Getting Real in Relationships

National Public Radio offers opportunities to write 350 to 500 word essays expressing personal beliefs. It's challenging to express a core belief in so few words, and also tell the story behind it.
This is my effort.

Getting Real in Relationships

I believe Jesus died for you. I believe that you do not need to believe it, or even have heard it, for it to be so.

For as long as I can remember, I have been able to say the words, "Jesus died for me". I was told that it was a precious gift that I should be thankful for. But to me, it only portended a reality that would be achieved after this real life ended.

By the time I had graduated from High School, I was much more interested in my real life rather than some ethereal afterlife. Also by this time I was deeply interested in the real world as described by physics. It was fun to play in this world, and already I had begun to delight in showing its wonders to others. And so I began my undergraduate education that prepared me for a thirty-five year career teaching high school physics and related sciences.

I could never accept that all reality is described by physics, yet God was not real to me. I explored different media ministries and finally joined a denomination that seemed to know what God was really up to in this world. In retrospect, I see this as an experience in knowing what to do and not do now so as to participate in some future life; it was not an experience in knowing God now.

One milestone in my physics teaching career was reading a simple statement of philosophy by Dr. Clifford Schwartz, physics textbook co-author and long time editor of The Physics Teacher magazine. He said that physics seeks not to explain the universe but describe it. From then on, the terms "describing reality" and "living in reality" became part of my physics vocabulary. But my theological vocabulary would be dominated by "do" and "don't do" for many more years.

During the year of my fiftieth birthday, our denomination began to understand that describing God's reality and living in that reality now is the quintessential definition of knowing God. I could finally admit openly that I really did not know God.

In my local congregation, I was a part of the much-contested theological reformation that ensued. Even so, I did not really comprehend that Jesus died for you until after I had retired from teaching, gotten a seminary degree, and been ordained a pastor.

The basis for seeing God's reality and describing it and living in it now is believing that Jesus died for you. If we were to connect in some way - whether face-to-face or through a medium such as this essay - God's reality demands that I see you as an equal - as a fellow human being who God loves equally, and who God has died for. And regardless of the purpose of our connection, my underlying motive for what I do or don't do in our time together will be have a shared experience in the reality of God.