An Excerpt From My Book

I’m aiming to have my book ready for purchase in January 2022. It’s called “(Re)Thinking Everything” and it reads like a memoir where a blog post married a Rob Bell book and they gave birth to an episode of the Office.

We’ll tackle Hell, LGBTQ Inclusion, the Bible, the Cross, and more.

Here’s an excerpt …

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“And what does all of this do to children?  That was one of the biggest questions that popped into my head.  In my arms that night I held an infant who would one day be a toddler and then eventually a pre-teen, then a teen, then an adult, then a parent to my grandchild … and I began to wonder what kind of impact this narrative about Jesus would have on her mind and on the minds of generations to come.

Like …

Is it OK to teach children that they are born bad?  That they are born evil?  Because we can try to pretty up the language of “original sin” and “sin nature” all we want, but the reality is that it teaches that we are all born bad and somewhat repulsive to God.

Is it OK to teach our kids that they are SO BAD that God needed to have his own son TORTURED so that by believing in him and his work on the cross they would be made more palatable?

Is it OK to teach kids that God is loving even though he sends his enemies (well over half of the population of the world, by the way) to an eternal torture chamber called hell while saving a few who believe the right things about him?  A few who believe the right things mainly because they happened to have been born in the West, a part of the world where there is a church on every street corner? 

Is it OK to teach children that the Creator of the universe expects them to forgive their enemies all the while he is incapable of forgiving his own?

And is it OK to tell children that they shouldn’t challenge the system?  That they shouldn’t challenge these doctrines and theologies?  That their questions are signs of weakness, signs of a lack of faith, signs that they aren’t being faithful to God?  

Is any of this OK?  

I began to wonder what kind of impact this might have on children and then I began to wonder what kind of impact it had on me as a child.  And THEN I began to wonder if maybe part of the reason why I would sit in Thursday morning chapel services back in grade school and cry my eyes out during the worship music was because …

Deep.

Deep.

Deep.

Down.

… Inside of me I somehow sensed that this God I felt forced to sing to and forced to listen to stories about … I wondered if I somehow sensed that he wasn’t all that safe and that one day I would grow up and need to do something about it.”