Rock and Roll and Jesus

During a long late night drive last night, my 7 year old started pondering life, the universe and everything. We talked about meteors, stars, and black holes before the conversation turned to God, creation and the Bible. This isn't your typical father daughter talk, but she clearly has an interest in history, science and other things that most seven year olds would never think about. She's daddy's girl in those regards at least.

Enter my dilemma. Smart as she is, Drew is still very impressionable. I don't want to push any of my kids to make decisions based on what I want, or what I believe. I'm a firm believer that my role here is to steer their minds in the right directions and allow them to come to decisions on their own, based on what they've learned or how they feel. I don't force them to church; they go because they want to learn and because I can't give them all the answers they need. I don't force them to listen to my music, but I do expose them to the different sounds and rhythms so that they can find what they like in the huge mix of crap circulating on the airwaves today.

So more to my point. I'm not atheist, but I'm not what you call a religious man either. I believe in the existence of something greater than myself; not because I feel it or that I've seen it, but because when I look around at the things I've seen in this world, I cannot accept that all of this happened by some accident or huge cosmic H-bomb. There was some kind of design or intervention there someplace. In addition to that, I'm not the person I am because I fear a hell in the afterlife, but rather, I believe that it's right to do good by others. To treat your fellow man, environment, and animals with the same respect just comes naturally to me and may be a result of my upbringing.

I decided to tell Drew the truth and explain to her that it in no way means that I don't believe in God or Jesus or any of the things that she's learning in Sunday school. Rather, it means I have questions that so far, no one has been able to answer. Things like; where are the missing 25+ years of Jesus' life? How was it possible for one man to build a boat that could hold pairs of the world's species? Where are the dinosaurs in the Bible? There's more, but they all come back to the same thing; no one knows. Surprisingly, Drew said she had questions too and many of them were the same as my own. One in particular; who created God? My only response to her now was that we need to just continue asking. Sometimes we may never get the answer we're looking for, but we keep asking until we do.

I take some comfort in knowing that I'm not the only one that feels this way. I spent a nice afternoon a week ago, with Bill Maher as he went around asking the same questions to the people I wouldn't have had the balls to ask. While I don't agree with everything, the film was entertaining and lighthearted, but still left me (and Bill apparently) with the same questions.

In the meantime, I'll still be here listening to my rock and roll and asking questions about Jesus.