The Stumble Walk
By Mike Freeman
My Story
My dad converted to Catholicism when he married my mom. After completing a bicycling honeymoon throughout Europe they settled down in Fullerton, California and brought me home on their first wedding anniversary. My brother and four sisters soon followed. All of us born within one decade. A pretty common event in the 1950s.
We grew up in a child full neighborhood where there was always plenty to do including swimming at the community pool, playing pick up games of various sports, climbing trees, and nighttime cul-de-sac hide and seek games. All six of us went through 12 years of Catholic education from grade school through high school.
I remember being aware of God's presence at a very early age. He was the Creator, the Big Guy, the Judge of the universe. He would talk to me sometimes and I enjoyed going to church activities. I received the sacraments of confession and holy communion in the second grade and became a confirmed soldier of the faith in fifth grade.
I began my three year stint as an altar boy in sixth grade. My first year we memorized the mass in Latin which meant we would utter mumbo-jumbo with no comprehension of what we were saying. By eighth grade everything was in English and more understandable. Sometimes, during mass, I would ring the bells at the wrong time but God and the assembled people forgave me, occasionally the priest did not.
Serving holy communion during mass was always fun because we could poke our friends in the throat with the plate we placed under their chins to catch the host if it ever fell. An activity the priests never noticed or said anything about. We received tips for serving funeral services. My faith was paying off in more than one way!
We memorized the Baltimore catechism cover to cover and studied church history. We rarely touched the Bible which in hindsight was a big miss by the church. Somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that Catholics went to heaven while Protestants, Mormons and the ungodly did not qualify and went straight to hell.
I also learned about mortal and venial sin. Committing a mortal sin sends you straight to hell. You can commit an infinite number of venial sins and still make it to heaven, you just have to pass through purgatory for a season. I committed myself to just committing venial sins when necessary.
One time Ricky Valenzuela and I, thinking we were alone in the church, started playing boogie-woogie and rock 'n' roll songs loudly on the church organ. Deep into our music, we did not hear the pastor storm up the stairs yelling “You cannot play music like that in here, this is the house of God!” He threw us out.
One of my treasured God ironies would happen roughly four decades later when I would be playing boogie-woogie music on the church piano at my dad's memorial service in the same church building. This time the church pastor approached me saying, “You can play that kind of music in this church anytime you want, the people love it.”
I continued my Catholic education at Servite High School. The Baltimore catechism was out, Church history stayed and there was a smattering of the Bible taught. I started committing mortal sins in high school hoping that I would not die.
My junior year an event happened that numbed my relationship with God. A group of people I respected and who professed the Catholic faith (priests and parents), disappointed me in a profound way that resulted in me not caring about God. With good but naïve intentions, they made a decision to go in an expedient and convenient way but not the right way. I was shocked and shattered.
This is my first major mistake in my faith walk. I let fallible human beings and their actions get between me and God. People failing does not mean God failing. People will always fail despite best efforts. Their failures can generate consequences for them and for others. God never fails. This learning does not bear full fruit until my late 20’s.
The only respite from my God apathy period happens briefly in graduate school. During a summer job, I met a person who is truly joyful in his faith and a bright shining light in his communities. I notice people clean up their language when they are around Bruce and go to him when they have troubles.
One day, during a break, I see Bruce having too much fun making animals out of paper clips at his desk. I go over to talk to him and we become fast friends. He really introduces me to God, this time it is a direct relationship with no intermediaries. I start to read the Bible to get to know God better and become a born-again Christian in a meeting room at work. I am mystified that God, who is all knowing, all powerful, all loving and infinite can want a relationship with a frail, finite person like me. But it is true.
Summer is over and I return to graduate school. My college roommate doesn't know what to do with me and my new faith. He hopes it goes away or evaporates over time so we can return back to our life of school, surf and fun. My girlfriend embraces the new me, at least for a season. Over the course of a few months, I fall way from my new faith and go back to the old me.
I learn another faith walk lesson. To keep your faith alive, it is necessary to plug into a faith community. Being a successful lone ranger faith walker is impossible over time. Another lesson that does not bloom fully until my late 20’s.
