"Reimagining God: Through Tears" – Ty Gibson Session 2

I wanna I want to share with you this evening a little bit about myself but it's it's to a very specific end there's a there's a trajectory to this what you need to know about me is that that my theology and my picture of God is informed by my experience it's informed by my story as a little boy as far back as I can remember I began to develop a kind of survival ritual that I would go through I needed to survive and so I would come home from school like all boys do with my lunch bag in one hand and whatever my school supplies were in the other hand and I would walk up to the house that we lived in and I would immediately begin to feel sick to my stomach I'd look at the door I'd walk up those three concrete steps I'd throw my things there on the porch and turn around and refuse to walk in that door in fact I don't think I can remember ever voluntarily going into that house I would go straight into the front yard where there was a big tree at least I thought it was big I went and visited that neighborhood as an adult and the tree wasn't as big as I thought it was but it was higher than the house and the first branch was so high that I had to as a little boy I strategically nailed three boards to the trunk so I could maneuver my little boy body up grab the first branch and start climbing and I found a place at the top of this tree that was very comfortable it was like a little cradle of two branches that I could just straddle and kind of lean back and just be there rather than in that house and I would sit there in the tree sometimes for hours and I would just think actually I don't think thinking is the right word at that point in my experience I take that back I was feeling I would sit there and feel anger hatred as intense as you can imagine because the things going on in that house were more than I could process there was of course my mother and she was incredible I just adored her she was beautiful she was the only person in the world who could make me laugh but then there was the guy called daddy and daddy was the man who came home from work every evening and he would begin to throw back the shots of vodka or Kessler's or Jack Daniels or whatever it was my mom would come out into the front yard she began to sense she knew why I was in the tree so she just let me stay there as long as she possibly could she didn't even want to be in that house but she would inevitably come out and she would call up into the tree tie you need to come down it's time for dinner or you got to do your homework or you need to clean your room it's just time to come down and I would slowly reluctantly I would come down I would grab my things off the porch I would go in the house and feel the tension of what was going to happen because inevitably it would I had two younger brothers a younger sister my mother had developed her own survival ritual she was a perfectionist everything was in place everything was impeccable the table was set for dinner every night beautifully set everything in its place this is what she was focusing on in order to process and we would be called to the table and two of us would sit on one side of the table - on the other side and daddy would sit at one to the table and mom would sit at the other at the table and one of the crazy things about that time in my life that stands out that I can remember as the oldest of the four children is I would literally communicate with my two younger brothers and especially my sister I had a very strong sense of of protection for her as her older brother and I would communicate with them with my eyes I would look across the table and I would say with my eyes don't have any accidents don't make any noise just eat and inevitably somebody would spill something or the cutlery would hit the bowl or the plate and make a noise and or something wasn't exactly the way he wanted it to be and he would just go into a rage sometimes he would just get up and leave the table and we would just hear her screaming later in the night sometimes he just casually get up and take the whole table and turn it over and begin throwing things smashing the dishes against the wall my mom would inevitably tell us children to go to our room and we would listen through the thin walls to the screaming to the yelling mostly screaming on her part so I didn't want to come down from that tree I adored her she was my mom and I couldn't bear to see her go through it again and again and again but on this particular day everything changed because I followed my little ritual and I went to the porch and I threw my things there and I climbed up the tree and this time my mom didn't wait and allow me to stay there as long as possible this time she came straight out tensive into the yard when she knew that I was home and she with a certain urgency in her tone she called up into the tree and she said ty she said come down come in the house I need to talk to you and then she said something that was completely foreign to me you need to come down before Charlie gets home she said well somehow I knew that was my dad because I heard his friends calling charlie but we never called him Charlie and she never called him Charlie when speaking to us about him I became very nervous but I didn't know why I quickly came down I went in the house my mom led me into a back room that we children were never allowed in it was a room where business transactions were conducted it was a room in the house that had a lock on the door and she led me and she sat me down on the sofa and she pulled up a chair in front of me and my mom looked at me and she put her young pretty hands on my knees and she looked into my eyes and she said ty I need to tell you something your teacher said that you're not doing well at school you're not even engaging you're not doing anything you're just sitting there you're staring out the window you're not even picking up your pencil I didn't know what to say I just looked at her I felt bad I didn't want to hurt her but all day long every day all I could think about was her and what she was going through she said I'm gonna tell you something and I think it will make a difference I know how you