Religion, and getting your butt in gear

 Religion, and getting your butt in gear

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve heard some incredibly intelligent people say that they are going to let their children “learn about God on their own.”  For someone who is a believer, this is like saying, “I am going to let them learn about mathematics or their own,” or “I am going to let them learn about dentistry on their own.”

On one hand, we all learn about these things on our own, but on the other, for someone who is new in the world, having a little guidance at the beginning can be really handy.

I find it hard to believe now, but there was a time in my life when I had the leisure to play video games.  One of my favorites was the Civilization series of games. You are dumped into a virtual world in which you know very little and you play the best you can from there.  You move around in the world of the game and as you visit a new place and learn something about it, that place is lit up on your screen.

To me this is a serviceable metaphor for life.  We are dumped into life knowing nothing; our worlds are small; but as we move around we see more, and we know more.

One key difference is that in Civilization you know how many turns you have; in real life, this is not the case. You’ve got a fuzzy estimate at best.

This is where religion comes in. One of the things you learn from religion is that one day you are going to die.  This is harder to learn than you might think.  

When you are young, you think you are going to live forever.  Then, if you have pets, you see them die.  Then, if you have grandparents, you see them die. While you are sad because of this, you think, well animals are different than we are, and grandparents are old.  Old people are supposed to die. (Yes, that hurts, but you know as well I do that’s the way we thought when we were young.) 

Religion teaches this as a basic.  As a young Baptist, I would hear it every Sunday.  The need to walk that aisle and be saved because one day I was going to die.  That was terrifying, but I am not sure I believed it even then.

But if you read through the Bible (and a history book that covers a long period will work too), you see all of these energetic, high-achieving people rise up, and one by one they all die.  Eventually, after hearing the message over and over it sinks in: This is going to happen to me and to everyone I know.

That one bit of knowledge is a powerful principle or organization.  The clock is ticking; if you’ve got things you want to do, you’d better get your butt in gear.

Religion teaches you the message and gives guidelines to make yourself into the kind of person you want to be.  And it may very well be that you reject it. Jesus himself didn’t force it on anyone. We do better in the things that we decide to do ourselves.  That is the truth that the people I mentioned in the first paragraph have grasped.  But...

As parents we try to impart to our children the things we have found value in.  We send them to school; we take them to the doctor; and we drag them to church.

That last sentence was the literal truth for what my mom did to me. She dressed me in a paisley shirt with a nice little bowtie and put shiny black shoes on me.  Then she left black marks on the sidewalk in front of the church as she dragged me in.

Eventually, after I was too big to drag, I stayed at home.  But at some point, I was able to find the front door of another church.

So I go to the dentist; I go to the doctor (and my age more and more of them); and I go to church.  This last part isn’t because I am afraid to die, but because I want to know how to live.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )