It always ends with Santa

So, to keep in line, ha ha, with the eternal round thingy,  I will start with Santa, too. I asked my daughter if she believed that Santa Claus was a man who lived on the north pole and delivered presents to every child in the whole world on Christmas. She is a very thoughtful and intelligent girl, but, despite what might seem otherwise she fully and unequivocally believes it all. So, she also believes that I have super powers and am beautiful. I sure wish I could live life with her perspective! It made me again wonder how I could know anything, and what if anything other than things we choose to believe could ever be trusted.

I had been taught stories from the Bible and they had been a great help to me. I believed them fully as I had no reason to doubt them. And really, what a refirmation they were to what I want to know and if one does believe that a young inexperienced boy took on a goliath and won,it would be remarkable evidence of how mighty and strong God is. I loved the stories of Jesus in the new testiment, like the one where the public majority wanted to stone a woman to death, but Jesus stood up for her and said the profound heoric words of "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Later, someone claimed factually, that no such event ever took place or could have even possibly been witnessed to be recorded in a book hundreds of years later. But, to contradict that I also heard someone defend Bible stories as true whether or not they were factual. True? In a lesson I recently had on honesty, instantly a recollection of one Paul H. Dunn came to mind. He was a general authority of my church who was released from his duties because he told false stories. That is serious. It was not so much that the stories were false, but they were told as if they had been his own. In his defense, he claimed that same thing that it mattered not that the stories were true as it did that they taught hard to conceptualize things, like Jesus' parables. Isn't this the same thing as teaching our children about love for one another through the fairy tale of a little fat man with magical powers who visits good children with Gifts at Christmas. If I had ever resented being taught such things I would never have taught them to my children.

So what I am really trying to get at is that I love indpiring stories if they are factual or not, and although I may doubt the ability to know the truths of them, I accept that perhaps some things are only to be known through a choice to believe them.