of God in every sense that I like to think that I am?

That's what I have been struggling with for these last several posts. It would be a lot easier if I just bought into some established school of thought about who's in and who's out but, as I've indicated in earlier posts, I believe that would place God in a nice, tidy box that pretends to tie up all the loose ends while turning Him into a contradictory and arbitrary deity. British theologian J.B. Phillips penned the title Your God is Too Small for his best-selling book. I believe that he wrote better than he knew.

At any rate, we lumber on. My son was good enough to direct me to certain Jewish sources that might be of some help in sorting out what being born from above means. Let's see where they lead.