My Own Story, Part 3: One Nagging Question

This is part three, click here for part two.

Because I come from a broken household, I never thought I had a really good idea of the role a man played in the family. I was always looking at other families to see what to mimic . . . or what not to. I was always thinking and reading about how to be a really good husband or father, and what to look for in a wife. Any time I was over at a friend's house, I was judging their parents.

Every single evening that I was at Jon's, he and his family invited me in for dinner. I was there for a very long time because of the work on the RX-7 (seriously, months), so I got a very good snapshot of his family life. Though it was rather interesting, and near the end, scary, that he was never angry at me for taking up his garage for so long; when I asked him about it he just shrugged.

I met his kids, four of them (I don't know about you, but that's a lot of kids), and they struck me as odd, I couldn't quite put my finger on why. I graduated high school in 2000, and still worked for the school system, and I didn't usually meet kids as well behaved and bright as this. I'm more used to them being cynical, or more often, stupid.

I also met his wife, the first stay-at-home mom I can ever remember meeting. She also home schooled the kids. At one point during conversation she mentioned how she was always looking for ways to better submit to her husband's leadership. I really didn't know how to take that other then thinking she was very strange.

I first learned they were religious when someone told me, and then when they invited me in for dinner the first time I saw them pray over dinner, so I stopped cursing when I was around them. He never once preached at me. We usually talked about mechanical or construction related things, and in turn I told his kids stories about giant hamster powered cars. I learned that he had built his house himself, with his father.

Jon was a good mechanic, a father to his kids, a loving husband, an Oracle programmer and a home builder. Great traits I'd want to mimic, except there was one nagging question . . .

How could someone as smart as him be Christian?

"How can you possibly believe the Bible" I said to him "Man pollutes everything he touches, there is no way this book is authentic after thousands of years."

I was expecting lines, excuses, maybe even the old "you shouldn't question God," But Jon didn't say any of that.



"Have you read it?"
"No"
"Read it." He said.


I didn't really have an answer to that.