feel and I need to tell you something and I don't know how you're going to take it but please try to understand then my mom looked at me and she said something that absolutely floored me she said ty Charley is not your then my mother reached for an envelope she opened it she took a photo out she put that photo in my hands i sat there eight years of age confused not knowing what to think saying things in my mind like well he's my dad isn't he and I found myself looking at the face of a man in a photo that I had never seen before and my mom said this is your dad his name is Jonathan tie your name is not tie Ross which was the name I was writing on all my papers until then your name is ty Gibson and your dad is Jonathan Gibson and tied this is what I want to tell you and then she spoke words that were liberation for me she said he never hit your mother and everything changed for me my dad whoever he wants wherever he was never hit my mother I kept repeating it over and over again in my mind Charlie came home that night from work he came in the house there was a new boldness that came over the little boy I walked up to him and I looked up into his big ugly face I'm telling you it's true he was ugly and I said your name is Charlie and you're not my dad he looked over at my mom and he knew that she had told me I won't go into the details except for to tell you that she received a beating one last time a few leaks weeks later and worked up the courage finally to pile us four children in the car while he was passed out in a drunken stupor and we drove off into the night never to return again many years passed by now with this mother raising these four children in the inner city of Los Angeles working 12 15 16 hours a day as a waitress bringing the tips home and trying to provide for us we hardly ever saw her but I'll tell you what I love that woman and as the time went by my little boy feelings began to grow up into thoughts I began to have coherent ideas formulate in my mind I began to feel that what was done was wrong I didn't just love my mother I felt an overwhelming sense of justice with regards to her I knew what was being done to her was wrong we didn't have a Bible in sight the name of Jesus was never spoken in our home I knew nothing about God I'd never heard of the 10 commandments if you asked me if I had ever read the book of Genesis I would tell you I've heard of the rock band Genesis what's the book of Genesis I don't know that's how foreign religion was to our home and yet I knew things there were two things going on inside of me that defined my life at this point two things if you would have come to me and said ty what's going on inside of you define life in all honesty I'd have to say that life for me was two things it was pain and it was love that's what I knew I knew that life was painful and I knew that I loved my mom and that she should have never been treated like that and as far as I knew God was nowhere in sight and yet he was there stimulating inside of me this growing sense of the difference between good and evil right and wrong just pain and love that's all and that pain and that love became for me a passageway for a series of questions that were haunting me through my teenage years as time went by my mom and my girlfriend at that time began to study the Bible they brought it into the home it was within our proximity in fact there's a guy I don't even know if he's here I think he used to be here on campus he was a young pastor his name was Joe Kidder and that dude was in our home studying with my girlfriend when he was a young pastor and he was opening her mind to things she was already spiritually inclined and I was dead set against it I was certain that the way we got here is that planet Earth was probably seeded by aliens or something like that probably I thought the evolutionary theory is true and that's why we're all so brutal those were the kind of thoughts going through my head and then finally my mom came home one day after attending meetings every night for what seemed to me like a really long time and she announced to the family that she was now a seventh-day Adventist Christian and I think she even threw in the words born again she was a born-again 70 having his Christian Google didn't exist yet so we were looking for the dictionary we're like what is she never heard of any of it but it became clear that this was going somewhere when she said and we are all hereby vegetarians and you will never watch TV again I'll give you one guess I'll give you one guess what church she was baptized into don't say it out loud we were confused but I loved her she had my respect she had my adoration she had my heart and now this other girl had my heart and my mom and her were becoming good friends and this joke Kidder dude was in the mix and they're studying the Bible and I'm staying downstairs saying this is just whack this is crazy nobody could possibly believe any of this then my mom put a guy up to coming downstairs during their Bible studies to visit me he was another youth pastor and he knocked on my bedroom door nobody knocks on our house I thought what in the world who's that so I opened the door and here was this guy I am not kidding you he looked like Richie Cunningham from you know that show and I thought whoever you are you're probably connected with what's going on up there and you're weird I didn't want to engage with him but he began to talk with me I listened rudely at the end of his spiel I said could you just not come back anymore I'm not interested I don't believe in God in my mind there were things going on I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of the existence of a Supreme Being who would have the kinds of things I grew up with going on in the world well he came again and I determined for the first time in my life to tell somebody exactly what I thought I didn't even know what I would say I knew it was going to be mean but I was going to tell him in an effort to get him never to come and talked with me again because this was becoming a habit for him so he came again and I said listen I don't want to hear anything more yeah my girlfriend is saying the same thing you're saying and my mom is