Tag: Testimony

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The Free-Throw Contest: A Miracle Story

In a previous post, I shared how past experiences of Jesus’ personal care and concern for me had pulled me through a terrible crisis of faith. Here I will share how one particular childhood event imprinted my heart with faith in Jesus. God demonstrated His love for me at the 1988 Thayer Booster Club Fifth Grade Free-Throw Contest.

Leading Up to the Free-Throw Contest: Awkward and Bullied

In the early part of 1988, I was an awkward and annoying eleven-year old boy. I attended this school.

The front of Thayer Schools, where the Miraculous Free-Throw Contest occurred
Thayer Schools, where I attended K-12.

I was a chubby kid who had already chosen to become a religious zealot. Plus, I had something of a martyr-complex that I lovingly nurtured. My Bible was situated proudly on the corner of my desk at school. And I was the self-designated guardian of my classmates’ souls. So, if I thought they were doing something to put themselves in danger of the fires of hell, I let them know about it with pompous self-importance.

They despised me.

And the more despicable I became, the more my martyr-complex blossomed, and the more they despised me.

There were other reasons. I was one of the only children in my class to come from a farm out of town. Also, the eighties were difficult for farmers, so my lower economic status was an obvious target. Moreover, I was not athletic, but bookish and fat, and I did not keep up with the products of popular culture that they were all consuming. I also had weird rituals that I used as coping mechanisms.

But the Bible on the corner of my desk was an unmistakable target.

Bully 1 and Bully 2

There were two classmates (henceforth designated Bully 1 and Bully 2) who could be especially cruel, and who served as ringleaders for the rest of the classroom. In pop culture bullies are usually depicted as social outcasts. This was not the case in my class. My nemeses were the most popular kids in my class. Everyone else fawned over them and basked in whatever positive attention they might shine their direction.

Bully 1 and Bully 2 were, among other things, especially good at sports, especially basketball. They played basketball with each other every afternoon, and often during recess. They were also funny, especially when it came to thinking up a cutting put-down. And I was usually the one on the receiving end for those. For some reason, an aptly timed Bible verse failed to land with as much finesse!

Today I recognize that I was largely responsible for the bullying that I suffered. But at the time, I was simply overwhelmed by the injustice and outrage that I suffered from day to day.

The Announcement of the Free-Throw Contest

On one particularly bad day my classmates had played “Matthew-germs” all through recess. (This was a kind of game of tag based on the premise that someone had accidentally touched me and thus been infected.) This was not so odd, to tell you the truth, but it really hurt on this day. The teasing continued as we made our way into the classroom, because to go back into the building we had to line up. My classmates fought with each other over who had to stand next to me. They didn’t want Matthew-germs. Finally, we got back to our desks, and there was a bit of respite from the bullying. Before we started the next lesson, my teacher told us we had a special guest.

My youth minister, Jeff Davis, stepped into our classroom. He was carrying a box. Jeff put it on the teacher’s desk, and passed out flyers, the kind with the original clip-art that you did with a photocopying machine. He wanted us to know about an upcoming basketball tournament and free-throw contest that the Thayer Booster Club was sponsoring. He opened the box, and pulled out a trophy. To entice us to sign up, he had gotten real trophies!

Winning the Free-Throw Contest an Impossibility

Before he left, he made eye contact with me and nodded. I knew that he was encouraging me to sign up. Jeff had enthusiastically supported my Bible-to-school habit. He was impressed with how well I knew the Scriptures. He invested a lot of time in me, routinely inviting me to help with things at church or the local church camp. The first time that I ever got up in a pulpit was because of his prompting. Sometimes he asked me to write something for the church newsletter. Now he wanted me to represent Thayer Christian Church in the free-throw contest. He didn’t have to spell it out.

Unfortunately, I was terrible at basketball. Living in the country, I had very little opportunity to play with anyone. And I would have much preferred to sit down with a book than to go to the shed and shoot hoops into the basket my father had set up for me. I knew that winning that trophy was impossible.

My classmates knew it, as well. As Jeff walked out of the room, the ones who had desks around Bully 1 and Bully 2 high-fived them. We all knew that one of them would get the first place trophy, and the other would get the second place trophy.

