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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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| The Nashville Statement
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| "I don't like Guns!" |
 I was baptized as an infant. All my siblings were baptized as infants, well, all except for my youngest brother, he wasn't baptized, but probably because my parents simply didn't get around to it. Part of the whole infant baptism ritual in our catholic circle involved the pseudo-solemn enlistment of a "god-parent". The idea as was understood by my family, was that if my parents died it was that persons responsibility to bring me up and presumably, to do so with some sort of religious instruction.
To give you an appreciation for how solemn this responsibility was, my uncle Marinus for the first few years of my childhood, used to buy me presents on my birthday, because he was my "godfather." Except, he wasn't actually my godfather, he was my older sisters godfather, my God parents were my uncle Lucien and Aunt Joyce. Of course, none of these people knew the Lord - but that is presently beside the point - the point was that my uncle used to buy me presents on my birthday under the presumption that he was my godparent when in fact he was actually my sisters godparent.
Perhaps there was some stigma attached to being the godparent of the oldest girl, as opposed to the oldest boy, or perhaps my uncle was embarrassed to learn that he had been mistake for the first six years of my life - whatever the case, I recall with sorrow that eventually my parents explained that I was not his godson, but rather that my sister was his goddaughter. He was not pleased with that, and the gifts stopped there, my sister never got any. That must have been a raw deal for her, but at the time I think I took it pretty hard too.
Anyway, one of the gifts my uncle brought was this toy rifle. Now, I was about five or so, and a toy rifle was perhaps the coolest thing in the world. Up until that time, I had to use sticks and whatnot and pretend that they were firearms, but this toy rifle was far more rifle-like than any of my sticks.
You see, like most boys who don't have toy rifles, I had to fabricate my own out of driftwood and whatnot. If a piece of wood was a good rifle-like length, and had a good branch coming out about where the trigger would be - and perhaps had another where the stock should be - that was considered a very fine gun in our play time. Not that we ran about the house with such things - but as we spent a lot of time outdoors in the summer in the country - such sticks were manifold, and having many cousins to play with, we quickly learned to find the best rifle sticks around. Whatever stick you found, you had to peel the bark off of it, for that nice, smooth, rifle-like finish on both the barrel and the stock. These were things that every child understood.
So when I received the toy rifle, it was so awesome, I could have lost control of my bladder. But then my mom went and spoiled everything. After my uncle had left, and I was in the living room playing with my new toy - killing everything imaginable, my parents got into a row about the toy gun. That was when I found out that uncle Marinus wasn't even my God parent, and that is when I found out that my mom was certain that if I played with the gun I would grow up to kill people for real. She didn't want me playing with guns, she hated the idea of having it in the house.
Now it was about this time that I was experimenting in the living room. You see, the gun was pretty solid, and I got to wondering if I could use it as a bridge between the two arms of our arm chair. So I set it up and began a sophisticated tight-rope walk across it, only to have it crack in half under my weight. It was broken beyond repair, even I knew that.
My heart was grieved, but being an industrious child, I turned this to my advantage, for I came and showed the gun to my parents, and declared words that I knew full well my mom would be delighted in hearing - even if doing so was entirely a put on show. So I went up to my mother and I told her that I broke the gun on purpose because I saw how it offended her, and that I neither wanted to offend her or to like a thing that she hated. I too, (or so I pretended) hated guns. Never had a mother been so proud of a child's deceitful lie, nor so gullible. She swallowed the hook, line, sinker, and even the rod and the dock.
Never doubt that a child is a master deceiver, or that your child will not say and do things that are entirely false just because they know that doing so will make you think more highly of them - they eat that stuff up for breakfast.
I was thinking about that toy gun this morning for some reason.Labels: deceit, memories |
posted by Daniel @
9:34 AM
 
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| 12 Comments: |
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Thanks, Daniel. I now know that I was not the most deceitful child ever. Still, I think I was close.
Who can deny that we are born wicked?
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I was an awful kid Dave, just awful.
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Daniel, I have very early memories of things I wish I could go back and undo. Some say, "forgive yourself (pfft) and move on," but I think God intends for those regrets to stick with us. Psalm 51 is the prayer of a man who is constantly aware of his sin. What else would make us cling to God's grace?
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David, I am inclined to agree with you entirely on that score.
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Man, what a great story! Makes me wanna share too. When I was a kid I had a paper route which afforded me the ability to buy a pellet gun with the approval of Mom of course. When out one day shooting clothes pins which I purchased myself for target practice my Mom wanted a try.
I said girls can't shoot and handed her the gun getting ready to laugh. That was the first time I underestimated my Mom, she shot all the clothes pins off with deadly precision. I was in awe and still am today.
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Phew, I thought this was going to be an exegesis against guns.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that mothers in general are just as gullible as children are deceptive.
BTW, this works on wives with manipulating husbands as well.
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Jim - that is quite true.
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So, for a wife with a manipulating husband, what is the correct course of action? Tell me more, please.
My 4 boys (and their self-manufactured guns) don't fool me much. They know I'm looking for it, and I praise them when they tell me a difficult truth. But when it is the husband, how could this role possibly be played out?
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Now, finally someone explains to me the meaning of "godparent". I always felt left out being the only one in school who didn't have one.
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MaLady - I will let Jim field that one. ;-)
Marcian, you must have gone to a catholic school ;-)
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c'mon, could it be that tough? ;-)
It goes to show that we all need grace for salvation - for the awful kid who continues to con, bully, and cheat as well as the gullible kid who lets sentiment rule the sensibilities.
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MaLady, apparently it has taken me just shy of ten years to respond to the question left hanging so long ago.
"So, for a wife with a manipulating husband, what is the correct course of action? Tell me more, please."
I probably left this hanging because there is no one "correct" course of action.
Obviously the husband thinks that he stands a better chance getting what he wants this way, than through some other avenue. I would want to understand what makes that choice seem best to him. What is going on in his life or in his relationship that deceit presents itself as the more productive solution.
Where there is deceit, there is a deceiver - and all deceivers are doing the work of the father of deceit/lies: Satan. I would want to show the husband that this is not an abstraction, but a demonstrable truth, and I would want him to own that truth for what it is - that every effort to manipulate his wife, is founded on the same kind of empty promise in Satan's first deception - you will not die, but you will be like God" - the denial of what is real, coupled to the false promise of something better.
But getting to that place involves counseling, and a willingness by both parties to subject themselves to an objective authority (scripture). It's not the kind of thing you can accomplish in the meta beneath a blog post.
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Thanks, Daniel. I now know that I was not the most deceitful child ever. Still, I think I was close.
Who can deny that we are born wicked?