Monday, May 7, 2018
599 - The Human Experience, Part 1
Spirituality Column #599
May 8, 2018
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
The Human Experience,
Part 1
By Bob Walters
This week’s column began life 12 years ago when I wrote a
back-page feature for Indiana Business Magazine (August 2006) about
“Experience Marketing.”
I promise
I’ll get to Jesus in a minute, but I have to set this up.
Most of my actual working life
involved corporate communications, sports public relations and
sports/motorsports writing. Marketing is
a close cousin to PR so I studied up and wrote the piece how companies through
the years – Disney and Starbucks are alpha examples – took a presentation or
product and turned sales transactions into consumer experiences. It is now the unwavering way of the promotional
world, updated with a strong shot of social consciousness thrown in to
accommodate Millennials.
You are thankful (or wonder why) Christian
contemporary worship is an “Experience”?
Well, because everything else is.
Going back to the business-oriented magazine piece, a church friend wrote
back about how he used experiential marketing in his business, which triggered
in my mind a notional bit of how we experience Jesus in our lives. It struck me that Jesus isn’t a conjured-up
“experience,” He is the ultimate real deal, in
toto. My “short note” back to my
friend turned into the first “God column” I ever wrote, which almost no one
else saw.
Here’s how it started. I called it, “The Human Experience.”
“Anytime we can hook emotion or
memory onto any or all of the five senses, that’s an experience. The “sixth sense” popularly refers to ESP or
spooks or something, but in the context of experience humans have a very
important and very straightforward sixth sense that’s never mentioned as one of
the five cognitive senses: thinking.
“We see, hear, smell, taste, touch
… and think. Pain’s only torture and
love’s only joy are memory and emotion.
Despair and joy are functions of thinking. Memory, emotion, and thinking are God’s
special gifts to mankind. With these
gifts we can know God, talk to God, listen to God, and search for God. Other humans cannot look at us and truly know
our memories, emotions or thoughts, only God can do that.
“And we have those abilities because
God wants us to find Him.
“Someone may ask, ‘Why are humans
so special?’ What about all God’s creatures?’
My guess is that, yes, animals have experiences – they think a little
bit, remember some things, and assuredly have the power to trigger emotion in
us. But I’m pretty sure they are not
looking for God. I rather think God has
hardwired Himself into all of His creation, but not in a “Pantheistic”
everything-is-God kind of way, but in an ‘I
am the Lord Thy God’ kind of way, standing separate and distinct from His
Creation.
“I think this explains why Lee
Strobel (A Case for Christ author) and so many scientists keep finding evidence
of God in our physical world. It’s
pretty simple, really. God is all around
and in us too, but we have the totally unique-to-humanity freedom to reject
Him. That’s what makes our lives so complicated.”
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) stumbled across this private correspondence in his archives
(ok, it’s a filing cabinet). The conclusion
will be along next week.
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