The Prayer

On the bus-ride home, I began, for the first time ever in my life, to pray in a frank manner. I told God exactly how I felt. The conversation went something like this: “God, I’ve been doing all kinds of things for the sake of your name. I bring my Bible to school every day and try really hard not to sin. When I see my classmates sinning, I warn them of Your approaching judgement. I obey my parents. I take care of my sisters. And so far, I don’t see how this has gotten me one single thing. In fact, about the only thing that it has ever done for me is give my classmates something else to make fun of me for.”

“God, some days I wonder if You even exist. I read in Your Bible about all of these miraculous signs of Your care and concern for the children of Israel. But I’ve never seen anything like that in my own life. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not just all made up.”

I got off the bus, ran up the hill to my house, and ran downstairs to my room. I picked up my basketball. And then I offered God a challenge. “God, if you love me, I want you to prove it.” With tears streaming down my face, I prayed, “God, if you really love me, make me win that free-throw contest.”

And then, for a week, I didn’t think about it.

The Basketball Tournament

But then, on that horrible, gray, Sunday afternoon in the middle of winter, the hour of reckoning arrived. I was sick to my stomach. But I had signed up. There was no getting out of it. I was silent as my parents drove me to the gym.

My team got demolished in the basketball tournament. I had never played in an actual basketball game. Neither had anyone else on my team. The referee was quickly exasperated with us for walking with the ball and throwing it out of bounds. The only thing that I really remember is throwing the ball to the one classmate who was kind of like a friend to me in those days, another farm-kid like me. As soon as he saw the ball hurling towards him through the air, he threw his arms around his head and turned his back to it. So the ball bounced off of his back into the waiting arms of Bully 2. He passed it to Bully 1 for an easy lay-up.

The Basketball Tournament: The Aftermath

After the game, I heard the father of my friend screaming at him in the hallway. My own father just hung his head in shame, and could barely even look at me. It is hard to describe just how important local athletics were for small-town farming communities like mine in the eighties. A few years earlier, our high school basketball team had taken the 1A state championship. Thayer took basketball seriously. Our losing team could taste the searing disappointment.

But there was no time to wallow in our defeat. The free-throw contest would soon be underway.

The Free-Throw Contest

When the dreaded hour came, I took my place at the end of the line. I was not excited about participating in this contest. I remembered my prayer. But it all seemed so foolish and vain right now. Why should God be concerned about a fifth-grade free-throw contest in Thayer, Kansas?

In the first round, about half of my classmates fell out, and took a seat at the side of the gym. Bullies 1 and 2 nailed their shots, as expected. All too soon, it was time for me to take my own shot. Better to just get it over with, and wither under my father’s disapproval on the way home. But, once again, I remembered the prayer. And so, I did something really odd. If God was going to give me this victory to prove His love for me, I wanted it to be indisputable. So I closed my eyes.

I did not open them until I heard the “swoosh,” and then, to my deep surprise, cheering from the bleachers. Beyond all hope and expectation, I had made my first shot! With my eyes closed!

There is not much more to relate. The next two or three rounds eliminated almost all of my classmates. Each time, my shot hit home. Soon, it was just the two Bullies and me left to duke it out.

The Free-Throw Contest: Victory

Mainly, I remember two things about the conclusion of the contest. First, I remember that it took several more nerve-wracking rounds. My accuracy was astonishing. Second, I remember how thrilled I was when it was just Bully 1 and me left to compete for the gold trophy. I was honestly delighted at the thought that I would get a silver trophy at the very least. And had that happened, I probably would have still been convinced that it was a miracle.

Come to think of it, I do remember a few other things. I remember how excited the crowd was getting. People began to cheer for me by name. For someone who had resigned himself to being a “loser” for the rest of his days, this was remarkable … and weird. I didn’t exactly like it. Bully 2 also began crying when he missed his shot. I have to confess, I did like that quite a bit.

The miracle trophy that I won, by God's grace, in the 1988 Thayer Booster Club Free-Throw Contest.
Here it is: the free-throw trophy. Strange and tangible evidence of God’s grace in my life.

In a few more rounds, it was over. I was victorious. The crowd rushed the court. I got a shiny trophy. And then, I was given an opportunity to share the story of God’s love for me.

The Free-Throw Contest Miracle: Concrete Evidence of God’s Love for Me

There are many, many things about God and His dealings with us that I will never understand. I don’t know why He let’s bad things happen to good people. I’m not at all sure why I’ve received so many precious graces that I know have been denied others. And even in my own day to day life, I have plenty of experiences that cause me to pause and doubt God’s goodness, and even His existence. But there is no denying that in 1988, a strange, overweight kid put God to the test, and instead of smiting the son-of-a-gun right then and there for his overweening gall, God gave this little kid what he really needed, a miracle. He helped me win a free-throw contest.