After returning from a backpacking trip throughout Europe, I begin to date DeeAnn. She is a faith walking stray like myself and is now returning to having a direct life changing adventure with God. We do this as a couple, get engaged and then married. Our individual and mutual faith play a key role in our marriage and lives, then and now.
There are several times that I am aware of God’s profound presence. Our Torrey Pines cliff wedding ceremony overlooking a spectacular ocean, my wife's embrace, the birth of our three children, times when I am mentoring and disciplining our young children whom I love and realize that God is doing that to me in the same Father/child type relationship, and when we sing worship at church for example.
One time, the struggling company I am working for starts laying off people indiscriminately every few weeks. I have already been searching for a job for over a year and my search intensifies. The layoffs continue. I have two new job opportunities that look very promising but disappoint and disappear at the last minute.
I am angry with God, so angry I cannot even pray. The best I can do is slap praise music into my car stereo system as I drive back-and-forth from work singing at the top of my lungs. My job search continues for another year. The stress and threat of an imminent layoff consumes me.
We have very little money in the bank and a second child on the way. Before I leave for a vacation my boss tells me I may not have a job when I return. I choose not to tell DeeAnn this until we are on our respite from my work. She receives the news well, better than I. While we are gone, a neighbor clips a small four line ad from the help wanted section of the San Diego edition of the LA Times that we do not receive. He gives it to me when we return and I immediately apply. With over 300 applicants, the job at WD-40 company is awarded to me and I work there for 28 years. It turns out to be an incredible blessing and answer to my prayers.
Another faith walk lesson flowers. Learn to wait for God's timing and not my own. The two jobs that I was upset about not getting both become disasters with one company going out of business and the other laying off most employees right before it moves out of state.
I want to discover and fully live God's plan for me. It's not about me, it is about Him.
After a 40 year career, I retire. One year into retirement on a hike with my dogs I fall down some stairs that I've traveled up and down a thousand times. I break my neck and end up in intensive care paralyzed from the shoulders down, breathing through a respirator, with tubes running in and out of my body.
My active mind is trapped in a deadened body with no sensation. Even breathing is a labor. Too many doctors offer too little hope. God, family, and friends surround me as do despair and depression. The latter battles against the former in a days-long war that I have no ability to share with others. I am out of myself, nothing left. Surrendering to darkness seems easy, almost inevitable.
This is the ultimate test of my faith. Will I die and truly find out if God exists? If He exists, now would be a good time for Him to show up. I haven't listened to His voice lately but I sense he's been talking to me all along the way. It is time for a face-to-face.
I develop a prayer that I say over and over again in desperation. It focuses me on the only two things I can do now: pray and breathe. That's it, there's nothing else I can do in my current state. So I do both, over and over. I learn to be extremely grateful for the capacity to take even one full breath of air.
This impacts my life perspective, I make a decision to be grateful for everything God has given me, all those little things we never notice or fully appreciate like taking a breath of fresh air. I begin to see God’s gifts everywhere, mostly unacknowledged by anyone.
My gratitude generates optimism. I can feel God's presence around me as he tells me,”Now I can begin My next work in you.” And He does. I know He has a plan for me and I want to live it fully.
God is real as Is my being a quadriplegic now. I do not know how this will all play out but I will clutch onto the ambiguity wholeheartedly. I embrace the adventure and sharing it with everyone around me. Hopefully, they will see the love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, kindness, faithfulness, and self control in me and what I do.
The Crux Of The Matter
My faith walk has been a stumbling, bumbling, eye-opening learning experience. When under severe stress, I come back to the following wide views to shore up my faith foundation before thriving on.
God exists. I review the span of my life and remember my many experiences and blessings. If more is required, my more rational and logical side takes over.
According to the first law of thermodynamics, energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The second law of thermodynamics, regarding entropy, states that order always evolves into disorder. This happens in my garage every day.
Given these two laws of science and my reality, how does something like the big bang really happen without God? How does the order and energy of the universe (and the laws of science that describe it) come from disorder or nothing? How does highly ordered life evolve from the chaos of random chemical interactions and events?
