A step forward

Thanks, Jackie, for not blowing me out of the water - which I perhaps deserved ...

Knowing, as I do now, that I have Asperger's, I realise that my perspective may be different from many people's. I am not comfortable with the idea that someone else's truth may be different from my truth. I suppose that I can accept that we are all dealing with approximations to the truth, but that doesn't really resolve differences too well. One can still end up with the argument that my approximation is closer than your approximation. I'm still reckoning that 'out there' is something which we may or may not be right about ...

I'm thinking back to my youth (ages, perhaps, from 8 to 18), when I was well aware that I was having to deal with at least two quite different views of what Christians believe. I attended (with my parents) what was probably a fairly liberal church (of Scotland). At school, I belonged to the Scripture Union group, whose doctrine seemed to be much more sharp-edged than what I was encountering on a Sunday morning.

I am particularly reminded of when the two worlds collided (although that isn't quite a true description - truer to say that a third world, which probably had more in common with the second world, collided with the first world). For some reason, I attended an evangelistic meeting at another church in the town where I lived. I went forward (which is another story), which led to the evangelist contacting my minister, presumably to encourage him to follow up this new convert. Whereupon my minister approached me, somewhat distressed, to say that he didn't understand why I needed to be converted, since I'd grown up in his church, and was already a Christian.

I find, as I write this, that I am confronting layer upon layer of questions, which may be why, at a somewhat more advanced age, I find myself trying to unpick the curious mixture of ideas which continually bash into each other whenever I try to think through an issue related to my faith.