On bad, bad days, I look at this free-throw contest trophy, and I remember God’s faithfulness to me as a child. And I know I can trust Him to remain faithful to the end of my adult-hood, as well.

Epilogue

The next year, I made myself sick with anxiety before that year’s free-throw contest. My farm-kid friend who got hit in the back with the basketball won that year. Bully 1 had to settle for a silver trophy again. Bully 2 still doesn’t have one.

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He Was There With Me In the Furnace: Remembering a Crisis of Faith

I had the great benefit of growing up in a deeply religious family. This meant that we were in church every Sunday, said grace before meal times, and regularly had spiritual conversations. My parents gave me a Bible for my seventh birthday. I read it through from cover to cover by the time that I was ten. It was only natural that I should decide to attend Bible college and prepare for ministry as a preacher and missionary. So, when I experienced a crisis of faith years later, it was a truly excruciating experience.

In my church and Bible college there were certain assumptions about the parameters of biblical research. There was a simple logic behind it all that went something like this. We can recognize that there is a God because of the world around us. We can perceive that this God is wise, all-powerful and that He is good from the same testaments of creation. If God is wise and good, then surely He would communicate with us.

The Bible is the record of that communication. If the Bible is the message from the all-good, all-wise, and all-powerful God, then surely He has preserved it from errors of every kind. Consequently, anyone who is trying to provide an alternative to the history and scientific information in the Bible is actually attempting to undermine the Bible’s credibility. We portrayed the people doing this as having a well-thought out agenda. We also labeled them “liberals.”

My Fundamentalist Upbringing

I learned that the world is only about 6000 years old, in accord with a strictly literal acceptance of the biblical chronology. The scientific establishment manufactured their so-called evidence for evolution as part of a vast conspiracy. Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Isaiah wrote Isaiah. David wrote the Psalms ascribed to him. Anyone who suggested otherwise was a liberal, chipping away at the foundation of faith in the Bible as God’s Word.

This is what I learned, taught and preached up until I was nearly thirty years old. This was an extremely chaotic period in my life. We were living overseas. Exposure to Judaism, the ancient churches of the Holy Land, and the Church Fathers had caused my wife and me to begin the difficult journey into the Catholic Church. And then, late one night, I decided to investigate a developing suspicion that kept niggling at me. So began my crisis of faith.

How I Met Nyū Nesshii

When I was very young, I attended a Creation Science seminar. It was quite sensational. In one of the slideshows, there were pictures of human footprints alongside of dinosaur footprints from Glen Rose, Texas. The speaker regaled us with amazing eyewitness testimonies of cowboys encountering pteranodons in the Old West. And then he showed us this:

The Zuiyo-Maru Carcass-A basking shark that looks a bit like a plesiosaur in its decayed state. Believe it or not, this picture contributed to a crisis of faith.
Many creationists claim that this is a picture of a plesiosaur, but it has been proven to be a basking shark.

Nyū Nesshii: A Plesiosaur?

That is a picture of a cryptid that the Japanese call Nyū Nesshii, i.e., “New Nessie.” The Japanese fishing trawler, the Zuiyō-Maru, hoisted it up off the coast of New Zealand in 1977. Unfortunately, after the crew took a small sample of its corpse, they tossed Nyū Nesshi back into the ocean because it smelled so terrible. But this photo created a minor sensation, because based on appearances alone, it really does look like a plesiosaur.

This really is a plesiosaur.
Reconstructed skeleton of a plesiosaur. Photo by Kim Alaniz / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paleo_Hall_at_HMNS_plesiosaur.jpg.

The speaker acknowledged that the scientific community had determined that the Zuiyō-Maru carcass was a basking shark, not a plesiosaur. He did not tell us how they had determined this. (More on that in a bit). But who were we going to trust, after all? These scientists were obviously in cahoots with the other scientists driving the evolution narrative. We could not trust these ideologues. I mean, look at that picture of the rotting corpse. Does that look like a basking shark to you?

Basking Shark
Just your run-of-the-mill basking shark. Photo by Greg Skomal / NOAA Fisheries Service / Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cetorhinus_maximus_by_greg_skomal.JPG.

