A few posts back I gave the experience of watching a king snake consume a copperhead that was its own size.
I mention this now because it helps me understand why scathing ridicule doesn't change my faith in the love of God. Just as I know what I saw at the bottom of that five gallon bucket (and it is ridiculous a story--two creatures becoming an arm in a sleeve) I had an experience of God's loving presence that was as graphic as that. It was as real as that. It happened ten years ahead of the Witnesses giving me a free home Bible study. In the end, knowing God was a live and gentle God who had shown me he exists brought me out of the WT.
I am a reasonable person. I don't very often tell about the snakes in the bucket. Why would I want anyone to think I was silly?
I am a reasonable person. I don't often tell what happened to me that made me know that a loving God lives.( It certainly was not a welcome story among the Witnesses, it didn't fit their theology of formalism.) I didn't find God in theology or a tent revival. It wasn't the sacraments or the Bible that was the agency. It was as direct as the blind man's healing at John 9. Just as that man knew nothing except that he was once blind and after Jesus smeared mud and spit onto his blindness he could see. That man was an object of ridicule for simply admitting that he once was blind and now he could see.
In spite of encountering God in a wilderness, I sought organized religion after the experience because I like so many others believed that the "church" is in churches. I believed faith was in religion. And consequently, like so many others on this board I am left with a deep and abiding confusion about what to think after the experience of such spiritual abuse at the hands of the church at the hands of the"Anointed".
After so many years I finally had to reclaim that simple, primitive experience of God and look at the incongruities of the evidence of God I have known and what I hear said about God by others who are smarter and better educated than I am.
I am left only with the story of a snake in the bucket. Not two snakes, but one. I have to accept what I saw and, when pressed on the matter, admit that I did see it.
When I wonder why religion is so poisonous, I think in part it must be because it tries to formulate God for others. Jesus never said "This means everlasting life, their taking in knowledge of you the only true God.." . No. He said "And eternal life is this: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."
Obviously God can be buried by the scriptures as much as revealed by them. I am trying to sort that out--now.
I am re-viewing the Bible, trying to rise above my own prejudices and the prejudice of others. Why would I post this? If God could reach me then he could reach anyone. But not through someone else's words, certainly not my own. Maeve