A Changing Wind

My oldest is a first-year law student in a new state . . . and since none of his friends or family are in this new area of the country that he's plopped down into, he has time to talk to me. Lot's of time, and it's wonderful.

But it's also troubling. I am a reformed evangelical, and his faith and systematic theology do not fit into any neat category. And he is very well-read and has put a lot of thought into his world-view and philosophy and theology and practice . . . and is one of the few people in my life that can actually change my mind about what I "knew to be true."

So I sent him a book on reformed epistemology, and he never even mentioned getting it. I asked him about it today, and his response was a 45-minute lecture on epistemology and where reformed epistemology fit into that, and what his own basis to know or believe anything as true had become. (I said something like "I see" somewhere in there, and he talked right over it. My friends and family will probably see the irony in all that.)

But the problem is that he's blasting apart my whole structure that I'd constructed over the past 2 years, in terms of my way of seeing reality and my choices and God and the Bible. I can put it back together, of course -- and, of course, it is good for our systems to be challenged and for our only God to be the real triune God, and not our way of understanding Him. And the foundation -- for Mike, too, he says -- is still Jesus and my commitment to obedience to Him.

So back to the base of the whole thing one more time . . . with prayers that I'll be a bit closer to a working model of reality with this version of "what I know to be true." I do know that God is God, and that He doesn't change, how ever often my analysis does.

And most of what I do each day doesn't either. So time to get the little boys to bed!