The Book of Mormon

Recently I went on a trip for work.  We were staying in a hotel and ever since I was a boy, whenever I go to a hotel, the first thing I check is to see if there is a Gideons Bible in the drawer.  It's more ritual than anything, but I can't help but to feel comforted every time I open that drawer and I see the Bible.  It makes me feel like I am protected.  It's not entirely rational, but few rituals are.  This time when I opened the hotel room drawer the Holy Bible was sharing space with The Book of Mormon.  Like a stranger showing up to an intimate gathering, this intruder disrupted my peace.  I held the drawer open for a bit, looking perplexed, feeling like there was something to be done, but eventually I just slowly closed the drawer and began to unpack.  The image hung with me, though.  I decided to take a picture and maybe later figure out what was going on in my head and in my heart.

Beyond the initial disruption of the intruder, I began to wrestle with something even more uncomfortable.  If I were to remove my faith, I would have a hard time explaining why one book was true and one was nonsense.  I already have long standing fight with God over how crazy his book is and how irrational his ways seem.  He has shown incredible patience with my rebelliousness.  This leaves me in a pickle, both for myself and defending my faith: I don't have any quick, succinct solvent for why the Bible is the true and inerrant word of God and the Book of Mormon is koo koo.  When folks set out to debunk the Bible, they quickly find hard to take stories of genocide, fathers killing sons and supernatural events to make their point.  And thus, it's easy to lump all religions into the koo koo bin, requiring either irrational faith or intentional blindness to make it work. So if the Bible is koo koo and The Book of Mormon is koo koo, why do I believe?  Why and how can anyone believe?  Good question.

We were built to believe.  We worship.  Go to a rock concert or a Tony Robbins convention or a Fortune 500 boardroom or some dude's man cave.  We all put our energy into something, making our work or our play or even our family the ultimate thing in our lives.  Some of us worship ourselves.  Even a confident and comfortable Atheist can't get around the need to surrender to something, or perhaps the urge to be a part of something.  For me, this clearly points to how God has created us.  We are built to worship and anything we worship will fall short of complete satisfaction until we worship that which we were built to worship, the one true God.  For those who don't believe, this inherent desire to worship is easily explained in the chemical and scientific terms of an evolutionary need for community as a means of survival.  Intellectually, I am fine with the Bible, I have accepted it.  However, although I have sound arguments on the rationality of belief, equally rational arguments for not believing (though not completely satisfying) leave me feeling just a bit short.  There must be a bit more.  It must be a bit personal. 

Do you have a hero?  An idol or an icon?  Who would you like to be around if given the choice?  The Pope, Bono, Obama, Trump, T. Swift?  I have a hard time, at my age, getting excited about celebrities.  If I could drive around in a 911 with Seinfeld, that would be a dream come true.  I suppose I'd be pretty excited to spend the day with Eddie Vedder.  I imagine me and Pearl Jam hanging out, singing harmonies and picking guitars to all their songs, drinking cheap wine.  Or if they wanted to play basketball, that would be pretty amazing.   The point is that it wouldn't really matter where you were.  Whatever we were doing would be incidental, it's the contact with someone you admire that makes the difference.  Maybe it's a loved one that is gone that you would choose.  You wouldn't really care what the context was, you would just want to see them again.  When we think of Heaven, we get caught up on our own flesh or the conditions of the soil, if there will be mosquitos and if we can eat.  However great we can imagine the perfect conditions to be, the reality is that Heaven is only heaven because Jesus is there.  The reason people don't care about Heaven is because they don't really know who Jesus is.  I make this point to stress that it is a personal relationship with Christ that defines faith.  Faith is only as strong as the object of that Faith.  Religion says victory is won if you have the firm conviction and strength to always have faith.  Christ, who transcends religion, is the only one who says believe in me totally because I am worthy.  The strength of your faith matters little, it is the object of your faith that delivers.  It's not what you do, it is what he has done.  Every other religion, Mormonism being a prime example, says that with enough effort you can get to God, and in fact you may become a God.  The Bible only makes sense, can only be accepted and digested under the understanding of who Jesus Christ is.  I didn't read the Bible to get to God.  God accepted me and revealed who he really was through the Word. 

So, that leaves we with all there has ever been.  After all the mind numbing arguments with myself, after all the attempts to run from what I have felt and then tried to dismiss rational thought because it was uncomfortable, I am left with a Person that stands at the core of my faith.  We are changed not by ideas, but by people that make ideas live.  Movements aren't started by Manifestos, they are started by the stirring of another soul.  Man will use influence in many different ways, but it is always the personal relationship that makes the mark.  In Christ we have access to the most tender, intimate, soul quenching relationship possible.  He made us, he knows what we need and he is calling us home.