Well, time for another catch-up post, or series of them, more likely.
The biggest change in my life recently is that I started going to the gym with my friend Tim about three weeks ago. We go at 6 in the morning four days a week, and I have been trying to take up his practice of getting up at 4 to have devotions. I’ve had mixed success with getting up that early, but I’ve managed to fit in a devotion most days sometime before work. That is a dramatic improvement from the past several years!
That brings me to a point I’ve been meaning to make. Sometimes when people read my “Agnostic Christian” essay, they note that I wrote it in 2005 and ask me how I’m doing with all that now. I tell them that right now I’m more interested in being a Christian than in being a skeptic. Last year I decided that it would be a year for self-improvement in various ways, and some of that was in the area of character. And to me, Christianity offers a much richer set of resources for building one’s character than secularism does. Plus, when I think becoming a better person, that just means becoming more Christian. So my faith is what I turned to, and since that time I’ve been trying to reenter the Christian spiritual life I had been progressively ignoring for the last 7 or so years.
And it’s been good. I began an accountability partnership with a friend who is very intent on seeing me grow. The few times I managed to have devotions, I got more out of them than I had since probably high school, and that has continued since I started having them more regularly this month. I can see myself becoming more sensitized to spiritual issues, and I believe these times with God have a real potential to change me. I think he is welcoming and blessing my effort to get back in touch with him.
And as one example, last year for the first time in my entire life, communion and baptism acquired real meaning for me. They were always just bare symbols for me before, and though I tried over and over to see them, mostly communion, from new angles and to get some kind of significance from the experience, I always failed, or at least nothing stuck. But last year finally something clicked. I’ll write more about that some other time.
So while those doubts are still there in the back of my mind and I still think it’s important to evaluate the Christian worldview as a whole, I’ve put all that on hold and I don’t really think about it these days. I’ll get to it later.
That’s all for now. I will try to get to the rest of my update in the next couple of days.
