Reflections at Age Seventy-five

Seventy-five years ago today I was born into this world.  I was a brand-new kid, but the “slate” of my life was not blank.  It had already been written upon by the hand of Providence through my genetic inheritance and the environment of my mother’s womb.  My genes, located on 23 chromosomes from my mother and an equal number from my father, plus some extra genes from the cytoplasm of my mother’s ovum, have so far served me well. 

Worldview from the Womb
The 9-month period within mother’s womb must have been a pleasant one.  Thankfully, my “warm womb world” was safe from any violent physical intrusion.  It was also safe from chemical intrusion and from unfavorable nutritional or narcotic consumption by my mother that might otherwise have introduced epigenetic triggers that could have affected my development through altered gene expression (See link HERE.).  Very likely, by the time I entered the bright lights of this world on May 9, 1947 in Dover, Ohio, I was already acquainted with the feeling of my mother’s warmth, her loving voice, and her caring hands.

Although I was born with a slate already partly written upon, it came with many questions and many “blanks to fill.”  You see, like all human beings, I was hard-wired with an inborn need to know myself and the world into which I was born.  I began my search for answers to these questions through personal experience and eventually, through reading.  Later, I learned that the answers I found and accepted were shaping within me what many call my worldview.  Our worldview is an internally coherent and consistent framework or lens through which we can view, understand, and relate to the world around us.

For purposes of this article, we suggest that each of us are prone to address four basic questions.  How we answer them will help shape our worldview:
Reality:   What is true?
Identity:  Who am I?  
Morality:  What is good and evil?
Justification:  What is my purpose and destiny?

How each of us answer these four questions is absolutely fundamental to how we each will function socially and professionally.   Maybe you will relate personally (or maybe not) as I share how I believe my own personal worldview has developed.

Reality:  What is True?
One of my first lessons began on my first birthday.  It had to do with who and what I could trust.  Everywhere I went, I depended on “the handlers”—first the nurses, then my mother.  Soon I learned to trust and feel safe in the (usually) warm hands of my mother and the larger, rougher hands of my father.  I soon felt other tangible things: the warm, tasty, nourishing milk from my mother’s breasts, and then from a baby bottle.  I felt the relief from a wet, itchy diaper when it was replaced by a warm, dry one.  I soon learned that when I felt uncomfortable or fearful, I would spontaneously cry out with strange sounds.   My cries brought results—my mother’s caring hands, a dry diaper, and her warm embrace.  I felt safe.  I felt valued and loved. 

My “reality” was already beginning to rest upon both material and non-material things.  I began to put my faith in things that I could touch and see.  When they appeared often enough and consistently enough, I considered them “real.”  I was beginning to “real-ize” a certain inner satisfaction that depended upon my physical senses of touch, taste, sight, hearing, and smelling.  But inseparably linked to my physical senses was a real and growing sensation of peace and joy that came from how my needs were being met—warmly, lovingly, consistently. For example, my mother and father touched and handled me tenderly in a way that conveyed something wonderful beyond the physical.  I could repeatedly feel safe, valued, loved.  I could see my parents’ smiles and hear pleasant, loving words from them, and between them.  Because they were faithfully on schedule to provide food, dry clothes, and nap times, I learned something about time—sunny daytime, dark nighttime.

Even before I could eat solid food, my worldview was developing.  I was finding satisfaction from both the seen and the unseen.  I was coming to accept as real, true and truth a statement from God’s book, the Bible: “Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see. (Hebrews 11: 1 NLT).”  I became more aware of my growing personal faith as I progressed from confirming what is true, then believing it as truth, and then placing my trust in it through decisions and actions.

Identity: Who Am I?
While I was realizing that my mother and father were regularly and lovingly providing for my needs, I was also hearing sounds that they associated with me.  Words like “baby” and “bottle” and “bedtime” became familiar.  I soon associated “mommy” with my mother, and “daddy” with my father.  Most affectionately identified with me was the frequent sound of the word, “Johnny.”  I began to realize that everything had a name, and soon it seemed natural that my ears would perk up when I heard someone say, “Johnny.”

