I’ve found that I get the most exciting stories from the people with the least going on in their lives.
You talk to homeless people and they’ll tell you about government satellites beaming subliminal messages into their brains. By contrast, the average bloke with a wife, kids and mortgage doesn’t have much time for chitchat.
I grew up in a religion, Seventh-Day Adventism, that was obsessed with its persecution. They saw a Time of Trouble ahead where the government would pass Sunday laws (mandating the observance of the Sabbath on Sunday) and Adventists would have to flee to the hills to escape persecution and hang out their without showers until Jesus came again.
It was very exciting to believe that the world was about to come to an end, that we were the highest revelation of divine truth to humanity, that we were God’s Chosen People, and as long as I could believe this, I didn’t give in to my frustrations that Seventh-Day Adventists were about as relevant to the world as the Amish.
So I’d go to these meetings about the Time of Trouble and I learned about how God’s people would be persecuted and then I’d catch a ride home again.
And guess what? There never was a security guard out front to keep the evil people from wiping us out. I never had to pass through scanners to make sure nobody was carrying weapons. And nobody molested us on the way home.
I never encountered hatred of Adventists, just some right-thinking people who were tired of being handed tracts and hit up for donations “so we can tell the world who Jesus is.”
As Reverend Sam Kinison pointed out, the world knows who Jesus is, so go get a job.
There’s no question that Adventism is a lot easier to live than Orthodox Judaism. There’s no law in Adventism, for instance, against eating food prepared by non-Adventists. You can turn lights off and on all Sabbath if you want and it won’t imperil your eternal salvation.
If you go to an SDA day school, your schedule will typically go from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. If you go to an Orthodox day school, your schedule will be about three hours longer each day.
On the other hand, Judaism embodies values that evil people hate. The world’s worst people will try to start their dirty work by going after Jews. The Ahmadinejads of the world don’t send out assassination squads targeting Adventists or the Amish. You don’t have haters of Adventists who go shoot up SDA schools or museums.
I love being part of a people at the center of what is going on in the world. As an Adventist, by contrast, I felt irrelevant once the fancy rhetoric about the Time of Trouble wore off. I didn’t see a world where leading playwrights, novelists, painters, politicians, military strategists, financiers, journalists, academics, etc were Adventist. When I go to shul, I get to mix with some extraordinary people, folks who were at the White House that past week or had written a hit movie, or had memorized the entire Torah.
