Broken Dishes

When Christy was in college at Cal Poly, she shared a room with  3 other gals.  They were in Campus Crusade and so there were always some number of Christian guys around...you know...circling. 

Christy supplied most of the house dishes from her own stuff, having previously lived on her own.  Her dishes included Corell Ware plates.  These were advertised as being "unbreakable."  Of course, that whole ad campaign was conceived by someone who probably only ate Chinese takeout from cardboard containers and who, due to the era, hadn't been around long enough to experience the long term effects of microwaves on some types of china. 

One day, a group of guys came over that included one particularly shy soul.  In an uncharacteristic act of bravado he saw one of the plates and said, "HEY!  These are those really cool unbreakable plates!" and proceeded to drop the dish he'd picked up.  It shattered...nearly into powder.  There was stunned silence as everyone looked at Christy.  She broke out in hysterical laughter understanding as she usually does, the complete social context of what had just happened.

This writing is not about Christy or the guy.  It's about the plate.

Ideas, beliefs and even love are all to greater and lesser degrees like the plate in the tragic comedy above.  We pick them up, look them over and make conclusions about what we're looking at.  Those conclusions are based on all sorts of things.  They're based on our experience, our learning, our culture and of course various information media (...like TV).  Lately, they've come to be based more and more on how we feel about something...the degree of emphasis this receives is kind of new.

Any of these can become a problem when we make an incorrect assumption that's based primarily on anything other than the thing itself.  "HEY!  These are those really cool unbreakable plates!"  No...no they're not.

I'm thinking here mostly about yet another new book about God, the universe and everything (author and title to remain nameless).  This particular book has ideas that have been floated before in a thousand different ways and contexts.  In this case though, the ideas flow very much from how the author feels first and what God says about who he is as found in his book The Bible, second.  As a friend of mine likes to say, "That ain't right."

In fact, that's the way you break a perfectly good plate.  You pick it up and you throw it down, assuming things about it that aren't true, and then everything breaks.  Things might break sooner and they might break later but break they will.  And just to be clear, in all the above it's not God that's the breaking plate; it's the idea of him as it is written in the author's new book.  

The ironic part is that the arguments this author posits are not without some merit and are even worthy of consideration.  He rightly points to areas of belief that I think we have drawn very bad conclusions about.  Even so, his feelings about God carry him a good deal further than any reasonable consideration of God, his word,  the universe and all would support.

Each of us represents the ultimate universal authority on how we feel.  However, if breakage is to be at least somewhat mitigated, we need to fully, openly and honestly consider the nature of the plate before we let our feelings test it's break point.