When I became what is called a “toddler,” I met some larger kids whom I later learned were my older cousins.  I also discovered that my mother and father each had their own mother and father.  My mother’s mother and father showed more love and kindness to me than my dad’s parents but I liked being with them all.  They were each different from one other, and each had their own names.  But to me, they became known as “Grandpa” and “Grandma.”

During the summer months, I was able to go outside into a large, green world.  Both my parents and grandparents liked to work outside.  They showed me things like animals and flowers.  I soon discovered that animals came in different forms like cats and dogs, chickens and cows.  The flowers also came in predictable patterns:  trees I could climb and swing under, and flowers I could smell and pick.  I began to see that the landscape of our farm could also be divided into field, forest, “the bottom,” and “the crick.”  I now pronounce “the crick” as “the creek” or by its proper name, “Sugarcreek.”  I was continuing to organize my world into more and more categories the each seemed quite distinct.

My parents gave me many chores to do and I learned to be responsible by feeding the chickens, gathering the eggs, forking cow manure, and handling hay bales in summer and winter.  I loved books and particularly maps.  Boundaries of each state fascinated me because they resembled pieces of a puzzle.  I began to realize that although they are restrictive, boundaries are important in keeping order and promoting orderly thinking in every area of life.

On Sunday’s, my parents took us to a white building with a steeple and windows that all pointed upward.  This was Dundee Methodist Church where we would gather with friends and other families to sing, hear readings and teachings from the Bible, and do fun things like coloring and eating snacks.  As an elementary school child, I was taught by stern but loving Sunday School teachers, several of whom were also my teachers at Dundee Elementary School.

Morality: What is Good and Evil?
My mother used to tell me that during my first years of life, my father would often hold me and whisper in my ears the words, “Johnny is a good boy?”  Very likely, before I can remember, I was already learning to associate “good” with behavior or performance that met the approval of my parents.  I wanted to please them.  At the same time, I tended toward “bad.”  There were times that I felt like doing “bad things,” especially when I was with my cousin who also tended toward “bad.”  I was learning the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie; and, between having what belonged to me and what did not.  When I stole a badge from one of my classmates in 3^rd grade, I felt a sense of guilt and I knew I had done wrong.  I wondered why that was, and why the guilt went away when my theft was exposed and I was punished.

In Sunday School and church each week, I learned that God is good, and that God had given us Ten Commandments that Jesus later boiled down to two commands:  love God above all else, and love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves.  Stealing from a classmate and lying to my parents did not show love to God or my neighbor.  The fact is, I was sinning—falling short of the mark of what is acceptable to God (James 2: 10).  I began to realize that God had given me a conscience to warn me and keep me from sinning, and to unsettle me until I confessed and made things right.

Thankfully, I was blessed with parents who encouraged me to obey God’s command to “honor your father and your mother.”  When my world expanded into school and church, I learned the importance of honoring my teachers, my pastor, and my country.  Each day, we stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America.  This exercise helped me to respect authorities who serve “under God” as His agents to make and enforce laws.  I began to see that laws set boundaries on what I could and could not do.  But laws were good because they protected me by keeping order in our nation and in our communities. 

I loved my history classes, but I learned that human freedom comes ultimately from God and obedience to His commands, not from government.   From history, I also learned that even leaders in government sometimes break God’s commandments and cause riots and war.  It made sense to me that our founders believed in the sinful nature of mankind.  Thanks to them, our federal government is divided into three branches to distribute power and provide a system of checks and balances to protect us from those who ignore God’s laws and the laws of government.

During these growing-up years, I learned about “good” and “bad” from my parents, teachers, pastors, friends, and “the media.”  At age 10, I became acquainted with characters like Wyatt Earp who was cast as a marshal who was also called “deacon Earp.” I like him because he was a “good” character.  He drank milk instead of whiskey, and he shot bad men only to wound them and not to kill.  By watching wholesome TV programs, I learned that things turned out well for “good men,” but the “bad men” had to pay a penalty for their actions.