I loved this sort of thing when I was a kid. The idea that dinosaurs could still be living in the ocean depths filled me with wonder. I thrilled to the pictures of baby brontosauruses on Noah’s Ark. And of course, it was comforting to be able to read the Bible and accept everything I read uncritically and at face value, especially as I grew older and life became more and more confusing.

I Research Nyū Nesshii As an Adult

For some reason or other, when I was about thirty years old, I dredged up all of this stuff about the Zuiyō-Maru carcass again. (Did you see what I did there?). I don’t remember if it was something I came across on the Internet late at night, or if it came up in conversation with a fellow that I drank coffee with back in those days. But someone somewhere challenged my easy-going belief that the the Zuiyō-Maru had pulled up a plesiosaur from the ocean in 1977. I was heading for a crisis of faith.

It was time to do some research. I googled “plesiosaur, Japanese fishing boat” and began to sift through the information. I wanted to reassure myself that the evidence for this being a basking shark was questionable, at best. What I found was something quite different.

Nyū Nesshii: Not a Plesiosaur

It turns out that the research done on the Zuiyō-Maru carcass extended well beyond “hunches” that it was a basking shark. Scientists extensively examined the tissue sample that the fishing boat took from the carcass.

There have been several publications that have dealt with this. The most complete and accessible one that I know of is an article by Glen Kuban, “Sea-monster or Shark? An Analysis of a Supposed Plesiosaur Carcass Netted in 1977,” published in Reports of the National Center for Science Education , May/June 1997, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 16-28.

There is a whole lot in that article, but two things really convinced me that this was a basking shark, and not a plesiosaur. First of all, the cell structure of the flesh was in the form of “horny fibers” that were “rigid, needle-like structures that tapered toward both ends and had a translucent light-brown color.”

This structure is exactly what researchers find in the cartilage of basking sharks. Secondly, scientists conducted a gross amino acid analysis of the samples from the carcass, and discovered that they were full of elastoidin, “a collagenous protein known only from sharks and rays (not reptiles or even other fish).”

What Young Earth Creationists Have Done with this Research

These studies were conducted in the late seventies, immediately after the discovery of the Zuiyō-Maru carcass. They seem to have conclusively proven that what those fishermen hauled up was a basking shark, not a plesiosaur. And yet, the speaker at that seminar, and numerous other sources that I encountered later, assured me that the claim that the carcass was a basking shark was really only a clumsy guess, motivated by the incredulity of scientists that this was indeed a plesiosaur.

To this day, creationists continue to gloss over the compelling evidence that the Zuiyō-Maru carcass is actually a basking shark. This site is just one example. This is unconscionable and deceitful. The Ten Commandments command us, “You shall not bear false witness” (Exodus 20:17). That some Christians continue to bear false witness in regards to the Zuiyō-Maru carcass is a cause of scandal.

Bearing False Witness

That some Christians continued to bear false witness in regards to the Zuiyō-Maru carcass was a cause of scandal to me, personally. It instigated a crisis of faith. When I discovered that there was more to the story of the plesiosaur, information that seemed to have been intentionally withheld in those seminars, books, courses, Sunday School classes, etc., I felt betrayed. I was extremely angry.

But a terrible thought generated in the back of my brain, and grew in intensity until it screamed in my mind day and night: if people that I knew, loved and trusted had lied to me about a stupid, fake plesiosaur, what hadn’t they lied to me about? If this wasn’t true, what was? Was anything that I had believed true? Now my crisis of faith was edging into doubt.

Cast Into the Furnace: My Crisis of Faith

As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, a whole lot was going on at this time in my life to contribute to this crisis of faith. We were living overseas. We were considering becoming Catholic. I was working on a graduate degree in Hebrew Bible. Studying Church history and the writings of the Church Fathers brought up all kinds of other questions about things that I had heard about the Catholic Church, things that I was finding out were just not true. And studying the Hebrew Bible was convincing me that the old, traditional claims for authorship of many books of the Bible were extremely problematic.

All of this underlined my deepening suspicions that for much of my religious education, my teachers had given me a carefully constructed version of reality. As this version of reality began to crumble, I began to feel paranoid and alone.

Trying to remember this experience is difficult now. My crisis of faith comes to me in images. I see myself falling through space, as though the bottom has been pulled out of everything. I picture myself in a dark cave, unaware of a way out.

For a few days, the terrifying possibility that I was going to become an atheist loomed large before me.

