This week’s video is a continuation of Nick Fiedler’s story from last week.
Nick essentially pushed the reset button on his faith. Have you ever had a similar experience?
Updating…
Nick Fiedler wrote a wonderful book called The Hopeful Skeptic that you should definitely check out.
Stepping outside of your known world to go see what the rest of the world is about is pretty brave. So many of us aren’t even willing to step outside of our homes to see what’s going on across the street. While others are willing to go out into the world, but only if they get to proselytize, without a thorough understanding and respect for the people they are trying to convert. It actually breaks my heart a little when I think of all the cultures lost to “Christian civility”. I love the example or the Maori blending their own religious stories with those of the bible. I’ve always thought of the bible as a book. A sacred, awe-inspiring, book that Christians are taught to believe is the living word of God. The thing is the authors of the bible were men, who like the Maori, put a little of themselves into the pages of the bible. Not one instruction, or any of the “words in red” were actually penned by Jesus himself, but we use this bible as our “scale” for measuring other belief systems without pausing to wonder what is really from God and what is from the author. I think Nick traveling the world is an extraordinary example, but not feasible for everyone. What we all can do is talk to someone who’s beliefs we don’t know enough about. Read through a Torah, Koran, or even a few history books. I personally love that Buddha didn’t want people to just do what he said, but to think for themselves and discover their own truths. I personally think that’s why God gave us autonomy. I just don’t think enough of us exercise that freedom when it comes to matters of our faith.
More great points. I really like the idea of exercising autonomy in faith and seeing that exercise as a freeing practice.
And as you say, not everyone can up and leave the country. We didn’t have kids and we were willing to leave our jobs. But everyone can interact with different faith and cultures. We can easily do that with the people and the resources of any town and any library.
Travel was a very important part of the journey for me, but there are a lot of ways to travel.
Honestly, I struggle with a lot of what Nick says. It could be that I don’t understand exactly what he means by packing of his beliefs. Does that mean he tells himself Christianity may not be the way and proceeds to open himself up to the possibility that there is another, very different belief system which he might need to discover? Maybe not. But then my question is which parts of his beliefs are “up for grabs?”
I get being open to others and different philosophies and ideologies. Recently I have become friends with someone who is Mormon. Albeit not a completely different belief system than my own (Christianity), there are enough differences to scare many people I know with just the simple word Mormon. But I have heard many things from him that I identify with. However, using Nick’s words, I find myself grafting those ideas onto my own. But these things do not meet at the core of my beliefs. That is the difficult part for me. Is Nick saying that he was willing to say that it was possible that Christ as son of God may not be true?
For me, and it is not my purpose to impose this on everyone, but for me everything was up for grabs. The only way to step outside my faith and look at it in a new light, was to step out side completely. And yes, I was willing to say that it was possible that Jesus was not the son of God. There was nothing that was out of the question when packing. Scary, I know.
Hey, i really identified with Nick’s video. I was saved into an evangelical Anglican church, where I completely embraced living for Jesus, to the point where I stopped listening to the radio other than christian music, stopped reading books that weren’t christian, and stopped hanging out with my unbelieving friends. I lived like this for years and was on the road to being a missionary, raising my funds, when God just impressed on me that I needed to be honest in my life, and I came out as homosexual. I was either rejected by, or given time, by many of the institutions which used to embrace me, and everything was stripped back. I questioned everything as it fell apart around me, eventually letting it all go and taking a blank slate, and building from there. I looked into history, I tried to find someone who would compare to Jesus. Some did in some ways, but ultimately I couldn’t. So I looked at cultures and church cultures and denominational cultures and tried to find out what of my beliefs came down to the church I was saved into’s interpretation of the Word, and what the Word actually said, or could potentially say. I’m still on the journey but I know that on it I have come to a genuineness and an honesty with God, myself and others that I would not trade. I’m so blessed to have had this journey. God is so much bigger than we give him credit for.