Reflections 6

To me, the most coherent view sees God in relational terms.  God knows us and wants to rescue us from our alienation.  He wants to be reconciled with us. He wants to be in relationship with us.

Relationships can be broken.  Any violation of our faithfulness to God damages our relationship to God, not on his side but on ours.  We cannot be unloving and not create distance between us and God. A person who is unfaithful in a marriage or friendship cannot be as close to their partner or friend, especially if their friend knows their faithlessness.

But relationships only break instantly with the most major of infidelities.  God will take us back if we can bring ourselves to go back--not always possible because our hearts become hardened like cement and we cannot move them any more. We can still move with smaller acts of infidelity, but they can accumulate like plaque in an artery.  Eventually we will have a heart attack and the relationship may not survive.

At least these are thoughts I had later. The climate of preaching that led me to fear that I would fry with the smallest of infractions was just plain wrong.  It was built off a shallow understanding of God's love, not to mention of relationships. It made God into a poor excuse for a human spouse, let alone a divine one.

The preaching I grew up with was also preoccupied with spiritual events, benchmarks you needed to check off a list.  I remember in particular one song they sometimes sang at camp meeting in Frankfort, Indiana.  Some families went to the beach or the mountains when they took their vacation.  We went to camp meeting or church district conference or, every four years, to church general conference.

Frankfort, Indiana was probably the navel of my childhood universe.  Every year at the beginning of August we made pilgrimage back to Indiana.  Frankfort was where my mother had largely grown up.  There was a Bible college there, Frankfort Pilgrim College.

My mother's father, Harry Shepherd, had taught there most of my mother's life except in the years of the Great Depression.  In those years he had pastored and taught at Bible colleges in North Carolina () and Kentucky (Kingswood). Then he had made his way back to southern Indiana pastoring () before finally finishing out his career at Frankfort.

Over the years he taught (dispensational) prophecy, Latin, calculus, and I suspect any number of other classes. He was a graduate of the 190* class of Wabash College and had played baseball there. He was quite a bit older than my grandmother, Verna, and she was his second wife after his first wife passed. Born in 1882, he and his two sisters were orphaned after his father finally succumbed to injuries he sustained in the Civil War.  I never met him, since he died about three years before I was born.

So my mother had grown up roaming the campus of Frankfort Pilgrim College.  She attended both high school and college there and became quite a good pianist. My three oldest sisters went to college there, although my third oldest sister Sharon had to finish her work at Hobe Sound Bible College in south Florida when the Wesleyan Church closed Frankfort.

But the camp meeting continued there and, although the grounds were sold in 2010, it continues even today.  I was born in Indiana, although my father's job took him to Florida in 1971.  So while we lived in Ft. Lauderdale, we remained strongly connected to Indiana.

I was born in Indianapolis at Methodist Hospital.  At the time we lived on the north side of town, just south of Carmel.  My Dad's parents lived in the middle of Indianapolis.  My Dad's father, Dorsey, had been a grocery store owner and a church planter. During the Depression he sold his store and worked as a butcher. He was handy with an engine and in general quite unlike me, except perhaps that he was the type of person to speak his mind. That side of me only comes out in writing.

My Dad's father was quite conservative even for my parents' circles...