Today is my father's birthday; he would be 89, I think, if he were alive. I don't imagine my children are totally clear on my age either, as they are even more estranged from me than I was from him. I find it ironic that in these last twenty years, I have grown more and more convinced that God chose to personify himself, and as a father at that, so that He could have a personal relationship with his children; and yet I cannot figure out how to have one with my own. I am caught in the web of my sins, I suppose, a combination of pride and insecurity, anger at their mother, issues with work and taxation. I have tried to follow the way of truth, but am still ensnared in the knowledge of good and evil. I try to be loving, but my heart is deceitful. I don't know how this is going to play out.
And speaking of Spring, the woman I have spent the last twenty years with, whom I might have said on a number of occasions that I love, has managed once again to put the whole matter into doubt. She tars me with the brush of her prejudice against Christianity, indeed any religion, and I end up saying to myself, though not yet to her, how can you have been with me so long and never known me? Am I a pharisaical Baptist type, ignorant and hateful, afraid of women? Just because I believe in Jesus and the truth of the scriptures, it does not follow that I believe everything my mother ever told me. It doesn't work that way.
Somehow I am unable to convey this to Ms. Spring. Living quietly for twenty years, sort of a Christian Hermit, I have lost the ability to defend my faith, similar to how I seem to have lost the ability to speak French. It just slipped away from disuse when I wasn't looking. So perhaps this conflict is good for me. I am forced to take a look at passages of the Bible I thought I knew cold. I need to find a way to explain my beliefs to a thoroughly reasonable and totally secular person I care about. I think the exercise is beginning to pay off, but the emotions run high; it is very difficult to penetrate the modern smug rationalism without sounding arrogant or patronizing. In fact it is she who sounds arrogant and patronizing to me, with her attitude that spiritual beliefs are juvenile at best, dangerously insane at worst.
