When it comes to looking at religions different from your own, remember that what matters to you is usually peripheral to others.
For Christians, Jesus Christ is central but nobody else cares who he was. For Jews, Torah is central, but nobody else cares much (with the exception of some Christians).
Salvation to the next world is a particularly Christian obsession. No other religion cares much about this.
No other religion has as much focus on sin as Christianity and therefore no other religion worries about salvation. In Judaism, for instance, I never hear rabbis talk about the next life and I never hear them talk about the great burden of sin. Even in Orthodox Judaism, there’s very little talk about sin. And certainly none about salvation through faith.
For the believing Christian, however, sin isn’t as much something you do but what you are, and for that ill, for that contaminated self, the only remedy is faith in the Heavenly Savior.
I’ve never known a Christian who believes that God is happy with how he leads his life. Rather, every believing Christian knows himself to be a big sinner.
I grew up a Seventh-Day Adventist, which has more focus on minute behaviors than other Protestants.
One of the big sins I was warned about as a child was eating between meals.
As Gary D. Strunk wrote in the October 1981 issue of Ministry (magazine for Adventist pastors): “…eating between meals can have as dire a consequence to the quality of health and the length of life as smoking. That’s why God in His mercy, His kindness, and His efforts to heal us before we get sick has told us that “never should a morsel of food pass the lips between meals,” “not even an apple, a nut, or any kind of fruit” (Counsels on Diet and Foods, pp. 181, 182). These practices depress the spirits, demoralize the attitude, and contribute to early death.”
Other Adventist sins included:
* Playing cards or chess or checkers
* Movies
* Plays
* Pop music
* Cities
* Caffeine
* Nicoteine
* Meat
* Candy
I was always pretty skeptical of the divinity of these commandments. They seemed extreme to me. Extremely stupid.
I don’t think I had much trouble as a child seeing the world differently from my family (meaning my father, the Seventh-Day Adventist theologian). What I’m still trying to sort out through psycho-therapy are those reflexive unthinking habits I took on as a child that don’t serve me.
When I was a year old, my mother was diagnosed with bone cancer and over the next three years, she withered away and died. During that time, the three kids got farmed out so my dad could properly care for his wife and for his work.
While I was living with different people for those three years, some of them bloody awful, I learned to survive and to see the world my own way.
When the family got back together in 1970, I didn’t just snap back to the Ford way of doing things. I didn’t want to get exiled again, so I learned to conform behaviorally, but from my earliest memories, I always did what I wanted when I could get away with it.
In those earliest years, I wasn’t particularly good at getting away with it.
I remember going to kindergarten when I was about five, and on the ride home, all the kids were given cookies. I ate some.
When it was found out (I had committed two sins — eating between meals and eating cookies), I got a beating I’ve never forgotten.
It wasn’t the last time I got hit for eating between meals.
As a preacher’s kid, people in my Adventist community would often rush to tell on me for my sins. It seemed like I couldn’t do anything publicly without my parents finding out. If I was disruptive in Sabbath School, my parents found out. If I cursed, my parents found out. If I ate between meals, my parents found out.
When I moved with my parents to Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley at age 11 in 1977, I noticed that fewer people told on me. Maybe this was a healthier community than Avondale College, where I grew up? Or maybe I just got better at hiding what I did from those who’d tell on me?
I started reading books at age eight, many of them recommended by my dad. I had no problem telling him about the ones I loved and the ones I didn’t care for. I developed a worldview different my father’s. I cared primarily about this world, not the next. I cared about Western civilization. I thought it was superior to the alternatives. My heroes were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, worldly men, not Christian missionaries.
As Desmond Ford‘s son, I got more religion than I wanted growing up, and so as my life went along and I got more control of my own time, the less religion I practiced. I never got out of the house just so I could be alone with my Maker. Rather, I’d tell my parents I was going to a Bible study on a Friday night and go to a basketball game instead.
I always believed in God and the divine inspiration of the Bible (except for a flirtation with atheism from 19-22) but I didn’t take my own religion of Seventh-Day Adventism too seriously. It seemed withdrawn from the world, quiet.
I didn’t see my dad’s way of life as a happy one and I didn’t want to imitate it.
I remember my dad’s students at Avondale College threw a big going away party in our yard in April 1977. It was at night. Even though I wasn’t hungry, I wanted to join in the festivities, and so I ate a piece of bread to fit in. And I freakin’ got caught and punished for eating between meals.
So we moved to PUC in May 1977 and dad introduced me to the library there where I spent that summer. I didn’t know anyone, so I spent my days reading books, mainly on wars and American history. Eventually, I started leafing through every issue of Time, Newsweek, Life and Sports Illustrated magazines.
I memorized jokes without knowing fully what they meant. One was about the wonders of the knight. He could do all sorts of wonderful things, including scaling the walls of nunneries. I remember the ladies, including my mom, were quite appalled at that one. I don’t think I fully got at age 11 that the primary reason men would scale the walls of nunneries was not to eat between meals but rather to rape women.
At that age, I would’ve rather eaten between meals.
I’ve never had a relationship with God. I’d talk to God about what was on my mind at times, but He never talked back. I sometimes got a ghostly sense of His presence. The further I’d try to run from Him, I remember feeling pulled back.
As I got into all sorts of dangerous reporting assignments for my blogs during my 20s and 30s, I kept feeling a force pulling me back from the edge. I had a sense the force was God. Or perhaps it was just my imprinting.
When I started 12-stepping for sex addiction in 2011, I realized I needed to get serious about seeking a relationship with God. That’s been awkward.
I’ve always wanted to do my own thing. I hated the idea of surrendering my life to God. I was attracted to Judaism in my 20s because it seemed like religious humanism, that people had more of a role than in Christianity.
But I won’t cry for yesterday
There’s an ordinary world
Somehow I have to find
And as I try to make my way
To the ordinary world
I will learn to survive
