EXPOSED At An Early Age

 In Light of my Blog Name Change

As far back as I can remember, perhaps age 9 or 10, my parents required my sister and I and later our baby brother to attend Sunday School and Church Services every Sunday regardless of weather and sicknesses unless we were contagious. The only exception to this rule was when the family was on vacation and then we were only required to attend Church Services.  This practice continued until we graduated from high school.  In the summer, we attended Vacation Bible School but as I got older and joined the Boy Scouts, I was allowed to exchange Vacation Bible School with Boy Scout Camp if I wanted; and, it was in Boy Scout Camp that I learned that KOOL AID was referred to as BUG JUICE and even though it was loaded down with sugar, we were allowed to drink as much as we wanted at camp.
In order to understand my parent strictness in raising their children, my sister and I had daily chores that had to be executed before we left for school or before we went out to play after school or before we did our homework or before we went to bed.  We were given additional chores in the summers that typically required yard work.


Our breakfasts were no different...

• Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we had eggs (usually scrambled) and something else like
  bacon/sausage.
• Tuesday was Oatmeal
• Thursday was French Toast
• Saturday was Cereal and Fruit
• Sundays was Waffles

So, for a good 8 years, I was EXPOSED to approximately 416 Church Sermons and in the United Methodist Church, many of those Sermons, especially around Holidays and Special Events were repeated.  Additionally, Methodist Ministers NEVER take obscure passages out of THE BIBLE and try to explain them...  their sermons are carefully designed around the MAIN PARABLES but they are targeted from different vantage points in order to provide a sort of 3-D Religious Experience.

During my first marriage, my wife and I went to an Episcopal Marriage Counselor and in order to get that counseling for free, we had to attend the Episcopal Church every Sunday unless we were on vacation.  This counseling lasted for another 5 years or I was EXPOSED to another 250 sermons, but this time the sermons delved into some areas with which I was not familiar.

During my second marriage, my wife convinced me to attend a local Baptist Church and I was so impressed with this Baptist Brother Pastor that I had him Baptize me for a second time which resulted in full immersion into a tank of water.  He wore "waders" whereas I was not allowed to so I had to bring a change of clothes.  This Brother Pastor was so impressive because he took all the familiar and unfamiliar PARABLES and approached them in logical, common sense way that explained THE BIBLE in such a way that it actually started me on the path on questioning what THE BIBLE had previously taught me but in so doing I was actually strengthening my faith.

This time period (12 years) added another 600 sermons to the list, making a grand total of 1,266 Religious Sermons to which I have listened or been EXPOSED.  Of course, my numbers may be off a little, so let's assume that the number is at least 1,000 or more.  So, one could say that I have a pretty good (relatively speaking) of BIBLICAL TEACHINGS from 3 different points-of-view, giving me a unique and wide understanding.

During my time at the Baptist Church, I put myself on a mission to read THE BIBLE from cover-to-cover, taking as much time as I needed to write down any questions that I had, take notes on everything I read, and cut and pasted into a CD all verses printed in RED because those were the actual words of Jesus.  I saved that Word Doc to my HDD, then later to a flash drive and later to a CD.  My desire was to refer back to it from time-to-time, but I never did.

I did not attend Church after high school or either before or after counseling with my first wife and after 12 years of attending my last Church, I stopped because the Baptist Brother Pastor was released by the Board of Elders because he had been convicted of 3 DUI's.

What a multiple dimension might look like...

Also during this time with the Baptist Brother Pastor, I met with him outside of Church for a couple of hours (about 100 times) asking him the questions that I had about THE BIBLE, about passages I found that no one ever discussed, and about the BIG BANG, joining science with religion, multiple dimensions, life on other worlds, and spiritual life after death.  He was sad because his congregation was not as open minded as me and he knew he could never have these conversations with any of them, even outside Sundays.

I did not feel sorry for him because he had made his own choices just as I had made my own choices.  The last of our sessions revolved around a NOVEL idea that I had rolling around in my head like a pair of CRAP DICE that had just be tossed velvet, entitled YOU CANNOT GET THERE FROM HERE.  The idea was to create a self-help book that was basically a SPIRITUAL JOURNEY from birth, life, death, and then finally into some sort of heavenly existence.  I actually drafted about 100 pages of a 300-500 word manuscript and put it on hold because of the probability of publishing it bordered on highly unlikely to not at all.

QUESTION:  What would GOD look like if GOD was a multiple dimension entity and GOD entered our 4 dimension world (height, width, depth, time)?

Potential Answers:  maybe a burning bush or a tornado-like storm or a black cloud or a spirit type image?