Thread by @owenbroadcast

drank too much coffee at like 3pm today so heres a story that changed my life that i dont think i really told anyone.

youre me. its a few years ago.

you just drove three days to be in a mountain city with your wife, for her birthday.

its not going to go the way you planned.

i became christian a few years before this. since then i have invested the maximum amount of time a person could reasonably be expected to into figuring that out. piles of books every day. talks while walking my dog, doing chores, figuring out what church to go to, all of it.

one day i literally sat in my car for like ten hours and listened to these talks about the old testament all the way through. that was just a random day. so, im the maximum level of invested in understanding things and have cobbled some basic understanding together.

now, its morning. we’re staying at this nice place her family friend runs. shes not there.

im writing an email. i get up to do something.

wow, its cold in here. im really cold.

wow, i’m really really really cold. like… insanely cold. thats weird.

its kind of… summer right. maybe its just cold in this room.

wow, im like really shaking. ill make some coffee.

wow, my hands are shaking so much i cant even make coffee. im really cold.

hey, my wife was just here, and she was in a… sundress. and shes always cold. weird.

she wasnt cold. well ill turn on this space heater.

actually my hands are shaking so much, i cant even turn on this space heater. actually, i cant even type on my phone.

thats crazy. oh, my wife happened to come back and grab something.

she says its not cold.

guess we’re going to, the hospital. cool.

now theyre taking my blood at the hospital.

im explaining this weird rare underlying medical condition i have. probably unrelated?

now theyre telling me im staying at the hospital overnight.

now im getting some kind of surgery. woah

well, its not really a surgery. its a surgical procedure. cool.

when you do this type of thing, theres a lineup of people you interact with before it happens, and theyre all like: yeah man its totally cool no worries this is totally chill. one after another

except: the last guy

after ten different people assure you its totally chill, they send in ‘the last guy’(tm) who is like: hey legally i have to officially tell you that its actually

not chill(tm)

and, you could totally die. can you sign this paper that says i told you that?

yeah sure. no problem.

the last guy(tm) also explains in detail everything that could go wrong. specifically like, hey if through no fault of our own, something pops, youll probably die, sorry. that happens sometimes.

cool man. thats great.

also im in a tiny room wearing just a robe in this part.

he leaves.

so, now you have no phone, and youre not wearing your own clothes, and youre in a little room that is right before the surgery room.

and its your wifes birthday (lol).

so, what now? well i guess people pray in this situation right. i mean obviously people do that.

dude thats obviously what i should do now. i mean, i know that. great.

so now im staring at the ceiling like

hey God, it would be… really cool if i did not… die in this next room over here…

thats honestly what i thought. just being honest with you all.

but

theres a but

im like… well, i believe that God… knows the future and everything

and is all powerful and, all that stuff.

so, if im going to die in the next room… he obviously has already known that for some time.

theres obviously some kind of plan going on here, at some level, right

its pretty difficult for me to imagine a scenario where God is like

oh, owen doesnt want to die? well i already knew that of course but since he asked nicely i will not have him die

im laying on this table looking at the ceiling trying to square how this is going to do anything

and im kind of like

i feel like i should have covered this at some point before getting…

here

to this situation.

right. like was i just pretending to understand this before? am i just like an idiot or something. did i miss the day about the basic logistics here?

apparently

so i was like: well yeah i really do think that so i guess there is no point

i mean i wasn’t going to pretend. it was just me there.

so i just laid there for ten minutes and then they wheeled me in and, as you may have guessed, i did not die. great.

but obviously that experience really made an impression on me. i left asking myself

so… what. am i just supposed to not ask God for stuff? i mean if i layout what i think about God me asking him for stuff literally makes zero sense. i mean i just lived through the test case.

but i look around about thats like… the number one thing people are doing around me. i mean everyone is asking God for stuff. am i stupid. do they know something i dont? i mean someone is missing something here and statistically its obviously got to be me.

so, what is it

eventually i found some people, i think they were calvinist (im not calvinist sorry but i do respect it) who were like:

yeah youre correct. we pray to have our will align with God’s. we don’t ask for stuff for the exact reason you’re describing. you are correct.

but

then i would see them pray for stuff. theyd tell me about getting into a medical situation with their kids and describe exactly the opposite of that.

okay. so… which is it? are they just saying they think one thing and doing another, or… what?

didnt help.

i like this story because, i try and not tell people what to think. i really enjoy discussing theology, but it often comes off as pontificating (which i dont do).

but this really happened. at this time i was just trying to play by the rules 100% all the way through.

so eventually i had to cave in one direction. i no longer do this, but my reasoning was: i can take what i think about God, and go from there. if what i think is accurate, it makes no sense to me to pray.

so i just didnt. ever. i literally never did, after that, for a long time.

i kind of just didnt think about what other people were doing. it was too much to dislodge the attributes of God that i had in my mind. like if i moved those it was just… way too crazy. not even sure where that would lead me.

so what else could i do? honestly. i didnt know.

but after multiple years - im talking like, a long time, that felt even longer because i think about religion every day, i thought: ok this is stupid. im obviously missing some crucial aspect of things here. i mean what is this a joke. im like a religious guy that doesnt pray now

but i still couldnt square it. and i didnt know… how (?) to dislodge the blocks in my wall. i had probably literally gone over every inch of the wall looking for a crack hundreds of times.

but i had to do something.

so, i just built a box in my mind, that i could go into.

this isnt advice, its just a weird super personal story.

i just built a zone in my mind, where i said: im just going to believe whatever i have to in order to pray genuinely, in this box. i mean who cares. im not a spiritual teacher, im not telling anyone what to do.

im not even going to say or think anything in this box is real. in fact ill stamp it all with “provisional” or “fake” or whatever. but in this box, ill do whatever i have to do in my mind to get to a place where the fact that i am asking God for stuff makes sense.

so, if in this box, i have to think: maybe God doesnt have a 100% set vision of the future that has been known from the foundation of the world, ill do it

if, in order to do it, i have to think God could change his mind, and deal with the logical ramifications of that, ill do it

so now i had this separate box where i would just pretend that asking God for stuff actually made sense to me, but then id come back out of it and come back into what i actually thought.

this was genuinely the only thing i could think to do that would potentially change anything

so now, i just have this box. and i go into it, and im like: yeah this makes sense. but the reverberations are a lot. if i dont tell this whole story about me and the shaking hands surprise hospital visit and everything, if i just lead off with ‘the box’, people are like

what

if you just lead off with “you ever wonder as an experiment what it would be like if God didnt have absolute perfect divine foreknowledge”

thats not really a tiny thread to pull

it kind of feels like its holding up a pretty large and significant part of the house. right

but i didnt seek that out. i just put it in a box explicitly labeled ‘fake ideas’ so that praying would actually be something i did

i dont like the box. apparently other people dont have them.

i could get rid of it, i guess. i mean i could do that any day. it was provisional.

but then im back in that room wondering how it makes any sense for me to ask God “uh hey could you not kill me on my wifes birthday bro”.

and i just… dont.

which is fine, i guess, thats how i lived the vast majority of my life. but that seems wrong also.

weird.

thats it.

its hard to talk about this kind of thing with people because you explain it, and they say something like:

“uh… dude, God is outside of time”

and im standing here like:

yes. that is what creates the entire situation i just described.

https://twitter.com/didymus_twin/status/1705077481001390223