About (part 3)

    In high school I got caught up in the Erich von Danikan books like Chariots of the Gods?. I would read every UFO book I could get my hands on. Trying to explain ancient artifacts, megalithic structures and making it all compatible with the Bible and UFO sightings took up a lot of my reading time. Without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I can see where people will get carried away with these ideas. I believe that UFOs and aliens will play a part in the deception that is coming upon the world. Lying signs and wonders. More about all this is later blogs.
     One summer I was invited to work on my cousin's farm in Wisconsin. I was 17. Communion Sunday came around and I was going to church with my cousins. The Lutheran church we attended was called WELS which stands for Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. This Synod is also considered more conservative than other Lutheran churches like LCMS. Just before the service started I was politely informed by one of my relatives that I could not partake in The Communion portion of the service because I was of a different Lutheran Synod. Well frankly, that bothered me. Where were theses Synod people? I wanted to protest this. I now believe God used that experience to get me thinking.
    Sitting on the steps of the auditorium at my high school one day at lunch period a girl I never met sat down next to me. She asked me if I was saved. I said I was a Christian and went to a Lutheran church. She asked if I was born again. I must have just looked at her with a perturbed look. She asked me if I died today if I knew without a shadow of a doubt if I'd go to heaven. I said I would hope so because I believed in God and the bible and that Jesus was the Savior of the world and because I was a Lutheran. She quoted the place in the bible right before the famous John 3:16 where Jesus tells Nicodemus that in order to be saved and go to heaven one had to be born again. Boy was this girl irritating. She was way overboard in her religious attitude. She ended the conversation by saying that I could be absolutely SURE of my going to heaven when I died. I thought in my mind that she was very conceited in her thinking. I mean, how could you KNOW. You try to be good. You go to church on most Sundays. You take Holy Communion. You belong to the Lutheran church. You were baptized as a baby. It is believed that this infant baptism requires God to impart the little guy with His Spirit which starts going to work in his little life right away. You no longer are a heathen baby. You are no longer on the road to hell. When you are confirmed at puberty this kind of "seals the deal" and means that the baptism "stuck" because you have memorized the Apostle's Creed and the teachings of the Lutheran Church and you are rewarded by being able to partake in Holy Communion with the grownups. It does not matter that the baby is unaware of what is going on. God is pouring out His grace in the Sacrament of baptism according to the infant baptism teachings.
     I married in 1975. My wife was a RCC(Roman Catholic). In fact she had gone to a Catholic school until high school. I didn't think much on our different religions because my grandfather was Catholic while my grandmother was Lutheran. We married in my Lutheran church. We would go to the RCC church for "Midnight Mass" as Christmas and a few other times as a kind of compromise. After college when we had children we needed to discuss things in a little more depth. We agreed that the mother should raise the children in the faith of the mother. When I was little, I thought catholics were going to hell because they believed in purgatory and they were so mean to Martin Luther and his friends. In my college years I looked at the Catholic church as having more rituals, more candles, more stained glass, more robes and drapes and using more languages(Latin) in their services(masses), than.the Lutherans. I really knew very little about the Catholic church at this point. My wife had us go to a Catholic church while I attended college and get married a second time just to make our marriage more "official" in her mind. I went along with it reluctantly. I understood. When our children came into the picture I found out that we more or less signed them over to the Catholic faith when they were baptized Promising to have them grow up in the Catholic faith. I see now that this was God using circumstances in our lives to make us think. I remember in college we lived in married housing which was an efficiency apartment down the road from the campus. Right next door to us were a couple of those pesky born-again Christians. Always inviting us to picnics and bible studies and such while everyone else we knew were going to parties and getting high. But anyway after college and having kids and having gone through the official channels we felt we needed to do concerning the Catholic child raising thing we compromised again. We agreed to go mostly to my  Lutheran church except for Midnight Mass and special occasions. (to be continued)...