saying it and I just don't believe it I said listen two plus two equals four not 56 and this God is love idea that you guys are pushing does not match up with reality it just doesn't I told him I said I'm not even God and I don't claim to love everybody like you say he does but if I saw children dying of starvation I'd maxed out my credit card to feed them I'm not God and I don't claim to love everybody like you say God does but if I saw a man beating a woman I'd intervene so don't tell me that God loves people and at the same time has some kind of power but he's not using because in my mind the way I was seeing it is that the idea of God if it meant anything equated to power if your God you can get some stuff done if you want to so the get some stuff done part wasn't happening so I thought if God exists and he most likely doesn't but if God exists he's got to be a monster of some kind to have that kind of power at his disposal and just let it go on so I told him and he said something I didn't expect rather than giving me some kind of prepackaged religious answer closing with God's said it I believe it that settles it for me or something like that he said I struggle with that too and I don't get it and I just respected him a little bit I was like well really you're not gonna give me a Bible verse you're not gonna try to make me yield to your authority source you actually see what I'm saying and you don't get it either and he went a step further he said God's got a lot of explaining to do and now my respect level went up higher because I thought if God exists yes he does have a lot of explaining to do he said I'll never visit you again I won't come around anymore I know that you're not into this your mom just wants me to visit you but he said if you would just do one thing just one thing would you be willing just to read the first chapter of that book and he pointed to a book on the table by our front door as I was seeing him out it was a big thick book with a black cover in pictures and I said to myself I am not reading that he said just the first chapter and there was a there was an inspiration in that because if he would have said would you read that book I never would have but we have a deal I read the first chapter you never come again deal and I was driven to read that first chapter just out of a sense of respect for the guy and I sat down in my mom's house and I opened the book to the first chapter and the first three words god is love I thought oh here we go that's what my girlfriend keeps saying how so my mom keeps saying that is ridiculous but I said I'd read it and so I did and I I kept reading and I can tell you that I did not understand 80% of what I read in that chapter the language was foreign to me the vocabulary was religious I had no idea what most of it meant but something formulated in my mind very very simple idea came clear before me and it was basically this that love necessitates freedom and freedom is risky that's it in that chapter basically I was confronted with an angle with an idea that I had never thought of before in my pondering of the pain and the love and the tension between the two that I was experiencing very simple idea and it was this I said to myself wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute it is possible to be in possession of a great deal of power maybe even to be an all-powerful God and to have a value system that favors love over power it is possible for a god to exist and have a world like this on his hands and be a God who is good and I begin to realize that love by its very nature after all there was my mom and I loved her and there was my girlfriend and I loved her and I knew something intuitively about love I knew that that love and coercion can't occupy the same emotional space I knew that I knew that the only way for me to relate to my girlfriend to my mother was by giving them space to be to me whatever they wanted to be to me and the moment I would begin to manipulate or to force or to control the thing would evaporate love would cease to exist I mean think about it this way how many of you guys here I can't see past about the tenth row there but how many of you guys are single raise your hand if you're not married raise your hand if you're not marry I know you're not married dude raise your hand okay all right so you're not married keep your hand up if you would like to be married I mean not like tomorrow or anything but someday you would like to be married now now what would you think if I said to you listen listen I have the perfect formula for getting the girl all you need all you need is a revolver it's foolproof you propose with a gun in your hand to her head she will say yes but here's the thing the question will remain does she love you and the obvious answer is that she doesn't because you're posturing yourself you're relating in such a way as to cause love to receive the very potential for love is vanishing in that way of relating I could point a gun out at this congregation tonight and with an implement of force in my hand I could tell you to stand up and most of you would stand up I would say sit down and you would sit down I would say I really like french toast get on it and you would start trying to get the ingredients to make french toast with a gun in my hand but if I pointed the same gun at you and I said stand up sit down everything's going fine and in the next breath I said trust me go ahead feel it I want you right now to experience an overwhelming sense of loyalty toward me or I will pull the trigger right now I want you to feel affection for me and be my very best friend now and the best you could do is lie to me you would say yes I love you I trust you I'm loyal don't shoot but you'd be lying because again love and force are mutually exclusive and can't occupy the same space and win this dawned on me I sat there in amazement and suddenly it was plausible that God could actually exist and be good and be all-powerful all of that could coexist for the first time I went to my mom to my girlfriend I said I get it my mom said you get what I said I'm I'm whatever you are I'm born again I'm dumb a Seventh day Adventist Christian she said you are not I said mom