Bible Secret #3: I was raised believing the every book in the bible actually happened the way it was written. I remember one moment as a young person as I was walking out in nature having a slightly disturbing thought in my head. I had to conclude that the characters in the Bible lived when the laws of nature were different than they were in my time line. I couldn't see a correlation between the magic of the bible and my life, but no one was telling me that it was possible that they were stories. So my only way to navigate the difference as to why Peter could walk on water and I couldn't was that the laws of nature weren't same two thousand years ago. So sometime after the bible stories, nature changed and water wasn't walkable anymore.
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I discovered Thomas Westbrook and his Youtube channel Holy Koolaid a couple of years ago. He caught my attention with some of his videos. I have my favourites, but since this week is about Bible Scholarship, I wanted to highlight a couple of videos that Thomas did on Bible Contradictions. I remember a moment when I was at Bible School back in the late 80's when a friend of my roommate's came to visit. A few of us were having a conversation about the bible, and I remember some of her words thirty five years later.
"I don't know about the bible... there are so many contradictions ."
It went something like that. It was the first time that someone had suggested to me that the stories I grew up with and had been studying at the time were not always matching in their content. I remember her words today, but back then, they didn't sink in. No one else was telling me that there were contradictions that challenged the reality of the stories. But I already admitted that reading the bible seriously wasn't a passion of mine. I was only in Bible School because my other alternatives for education weren't an option for me at the time. I breezed through without actually caring to dive deeper into the messiness of the Bible and the pastor teachers weren't encouraging me with an introduction to the mess.
I am in my mid fifties now unable to understand why I couldn't connect the dots much earlier. Why was it so easy to just assume that I had been given a flawless narrative? Why was it so easy to accept as "truth"? Where was my brain back then? I wish I could go back and ask that girl what she was thinking and maybe I would discover that thinking wasn't a priority. She wanted to play, enjoy the outdoors, connect with the animals around her. School was boring; church was boring. She just did that because her parents wanted her to do it. I couldn't ask that girl to do any deep thinking back then... but I can do it for her now.
Day 30: 2022 - "Looking for something a lot more simple"
Day 30: 2023 - " Wolves in the Snow"
Note: This puzzle is still on my shelf awaiting the courage in me to start it.
