"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." HENRY DAVID THOREAU
These words most accurately describe my Christian journey. My deepest desire is to find out what lies at the core of my closely held beliefs. I first read Throeau's statement when I was nine or ten years old and somehow at that young age I understood its importance. I grew up in a very conservative Christian church and struggled to feel at home. There were things that I simply couldn’t reconcile with what I felt should be true about Christianity. The excess baggage seemed to burden my journey.
If the kinds of things Jesus said were true, I wanted to experience them in the depth of my soul. I didn’t want to just explain away the hard stuff. I wanted to discover the truth about the core of what I was being taught.
In the years that have followed those early stages of questioning I have razed my beliefs down to their foundations and rebuilt them several times over. In the process of rebuilding them, I have found that Jesus easily stands the tests of time.
The critics of Christianity constantly throw accusations and insults at Jesus in an attempt to make him more human and less of a divine rebuke to their chosen way of life. I imagine Jesus smiling back at his attackers as egg and rotten tomatoes drip from his clothing. He continues to reassure his detractors with these words, “There’s nothing you can ever do that will make me stop loving you.”
That is a solid core around which I feel safe to build my Christian beliefs. And when I finally come to die, I am sure I will discover that I have truly lived.
