Preface - A Letter to a Friend

Doubting Doubt

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Preface – A Letter to a Friend

 

April 10, 2013

Hi Frank,

  I hope you are doing well.  I think that I told you that I was working on some research projects.  Those projects got shelved while I was working on dealing with all of Lynn's things.  After I finished that, my intention was to begin to put my own work area back together so that I could get back to work again.  I really thought I was just going to forget about those research projects and abandon them forever and never come back to them again.

  But one of those projects kept grabbing at me.  It was as if it was saying, “Hey!  You've got to listen to this!  You've got to learn something here!  You've got to open your eyes to something!”

  I didn't want to do it.  I had given up on writing.  I quit.  I retired from writing.  It was an unproductive waste of my time.  I had written three books and nobody had the slightest bit of interest in any of them.  It had all been a big waste of time.

  But this thing kept coming back to me.  It was like a pet that keeps scratching at the door to say, “Hey, pay attention to me!”

  There are 4 Bible projects that I have wanted to work on.  I think I told you about one of them.  I was researching the people in Genesis and Exodus and I wanted to track their movements through the pages of the Bible and plot their locations on a map.  I am interested in making a study of the various people groups, where they came from, where they went and what connection if any there is with the people of today.  I'm still curious to work on this and there's nothing controversial about it.

  There are three other projects.  One is a study about an event described about Peter that I have been interested in.  The two other projects:  One I began after Lynn died and it came about as the result of a Bible paradox I seemed to discover.  It is perhaps the most extensive subject I have ever tried to study and there seems to be some controversy about it because it seems to question some fundamental things that we are always taught.  I don't know how it's going to go but I have a feeling that it is going to teach me a lot about the unsearchable wonders of heaven.

  It's the last project I'm writing to you about today.  I didn't think it was going to be any big deal; I didn't think it was all that important.  I was going to just give it up and not do anything more with it.  It got started as a study of a secondary issue.  By secondary issue, I mean it is one that doesn't have any bearing on your salvation.  You can interpret it one way or you can interpret it another way and it doesn't affect your salvation.  But it is controversial because it questions a traditional teaching.

  This controversial aspect made me want to give it up because I figured that I had to be all wrong, I was making people think I was a nut case and it was all just a whole lot more trouble and waste of my time than it was worth.

  But it was like my little dog who keeps getting under my feet and saying, “Hey!  Here I am!  Pay attention to me!”  It wasn't that there was something inside of me making me think about it.  No.  There were external things, people here and there who kept bringing the matter up.  It was happening so much it seemed just plain strange.  It made me wonder, “Why does this one thing keep showing up so much?  It's popping up all the time!  It's like a pesky moth that wants to keep flying in your door.  It won't go away.  It won't leave me alone.”

  I've been working on it day and night now.  I can hardly even get myself to stop long enough to eat.  I learned a lot of things and I found what I thought would be some good lessons to be learned.  But still it just didn't seem to be important.  I thought, “It's just a whole lot of writing about something that no one in the world is going to want to read and they won't agree with it even if they did read it.  And they'll think I'm a crackpot.  And maybe I have cracked up.  It's stupid for me to be wasting so much time on this and irritating people with it for no good reason.”

  But suddenly I realized something.  This is teaching me something far greater than anything I ever expected.  This is teaching me something much more important than the subject I started with.  This is teaching me something that the Bible is telling us from Jesus to Job and all the way back to the Garden of Eden.  The bigger lesson in this study - the much bigger lesson – is not a secondary issue at all.  It is a very essential issue, probably the most central issue that there is.  It is important.

  I don't know why I've written you all this about it.  I hope I haven't annoyed you.  I guess I kind of got excited about it.  I'm going to try to get this project finished.  I hope I can finish it in the next few days.

     Take care,

        Monty