i have always been a person who sees the other side

If you think you are standing strong, be careful not to fall. (1 Corinthians 10:12)

He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe do what you please.
William Blake

There are those who no matter what you do, no matter how much the evidence or weight in favor of what you say, will never believe you.

And simply because you have proof, or facts or anything else really doesn’t mean anything.

They have made up their minds. At sometime in the past, they have decided that they are going to believe a certain way and that is that.

My father-in-law was such a person. It didn’t matter what the weight of evidence in your favor, he would not believe what he didn’t want to believe.

And oddly enough, my son is too. If he doesn’t already think it, he will not. His kind of music is all that matters, his kind of everything is all that matters to him.

It is strange that the attitude of believing only what you want passed over my wife and landed on my son. Now he is nothing at all like my father-in-law. Other than the fact that both are named Sam, they have nothing except that odd attitude in common. My father-in-law only liked one kind of music, as does my son – but they are worlds apart. My father-in-law listened only to country, my son only listens to heavy metal.

And the list can go on ad nauseum.

You meet people like that in religion, too. They believe what they believe and almost revel in their ignorance or single-mindedness.

I have always been a person who sees the other side, who tries to understand all the sides of an issue or point. It made me unwelcome in the denomination I spend 44 years in. that denomination had only one viewpoint: theirs. All else were not “honest.”

In fact, they would make the comment when dealing certain Bible verses that “honest scholars” would see things the way they wanted. If you didn’t, you had some unholy agenda.

I never saw that and sooner or later had to leave. The fact that I didn’t buy into the corporate doctrine made me, after a while, unwelcome.

I remember a man who came to me after church one Sunday and told me that when I came, he was impressed with me. But here lately, he wasn’t. I was not preaching things the way he wanted them preached so therefore I was wrong.

It is an odd quality. Even though something is so clearly in front of you, and even though there are so many in agreement, they do not believe it, so therefore it is not real. It is a denial in the face of facts to the contrary. They see, yet they doubt and they will never agree with you. It is not in their power, I guess, not in their make-up to change their minds.

And anyone who goes through life without changing his or her mind at least once is a fool.

Politics are (is?) full of people like this. Right now we have a president who has not done anything that worked, yet he keeps on doing the same things again and again. And he will until he is put out of office next year.

These are the people who see pictures of aborted unborn children and yet refuse to believe that they are killing real live people. They are the people who cannot see that giving people money does not make them free, but instead enslaves them. They are the people who think that a bigger government and more government control is the answer to everything.

Even though these things do not work, they still believe them.

I don’t think I have any such oddities in my make-up, but of course, I don’t know that I would know it.

But I do believe that anyone who thinks they are fine are foolish. Anyone who thinks they have all the answers are weird.

The older I get, the more I realize that I do not have all the answers. In fact, I have only begun to figure out the questions. That sounds goofy but it is true.

What is good in life? What matters? What does God want of us? What is important?

When you figure those out, you begin to understand that you need real answers, not just simple presuppositions.

I do hate liver, though, and no one can make me like it.