I met an old friend for lunch yesterday. He was, once upon a time, firmly ensconced in a career in the ueber-conservative world of \u201cEvangelical orthodoxy\u201d\u2013and he actually had a pretty good gig.<\/p>\n
He left because of inerrancy. He could not square that non-negotiable pillar of the evangelical<\/a> system with (1) how the Bible behaves when you sit down and read it, (2) a modern\/scientific framework of thinking that is fully operational in every other phase of his life but not permitted when it came to his faith, and (3) his own experiences with real live people of faith whose very lives were a living testimony to other, vibrant, paths of Christian communion that did not require him to turn a blind eye to the cognitive dissonance created by 1 and 2.<\/p>\n In other words, for him, inerrancy<\/a> was intellectually inconsistent with itself, was out of step with modern (that\u2019s not a bad word, by the way) thinking, and was out of step with his experience.<\/p>\n My point isn\u2019t to talk about inerrancy here. Besides, I haven\u2019t had my Kashi cereal with strawberries yet, so I don\u2019t have the energy. My friend, now past normal retirement age, left his former subculture 25 years ago and, in the throes of midlife, built a new career for himself. He\u2019s been very happy, and he has also been active in a very-not-evangelical-or-inerrantist-inner-city church. He\u2019s moved on and he\u2019s just fine.<\/p>\n He said one thing, though, that really struck me. He wonders what his life would\u00a0have\u00a0been like had he not been raised within the inerrantist subculture, but instead in a community of faith that took Jesus and Scripture seriously but didn\u2019t have rows of fiery intellectual hoops to jump through daily.<\/p>\n Yeah, what if. He\u2019s moved on, but he\u2019s still nursing some deep burns.<\/p>\n It has been hard for him to move past his past that was part of him for 45 years, which stands to reason. To make such a profound shift in midlife is very hard to do. It can be a\u00a0challenge\u00a0to put the first half of one\u2019s life<\/a> And the thing is, he\u2019s not bitter about any of it. As he sees it, his choice is to live now as the person he is, with the\u00a0experiences\u00a0he has had, but not to be defined or\u00a0limited\u00a0by them, and trust God along the way\u2013but he still struggles with those forces that shaped him for all those years. As he put it, he sometimes feels like a recovering addict.<\/p>\n In other words, he is on a journey, he knows it, he accepts it, and he\u2019s committed to working at it. And it\u2019s all good.<\/p>\n Maybe some of you can relate or be encouraged by this.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=inspirandinca-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0470907754\")
To honor your experiences as those things that come together to make you you, but without being limited by them.<\/h2>\n