I don't see it. The odds of God existing are much higher than the odds that he doesn't. Creation requires a creator, life comes from life. Stones can't become frogs. It is much easier for me to reason that a creator God exists than to think everything came from nothing and is a result of chance.
What to do about Jesus? He is a historical person reported on within the Bible plus other historical sources like Josephus and Tacitus. In the four Gospels, Jesus says many incredible, beautiful things and also claims unequivocally to be divine, the son of God. He claims to be the Messiah (one example is the woman at the well in John chapter 4). If he is who he said he is, then he is my Lord and Savior. Or he could be delusional? Or he could be a liar, the biggest con man of all time?
Given his overall message and impact, I reason Jesus is my Lord and creator. If someone says he is just a great moral teacher or anything less than what he claims then they are saying Jesus is a liar or delusional which I do not believe is consistent with his life and teachings.
Jesus also separates himself from all other great religious leaders in that he said he would rise from the dead and he did. His physical resurrection, which I believe can be proven as a historical fact, is the cornerstone of my faith.
There is roughly a 400 year gap between the Old and New Testaments where the Bible is silent. The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, created in the third century BCE by 72 Jewish scholars in Alexandria. It was the first major translation of the Hebrew Scriptures and became the primary version used by Greek-speaking Jews and early Christians. Jesus would've been familiar with it.
This translation locks in the contents of the Hebrew Bible, including all of its prophecies about the coming messiah. This means that there could be no creating or editing of those prophecies once the final copy of Septuagint was created a few hundred years before Jesus' time. There are roughly 300 prophecies in the Septuagint that God uses to point the Jewish people towards their messiah. Jesus fulfilled all of these prophecies. No one else in history has and the odds of someone doing it in the present or future is beyond all calculation.
For example, following are a few Old Testament Messiah prophecies, their references, and where Jesus fulfilled them in the New Testament.
- Born in Bethlehem, Micah 5:2, Matthew 2:1-6.
- Triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the foal of a donkey, Zechariah 9:9, John 12:12-16.
- Rejected by his own people, Isaiah 53:1-3, Matthew 26:3,4.
- Betrayed for 30 pieces of silver used to buy a Potters Field, Zach 11:12-13, Matthew 27
- Tried and condemned for claiming to be the messiah, Isaiah 53:8, Luke 23:1-25.
- Dies by crucifixion, Psalm 22:14, 16, 17 (crucifixion invented by Persians 700 years after Psalm is written), Matthew 27:31.
- Physically raised from the dead, Psalm 16:10, Matthew 28:1-10.
Some of these he could've arranged for (triumphal entry into Jerusalem) but many of them he could not (where he was born).
Most estimates of how many humans have ever lived, including those alive today, come in over 100 billion people. Using 100 billion as the denominator and 1 million as the numerator (a very conservative estimate meaning 1 million people claiming to be the Messiah had this happen to them in human history) results in a probability of 1x10 to the minus 6 power for each prophecy. Using the same probability calculation for each prophecy is done here for simplicity’s sake. The probability of the seven events listed above occurring to the same person is 1x10 to the minus 42nd power.
If I take seven more Old Testament prophecies regarding the Messiah and go through the same exercise I can come up with the odds of all 14 happening to the same person being 1x10 to the minus 84th power and still have over 275 prophecies unused.
How crazy is the number 1 x 10 to the minus 84th power? The science of physics defines absurdity as anything with a probability of happening less than 1x 10 to the minus 50th power. For another reference, the total number of atoms estimated to be in our universe is 1 x 10 to the 78th power!
It is against all odds that Jesus is able to fulfill all the old testament prophecies successfully and yet He does! The God inspired power of the Bible and Jesus' uniqueness are clearly demonstrated here. It seems very rational to me to accept the odds of Jesus being who he says he is rather than reject him.
People ask many valid and challenging questions including does hell exist or how does a good God allow all the evil in the world to happen? I find these type questions easier to approach once I have a more full understanding of the God that exists and His full nature or attributes.
The above is what I believe and think is true and what I use to celebrate my life and confront my struggles. What do you use to work through life’s ups and downs? How well is it working for you?
Credo ut Intelligem
