My New Perspective

I have been a pragmatic for most of my 60 + years and always relied on human qualities to guide my approach to life.  Like many folks, I just could not reconcile biblical events with the tools of logical deduction that I believed, God had given me.  I only learned recently that, by anyone’s standards, I would be called a Humanist.

There are “self-help” books and authors too numerous to mention that purport to tell us how to think to make our lives fuller and richer and I have read many of them.  Set goals, nurture positive thinking, and visualization are a few of the techniques they offer as footsteps to achieving fulfillment. 

 

I always thought I had one of two choices.  I could accept blindly what “a book” (the Bible) was telling me about God, or I could use my God given sensibilities to deduce the truth by examining the world around me.  Surely God would not want me to abandon my free will and accept some illogical and unsubstantiated belief system that had been handed down by man through the centuries.  That seemed to me to be a very dangerous path to take and I had seen its results many times over the years in places like Guiana (Jim Jones), Waco, TX (David Koresh), and Heaven’s Gate (Marshall Applewhite) in San Diego, CA

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While I was never able to accept many biblical accounts of the Flood, Virgin Birth, raisings from the dead and many, many others, neither did I discount them completely.  Anyone who has read some of my other writings knows that I usually allow for some credence to all legends and sagas, no matter what their source.  There is some truth behind many of them whether they come from the mysteries of Persian Zoroastrianism, The Bible, or some Greek mythological Odyssey.

My observations of the awesome creations around us and the balance that exists in nature have always affirmed my belief in God and a divine creator, but my study of religious history and its divisiveness has always prevented me from aligning myself with any particular church or group.  Nevertheless, one of the few statements from the Bible that I firmly held on to was (Matthew 7:14) “For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life.”  A narrow path to me meant that it was individual and only wide enough for one person and each of us has his own, and the path is hard because it has to be traveled alone; on faith.

My sudden “Awakening” and rebirth on the morning of March 10, 2013 did not change my basic belief system, but it did add the Bible to a preeminent place on my list of “self-help books.”  Suddenly, a spiritual facet was added to my Humanism and my faith was expanded many fold.  I could see that Jesus was also trying to show me the “footsteps to achieving fulfillment.”  He had found the path, not only to eternal life but to a present life of fulfillment and I only needed to follow his example and “walk in his footsteps.”

During my Bible studies, I learned that Jesus often referred to himself and human kind as “sons of God,” but beyond that, a very subtle detail arose that was repeated many times in the testimonies of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  That detail is the fact that, on several occasions, Jesus referred to himself as “The son of Man,” (Luke 9:56) just like the rest of us!

If Jesus had been born a supernatural being, then his accomplishments would not have much relevance to ordinary folks, but he assured us that we are just like him and have the same abilities and even more!  (John 14:12) “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father.”  Here was a man, just like us, who was performing miracles almost daily, and he was telling us that we could achieve the same!  As further proof that Jesus was a son of man, contemplate his final words as he hung on the cross at Calvary, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  Those words would not have come from a supernatural being!

As a consequence of all this, I no longer solely depend on the guidance of Dale Carnegie, Wayne W. Dyer, Tony Robbins, Paramahansa Yogananda, or any of the other “self-help authors but, instead, will continue to practice walking in the footsteps of Jesus, the original and “The true light and the way.”  Now, whenever I have a question, I ask myself; What would Jesus do in this situation?