During the 1960’s and 1970’s, I began to notice a blurring of the boundaries between “the good and the bad.”  Even cowboy shows portrayed characters that made me question what was right and what was wrong.  From the media, and from my cousins and classmates, I was exposed to the attractions of smoking, gambling, immoral sexual images and behavior, and alcohol and drug abuse.  While my own body was changing and I was literally “growing up fast,” the voice of my father saying “Johnny is a good boy,” seemed to fade away.  I wondered whether I or anyone for that matter could really be “good.”  Thankfully, God used the influence of my family, teachers, and church to help me ask deeper questions:
Who am I?   Who do I want to be?
What is true?  What difference will it make?
What is good and evil?  Can I be good?

Beneath all of these questions was the deepest question of all:  What is my purpose and destiny?

Justification:  What is my purpose and destiny?
During my junior and senior high school years, I was surprised to learn that respected scientists believed that the world as we know it came into being entirely by “natural laws” of physics and chemistry.  Gone from my public-school textbooks was any mention of “super-natural” acts of God in creation.  It seemed that a great divide was opening up between church and the rest of my world, between Sunday School and the public school; and between the Bible and science.

The growing desire of the ‘60’s and 70’s culture to dismiss the authority of God and the outmoded moral standards of the past was further invigorated by the notion of Darwinian evolution.  This trend also affected my answers to who I am, what is true, and what is good and evil.  If the world originated and now operates by natural laws without God sustaining it, then is there really any purpose in life?  For my life?  Who decides what is true and false?  Good and bad?   Where will I go when I die?  What will happen to this world?   Does it even matter?

Adding to my adolescent confusion was a series of terrible events of the 1960’s:  the Vietnam War and the possibility of being drafted into the armed services, the assassination of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, and the rise of violence and immorality.  Thankfully, I gladly followed my parents’ wishes that I attend Malone College, a Christian college in nearby Canton, OH.  Here, I learned much more about the world and how to reason critically about issues of religious faith, science, and culture.  My knowledge of the origin of life, creation, and evolution increased but my integration of concepts of science and faith remained incomplete. 

My pursuit of a satisfying understanding of the world as an undergraduate, as a husband and father, and then as a graduate student and teacher gave me one major insight:   that all of us are constituted in such a way that we must live by a faith in something or someone beyond the material world.  That something or someone is more powerful than us.  What’s more, we may each have to eventually give account of how we lived between the two dates that will appear on our gravestones.  Faith in some higher power leads us to pursue a coherent, internally consistent, and hopefully satisfying way of knowing what is true and real.  This pursuit is necessary for us to know who we are (our identity), to discern what is right and wrong, and to adopt a code of ethics and morality that will satisfy any judgment we might incur from the higher power.  

At the beginning of this article, we referred to the framework for answering the questions about reality, identity, morality, and destiny as our worldview.  My personal biographical sketch reveals how my worldview developed through my parents, family, friends, church, and school.  This gradual development over many years until my twenties reached a climax on a single day when I began to see how the pieces all fit together.

A “Second Birthday”
When we began graduate studies at West Virginia University-Morgantown, WV, Abby and I with our young son, Bradley, chose wisely to continue our practice of attending church on Sunday’s.  One day in 1972, we were visited by two laymen, Leroy and Pearl who were lay leaders from the church.  After casual conversation, Leroy asked me if I had come to a place in my spiritual life that I could be certain that if I were to die today that I would go to Heaven.  “Yes,” I said.

Probing a bit further, Leroy asked a second question: “Then let’s suppose you were to die and stand before God and He were to ask you, ‘Why should I let you into my Heaven?’  What would you say?”  After explaining that I had tried to keep the Ten Commandments, the men explained politely from the Bible that it is “not by works of our own righteousness,” but “according to God’s mercy” that we can be saved from judgment and its penalty of eternal separation from God (Titus 3: 5; Romans 6: 23).  They explained how God had already been working in my life from the beginning, gradually helping me to realize that the answer to my questions of reality, identity, morality, and destiny all are found in God, the “Great I AM,” the “Eternally Existent One.”  All I had to do was to surrender my own pride and imperfect efforts of self-righteousness, come to realize that God wants to give me His righteousness, and then invite Him through His Holy Spirit to come into my heart, take the “throne of my life” and lovingly enable me to learn to live in a way that is pleasing in His sight according to His Word.

