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What greater gift?
By Arthur Webster of Ask Old Coot
Gifts can be from others or they can be from the world that spawned you. My greatest gift is from both. What is it? My greatest gift is the power to reason and look for questions. When I was growing up it took me quite a while to reason that the shops were full of things that were never to be seen in my home because my parents either did not want them or could not afford them. Could not afford was the reason - that took a little longer to work out. My parents suffered huge disadvantages compared with others. My father was blind but very inteligent while my mother was a grand mal epileptic with an IQ that sometimes threatened to go into double figures. Both of my parents had suffered at the hands of their own parents - both having been visciously physically assaulted. Fortunately, they had not read any of the books that said people who were physically abused in their childhood would probably physically abuse their own children. We lived in a community. It wasdn't a wealthy community but it was a caring community. We all knew each other and shared each others' homes as though they were our own. Locks and doors were like fish and fire - strangers to each other. I remember once asking my mother why God did not help us. She told me that God was not happy with the world and the damage that had been done to so many of His followers. She told me that there were so many people who needed help that He could not get round to us all very quickly. She told me that God did not put us on Earth so that He could give us what we wanted - he put us on this Earth to deny us what we needed and to see how we responded. When I asked why she told me to ask my father. When he came home and our evening routine had been completed, I asked my Dad why God didn't help us. He told me that it wasn't always possible to know when we had been helped by God because He didn't want to be seen to blatantly favour any individuals. I asked if it would help if we all went to Sunday School and asked Him for help as a family. My Dad told me that Sunday School was somewhere poor children and wealthy children could go to learn the answers that God had provided and of which many were in the Bible. I asked if all the answers were in the Bible and he asked if I thought they were. My answer was that enough people whom I respected thought they were so they probably were. My Dad's next question floored me because I had not taken that extra step. Son, he said, what possible use are all the answers if you don't know the questions? He compared the Bible with the answers pages of a quiz book and said that to be any good, you would have to create questions to validate the answers. He told me that the Bible was one of the three pillars that propped up the church. In his opinion, the other two pillars were a greedy and wealthy priesthood and a gullible and innocent congregation. This was a very thought provoking response and I certainly had not thought in those terms but my Dad's next question absolutely finished me because I couldn't even think how to answer it. His question was - "If we go to church, why does the person who goes round with the collection plate make a special point of rattling it loudly in front of those families that have no money to give? Is he not a Christian?" As far as I remember, those were his exact words. I owe my parents a huge debt of gratitude for teaching me that knowledge, for its own value, is worthless unless it can be applied. I owe them even more for showing me that an answer without a question is of no value and that the reason God only supplied answers (if) when He inspired the gospels, was that He knew our weaknesses and wanted us to develop a knowledge that was not simply removed from a tree and ingested - we had to seek His questions. My Dad also had a rather telling point to make about God. If God knows all that has happened, all that is happening and all that will happen - what is the point of His existence?
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Contributor's Note
As far as I remember, I was seven years old when I learned from my Dad that the Bible only provided answers. From that day to this I have been asking questions and trying to fit them to the answers I have.
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Mam and Dad
PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE
Ask Old Coot
An open invitation to ask questions.
www.askoldcoot.info
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