A time for everything.

Friends of ours visited earlier this week. They came over for dinner and stayed late into the evening, well passed the time the part of my brain which filters thoughts as they go through my brain before the come out my mouth stoped working. We had one long conversation about many things. Somehow we started talking about Noah and the flood. I said that I didn't believe that the flood covered the whole earth. My friend not only disagreed but proceeded to tell me how before the flood there was never rain only dew, and that it was cloudy all the time. That is of course why people lived so much longer. They were not exposed to the sun. As I sat next to her on the couch, thoughts about the flood bouncing from one side of my brain to the other like a game of Pong, I blurted out that I didn't believe any of it. I didn't believe that it had never rained before that flood, or that the earth had been covered by some special layer of sunblocking clouds, or that people really did live longer. What shocked me the most was not that I had said outloud that I didn't believe it, but that I truly did not believe any of it. The look on my friends face could have been used in a Master Card commercial because it was priceless. She started throwing scripture at me like it was truly a sword and she was trying her hardest to cut of the nonbeliever part of me. What she didn't know is that I don't believe a lot of what the Bible says, so she can't realy use it against me. When she finished, I asked her if my not believing in the story of the flood changed anything. Does it change who God is? Does it change who I am? Does it change how I interact with God? Is the point of the story that it was all factual or is the point that we get the message behind the story? She like many others can't get past the facts. In her mind every word in the Bible is a fact that is applicable to her life. In my mind, it doesn't matter if it happened or it didn't. My faith is built on much more than a story about a flood.