The day the two men visited and led me in a prayer of confession of my sin and heard my profession of a willingness to turn from sin and self to serve God was my “second birthday.”  Since that day 50 years ago, I don’t wish the impossible; namely, that I could live as a perfect man.  God knows that I still live with a sin nature in a world infected by the curse of sin/rebellion against God.  But, with Paul the Apostle, I can say and hopefully live out the testimony that I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3: 13-14).

Sharing Our Best Gift
When we find something that means all the world to us, loving our neighbor makes us want to share it with them.  Likewise, those of us who have come to realize that Jesus is the “precious Cornerstone” (1 Peter 2:6-8) upon which our worldview is built are also compelled by the Holy Spirit to share Him with others (2 Corinthians 5: 13-21).  We want to share the Good News of how God took on flesh through Jesus Christ, demonstrated His grace and Truth (John 1: 17), then died on a Roman cross in our place, and rose from the dead in victory over sin and its penalty—eternal separation (spiritual death) from God forever (1 Corinthians 15: 1-8).

We must also realize that Jesus is the “Cornerstone” and foundation for Truth and Life.  But He is also “a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall (1 Peter 2: 8).”  Those who deny both God’s living Word (Jesus Christ) and God’s written Word (the Bible) are offended upon hearing the claim that (emphasis added) salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved (Acts 4: 12). Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except by me (John 14: 6).  

Because the “Good News” brings a stark reality that is often personal, painful, and provocative, we ought to be humble and respectful to those with whom we share it.  After all, we wouldn’t want others to foist even their best gift on us without consideration of our worldview.   Remember, we are all sinners (Romans 3: 10, 23) and all of us are trying to make sense of reality, identity, morality, and destiny.  Best of all, God loves us all (John 3: 16).

What then should be my approach toward sharing “Good News” that is truly “good” but also provocative?   The Bible gives “born-again” Christ-followers the best approach to sharing the Gift of salvation and Eternal Life.  It states, But sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, but with gentleness and respect… (1 Peter 3: 15).  This was the approach of Leroy and Pearl, “gentleness and respect,” when they confronted me with my need for salvation from sin.  I want this to be my approach, too.  I hope and pray that my readers will receive my testimony in this article with the gentleness and respect that I intend.

Can You Define Your Worldview?
Thank you for reading.  If you have any questions about what I have shared or would like to comment on this article, just use the “Comments” link below.  As always, when you “Comment,” you add much value to my blog.  Please allow me to pose some questions to stir up your thinking for your personal reflection and/or posted comments:
1.   How would you describe your worldview? 
2.   Does it include your basis for truth, your identity, morality, and destiny?
3.   How do you see your worldview influencing your values and choices?
4.   Do you agree with my statement that “all of us are constituted in such a way that we must live by a faith in something or someone beyond the material world.”  Why or why not?
5.    According to a survey of 2,000 adult Americans by the American Worldview Inventory 2021, over half (54%) embrace the postmodern idea that all truth is subjective and there are no moral absolutes.  How would you explain this finding?
6.   Would you like to know more about God’s “Good News” and how to respond to it?  Check out an online source entitled, “Have You Made the Wonderful Discovery of the Spirit-Filled Life?”  It explains how you can surrender your life to Christ, gain peace with God through His Life, and begin to see the world and your life from God's perspective through His Holy Spirit dwelling in you.   Again, you may respond by posting a “Comment” (below) or by e-mailing to silviusj@gmail.edu

Related Readings:
Stewards ‘Fit into’ God’s Order and Purpose – Human need to “fit in.”  Oikonomia from 2012
Hearing the Voice of Jesus –2: When Suffering Comes – How my faith strengthened in 2017