@Christy
It wasn’t my dino loving daughter that pushed me over the edge, lol. I taught her what I had “learned” that dinosaurs lived with humans, and we were pretty ok with that explanation. We just last year visited the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum after my husband returned from a deployment. So, all this is very new to me and my family. My kids seem to be taking it in stride, although my 17 year old is really upset about the possibility that Adam and Eve may not have literally existed. It’s really hard to explain to them the things I’m learning, but I try to emphasize that we have to understand the Bible from who, when, and where it was written and not try to read into it from today’s perspective. We’re still working on it. My journey was actually a series of other events in my life that led me to question Christianity and God as a whole.
I had a very personal and quite devastating situation happen to me in 2012, which, honestly, I turned my back on God during a period of about 2 years. I was drawn back, naturally, as we all know God doesn’t let us go so easily. Then in 2017, my grandmother had a heart attack. She came to live with us for the last 3 months of her life and I was honored and blessed to take care of her until she passed away. However, at that time, because of various cliches concerning death, etc, plus the events from 2012. I started questioning the Bible, God, etc. Although, honestly, if I look back through my notes in my bible, I’ve been questioning things for over 20 years, I have always just set those questions aside because I felt I wasn’t “in tune” enough to understand, and I relied on the “more faithful” to lead me. But after 2012 and again in 2017, I felt like something wasn’t right overall and I wanted to figure out where Christianity “went wrong”. I started with looking into life after death, then into the history of Jewish thinking, which led me here and there. I came back to those ideas later, but as I searched I came upon a book called “The Divine Dance” by Richard Rohr and another book called “the Language of God” by Francis Collins. I was reading them simultaneously. They both made statements about evolution at about the same time during my reading of them. It really shocked me, but I followed some other resources listed in Collins’ book, and after reading in several places concluded it had to be correct. I did quite a bit of reading at asa3.org. Of course, my main problem was ok, if evolution is true what about Genesis? I studied for over 20 years the Ken Ham, AiG, IRC version of creation and the Bible so my mind was really messed up thinking about evolution. So, then I moved on to reading “Coming to Peace with Science” by Darrel Falk. That furthered my belief that evolution was absolutely true. I’m currently reading (or attempting to read) another book called “Belief in God in the age of Science” and “Questions about Truth” by John Polkinghorne, but he’s really difficult for this pea brain to understand.
At one point, I realized I needed to share this information with my family. I sat and shook uncontrollably and cried as I told my husband, then a few weeks later gathered my daughters together and told them all at once. They didn’t seem to be to upset at first, but here and there questions have come up that I try to answer. I keep telling them that I spent over 20 years learning the other side, and now I’m just beginning to learn this side, so it might take a while for me to “figure it out”.