Getting Kind of Scared

As I continue to learn more and more about religion and my faith while attending Trinity Western University, I become more and more scared. Being out in the religious world and not being pointed in any certain direction is a mighty scare for anyone who feels called into the pastorate field. I think that this scare is both an excitement and a fearful feeling.

Learning about other religions is something that becomes more and more real to me everyday. I want to learn why people believe in 330,000,000 different gods, or why walking around naked is part of their religion, or why people decide to sacrifice their own personal happiness for their religion. These are things that I wonder about, but there are also things outside of my christian faith that make sense to me. A buddhist walking alone in meditation makes complete sense to me. I think that meditation or "quiet time with God" is a lost art form in western culture. We are so busy trying to fit as much as we can into our lives that we tend to start filling our lives with crap we don't need. THen we are focused on trying to work as much as we can to pay off this crap that we went into debt for in the first place. These understandings of other religions is what is so scary to me-the fact that they are so appealing to me and yet I feel dirty if I practice them because I wasn't taught about it in my "core classes" at my church.

I do have some ideas on how to teach the christian culture about different religions though: I want to start a board game and sell it in the family book store and call it "Bible Verse or Heathens Words" (I think that the name alone would get it in the doors, though I don't think that they are heathens, but hey, I gotta make a living too). This is a game where we take cards and put the verses from the bible we read or scriptures from somebody else's holy book and then the christian has to determine if it is in the bible or not. Sounds easy? I was reading the Bhagavad Gita, some of the Hindu scriptures, and found that a lot of what they say sounds like it could be in the Bible. Even in the Q'uran there are some things that sound like they just missed the cut for the bible.

I have a couple of other ideas: "Proverb or Fortune Cookie" where you determine exactly that, and also one that my friend Kurt and I were talking about to sell up front: a candy that would give scriptures or they would tell of the miracles in the bible. We will call them "Testicles"...am I going to hell for that one? You're going to then, because I know you laughed.

Seriously, back to the issue. i think that if one isn't really grounded in their faith, they could seriously leave and decide to be a Buddhist. Is that such a bad thing though? Eventually they will come back to what they were raised with. Statistics show this right? Right?!??

ron

CD I am listening to: My own. I recorded a 6 song scratch track cd and my friend tony and I are looking to re record it this summer. We are both listening to it to think of ideas to track behind it all.