I get it and she said you get what and I began to explain to her this very simple idea and she began to weep and she said there's no way you could understand that if you didn't really come in contact with the God that I love she got it now I got it I married the girl we've been married forever and now it's incredible anyways I won't go on the tell the details but here's the thing here's the thing that's the part you don't want to miss what I was sensing what I was experiencing I discovered later on is the question that lots of people down through the ages have been asking and I didn't know it and this meant something to me and you'll see why in just a moment because this question of why there is suffering in the world if God exists and God is love is the only branch of theology that naturally occurs nobody comes out of the womb and grows up and intuitively wonders which days the right day of worship nobody comes out of the womb saying did Jesus have a pre-fall nature or a post-fall nature everybody comes out of the womb and either witnesses or experiences pain and the question inevitably comes to the surface so what's going on why are things like this well Epicurus 300 years before Christ in what's called the epicurean riddle said is God willing to prevent evil but not able then he is not omnipotent is he able but not willing are you following his reasoning here then he is evil is he both able and willing then why does evil exist and if he is neither able nor willing that is to prevent evil then why calling God 300 years before Christ he was looking at the suffering and the evil and the pain around him and he was trying to make sense out of it that's all he was seeing what I was seeing but he came short of seeing that the primary constituent of reality is love not power at least at this point in his reasoning process I don't know where he went with it dudes dead can't ask him here's the thing Epicurus is simply thinking if God exists and he's all powerful evil wouldn't exist but think about this for a minute if love and not power is the primary construct of how life in reality is unfolding then we could begin to wrap our minds around the fact that God is love and because God is love he values something above control there's something God's after there's something he's pursuing there's something that Almighty God wants and if you think about it there's something that God with all his omnipotence wants but even God can't get by means of force God with all his power can't make me love him if I choose not to that is the gravity of free will and once that registers things begin to make sense George MacDonald in my opinion just one of the probably top five human beings that ever put pen to paper intuitive theologian said this is power or love the making might of the universe he who answers this question a right has the key to all righteous questions he's essentially saying that reality is fundamentally governed by the exertion of power over or power under he's saying that either God is operating on the premise of brute might or God is operating on the premise of holding his power in reserve in favor of love as the primary force to get things done and God got things done in my mom's experience after all the pain she went through she underwent this amazing healing right before my eyes and then without exerting any force or manipulation God got into my heart and into my girlfriend's heart and things began to happen in the way we think in the way we feel and all of this voluntary adoration for God began to come up from within and we found ourselves being changed from the inside out and God pulled off all of that without any force without any coercion the Bible puts it this way we love him that is we love God for one reason and one reason only because He first loved us this is one of the most profound sentences the human mind can process this is telling us that God is operating on the premise of pursuing our hearts that God by love and love alone or not at all is going to win the battle with evil that there's one thing that God won't do he won't cross the line to make me be something I don't want to be why because he's weak no because he's powerful with a different kind of power that sovereign God in His sovereignty chooses to hold omnipotence in reserve in favor of love he's allowing me the dignity and the nobility of saying yes to him because I want to Ellen White oh man this is amazing this is probably Ellen White thinking at the highest level of brilliance that I've encountered in her writings and this is amazing in a single line only by love is love awakened that was the bottom line in her theology by the way we'll talk about that on another evening but here she's grasping the fact that love is God's ultimate objective and that there's only one way for Almighty God with all his power to get you and me there he's going to love you he's going to love you he's going to love me he's going to love us to the nth degree of self-sacrifice the door is open wide and he's just over and over again through the gospel through the Providence's of life through every relationship that is beautiful and good and pure every time you encounter beauty of any kind God is whispering through that beauty and telling you and me that there is an ultimate beauty to partake of every time you feel the surge of affection and passion in your heart for another human being and you think I could die for that person the truth is being spoken at the deepest level every time you and I as human beings realize that we were made to love and be loved the most grand and glorious truth of the universe is being told to us that's who you are that's who I am as a little boy I found refuge in that tree because the pain was more than I could bear well I'll tell you this God's love is so powerful and so healing that I actually feel like I just told you somebody else's story

Channel: Pioneer Memorial Church

Views: 31,549

Rating: 4.9002771 out of 5

Keywords: ty gibson, lightbearers, Andrews University (College/University), Pioneer Memorial Church, PMC, God, Atheism, Atheist, theodicy, religion

Id: LCWSAlimr8o

Length: 39min 12sec (2352 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2015