The Burning Furnace of Doubt

This was absolutely excruciating. Since faith was such an intrinsic part of my personal identity, I didn’t know how I would carry on. What would my life look like without it? I was tempted to retreat into an easy and assured Fundamentalism, and abandon my no-holds-barred search for truth. But the incongruence of ignoring certain truths for the sake of religious Truth stared me in the face, and so I carried on through my crisis of faith.

I took stock of what I did and did not know for sure. Had any of my religious teachers been completely honest with me? I was in the middle of considering a transition to a new set of teachers in the Catholic Church. There was no assurance that they were any more worthy of my trust.

And now the possibility emerged that even the Bible, up till that moment the foundation of my faith, might not provide an exit from my doubt. The human authorship of the Bible was becoming more and more apparent, and the old proofs for its divine authorship that I had learned in church and college now appeared tattered and thin.

The Burning Furnace of Doubt Begins to Swallow Up Everything

For all that, I wasn’t ready to trust other human authorities, like the scientific establishment, either. If people in the church could lie, people in lab coats could, too. And I had audited a course in the philosophy of science. I knew that scientists had their own blind spots. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions played an important role in that regard.

And I certainly wasn’t prepared to go relativist. I trusted my own instincts and perception least of all. As much as the Zuiyō-Maru carcass had eroded my confidence in my creationist instructors, it had made me aware of my own incapabilities to discern what was true.

I was adrift in a sea of doubt, sinking into despair.

The Familiar Presence in the Furnace of Doubt

And that’s when I was enveloped in a familiar grace. In the midst of this ocean of skepticism, as I was desperately attempting to tread water, there was one reality that imposed itself so strongly on my mind and emotions that I simply could not cast it aside with everything else. Any rational arguments for belief in God seemed hollow now in contrast with my indisputable experience of His presence and work in my life. And that presence and work was especially palpable in the person of Jesus.

Existentially, I simply could not apply the same radical skepticism to Him that everything else was just crumbling under. With Him it would not work. Past experience of miraculous intervention was compelling enough on its own terms. (Perhaps I will share a few of those stories here). But at this moment in my life, what I found most indisputable was the undeniable sense of His presence.

So, together, we started to make our way back to solid ground. Beginning not with any teachers, or a particular church, or even the Bible, but with Jesus Himself, I was able to recover my faith. My faith was different. It had been stripped down, and built back up. Lots of things that I would have regarded as essential to my faith before the crisis were gone. But there was also continuity.

Jesus is the Foundation of My Faith

One of the things that I had learned in my Young Earth Creationist days was that modern scientific theories were an attack on the very foundation of our faith. This image, from Ken Ham’s “Answers in Genesis,” is illustrative.

"Castles in Conflict" from Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis. Young Earth Creationism is presented as the foundation of Christianity.
“Castles in Conflict” from Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis. Young Earth Creationism is presented as the foundation of Christianity.

This particular image is from a 2004 publication. But I remember an almost identical one from materials that I saw in the 80s and in my Creation Science course in the 90s.

In the gradually accumulating peace that followed my crisis of faith, I thought about this image many times. I realized that folks like Ken Ham would now perceive me as one of the foolish Christians firing away at the foundation of the Christian faith. And then I realized what a terrible lie this piece of propaganda is. No single theory of human origins or cosmology could ever be the foundation of our faith, no matter how biblical it was. Jesus is the foundation of our faith. In fact, St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:11, “For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

The Freedom of Making Jesus My Foundation

Making a determined effort to live with Jesus as the foundation of my faith, and, really, every other aspect of my life, has proven to be remarkably freeing. I don’t have to force science to fit a preconceived notion of what I think the Bible is saying about it. I can be more flexible with different possibilities proposed by biblical scholarship. Since my faith is not founded on the Bible, but on Jesus, I don’t have to be threatened by ideas that challenge what I have thought the Bible was saying. I’m not attempting to force the Bible to bear a burden that it was never intended to carry. The result has been that I now believe more than ever that the Bible is a faithful testament to Jesus.

I realize that my own interpretations of the Scriptures are prone to error. As a Catholic, I am thankful for the guidance the Holy Spirit provides through His Church, but even so, there is room for doubt. The only thing that I know for absolute certain is that Jesus has personally intervened time and time again in my life to envelope me in His grace. To date, the most dramatic evidence that I have for Jesus’ faithfulness is His presence during those horrifying few days when I wondered whether or not I actually believed anything.