My Long, Strange Journey: with Jesus, the Bible, the Christian Church, and Spirituality

By Tom Oldoski

What is truth, especially when it pertains to spirituality? Aren't we all just living on faith while trying to navigate our soul journeys?

This book is one man's wrestling with the questions plaguing us all: "Who are we?" "Why are we here?" "Where is God in all of this?" And perhaps, most essentially, "What is God and how should we relate to Him?"

This is a book designed to spur thought and reflection. It, hopefully, will spark loving conversations between friends, in-laws, and outlaws.

No one has a monopoly on the truth; we're all just seekers with whom God is relating individually.

If you like thought that colors a bit outside the lines, then you might want to try this book on for size and travel a bit outside the box.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9798892438056

Book preview

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My Long, Strange Journey

with Jesus, the Bible, the Christian Church, and Spirituality

Tom Oldoski

ISBN 979-8-89243-804-9 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89243-805-6 (digital)

Copyright © 2024 by Tom Oldoski

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

The Church

Chapter 2

Liberation, Enlightenment, Rejection, Reengagement

Chapter 3

Seeking

Chapter 4

Love Hurts!

Chapter 5

Who Ya Gonna Judge?

Chapter 6

What's Important?

Chapter 7

Suicide

Chapter 8

Just Follow the Bible

Chapter 9

War

Chapter 10

Reincarnation

Chapter 11

God's Will

Chapter 12

Other Ramblings from My Scattered Mind

Chapter 13

Theories

Chapter 14

The Afterlife

Chapter 15

In the News

Chapter 16

Socialism vs. Capitalism

Chapter 17

People Who Aren't Christian but Share Those Values

Chapter 18

People and the Population

Chapter 19

The Love Children

Chapter 20

Let's Talk Hair

Chapter 21

God, Your Children Are out of Control!

Chapter 22

Tom Shadyac—An Awakening

Chapter 23

It's Nice to Be Nice to the Nice

Chapter 24

The Competitive Spirit

Chapter 25

Quotes

Chapter 26

Letting Go

Chapter 27

Where Evil Lurks

Chapter 28

Apocalypse

Chapter 29

Did Someone Mention Aliens?

Chapter 30

A Film on the Horizon

Chapter 31

Wisdom Offerings from the Clackamas United Church of Christ Reader Board

Chapter 32

Testing God

Chapter 33

Fancy Stuff for God

Chapter 34

Quote Break

Chapter 35

Freedom

Chapter 36

What's the Outlook?

Chapter 37

Why Can't Life Be Fun?

Chapter 38

Old Rules

Chapter 39

My Heaven or Your Heaven?

Chapter 40

More on the Afterlife

Chapter 41

More about Loving

Chapter 42

Blessings and Gratitude

Chapter 43

Bumper Stickers and Refrigerator Magnets

Chapter 44

Addictions

Chapter 45

The Late Great Muhammad Ali

Chapter 46

Miscellaneous

Chapter 47

Psychics, Ghosts, and Channelers—Not Necessarily in That Order

Chapter 48

Astrology

Chapter 49

Time for Another Quote Break

Chapter 50

United We Stand, Divided We Fall

Chapter 51

I Think, Therefore I Am

Chapter 52

Humility

Chapter 53

The Holidays

Chapter 54

More Wisdom from the Box

In Summation

About the Author

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to all those who influenced the writing of this manuscript:

To Joyce Oldoski, my much better half, who has put up with my foibles and idiosyncrasies for fifty-five years!

To my children, Lisa and Michael, who have always made me feel loved, even when I may have been remiss in doing the same for them.

To my sister, Carole, for practically raising me during my formative years and for always being there to support me.

To my extended family and friends who support me much more than they'll ever know (because I don't know how to express my feelings adequately).

To Kimberly Clark Sharp, founder of Seattle IANDS, for all the work she does and for introducing me to Dave, Corinne, Marcie, Baraba, Bill, and all the wonderful people at Tacoma IANDS, who profoundly altered my spiritual path.

To Justin Moser for the cover art and for being the finest son-in-law a guy could ever wish for.

Chapter 1

The Church

As I've surfed my way through various forms of Christianity during my time on planet Earth, one thing has become increasingly clear: nobody knows anything for certain. But the faithful all think they do. Every church thinks it has the definitive formula for spiritual success. What form does that success take? Ask the roughly three thousand Christian denominations in 238 countries. Also, I don't know if those numbers account for the various sects and synods within a given denomination. For example, among Lutherans, there are synods—subgroups that have widely varying beliefs on what the Almighty wants out of His followers. At one convention, it got so contentious that they wouldn't even pray together. I'm fairly certain Jesus wept that day. Still they were each and every one divisionally convinced they had a monopoly on the truth.

Instead of saying, My how they love one another, as they said of the early church, now today of the church they say, My how they fight with one another. (Theologian J. D. Farag)

Add to this the fact that, even though the New Testament portion of the Bible appears to be the go-to manual for Christians, they seem to dip back into the Old Testament whenever it supports a particular behavior they wish to display at any given moment.

This brought me to the realization that if you are seeking the Bible as a debate tool, there is certainly enough ammunition to support any stance you wish to take, especially if you're willing to jump from testament to testament and also willing to take Scripture out of context for your own selfish purposes.

Why should I care so much about any of this, you ask? Good question! I think I was programmed to care from a very early age. My mother insisted that I have perfect attendance at our church Sunday school. It was not just a year of perfect attendance or even two years. No, I was the proud recipient of six years of perfect attendance pins from our local Presbyterian church.

My mother must have read Proverbs 22:6 (KJV): Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

I was probably the most churched youngster in our small farm town of roughly four thousand people. Actually, I can't back that up. There was one Pentecostal group that gathered at least three times a week, and if they had their kids in tow, then I'm certain there were young people much more indoctrinated than I.

My first informative experience with how God supposedly operated came during a first grade Sunday school class, when one of my six-year-old colleagues was peering out of the upstairs classroom window. Across the street, on the opposite corner, there was a beautiful Catholic church. My astute young classmate noticed something he thought was important enough to pursue. He inquired of the teacher, Why do those people going into the church over there have so many kids?

The teacher, no doubt looking for a quick and easy answer, replied, God gives you children according to how good you are. The teacher then followed up with, The better you are, the more children you get. I think my classmate might have been an only child. He must have thought his parents were quite sinful creatures. I wondered if he ever broached the subject with his parents and what the family dynamic might have been like after this little exchange of information. No one thought to ask the teacher how many kids she had. And thus began my journey of misinformation with the Christian church.

My mom loved church, but maybe she was brainwashed…programmed…ingrained…blessed? Pick the most appropriate option for your particular sensibilities. Her mom—my maternal grandmother—was the founding mother of a nondenominational Christian church. That kind of passionate dedication tends to get passed around the family and then down from generation to generation. My aunt—my mom's sister—was also a devoted follower of conservative Christianity. In other words, I didn't stand a chance—I was going to get thoroughly Christianized, whether I wanted to be or not.

Chapter 2

Liberation, Enlightenment, Rejection, Reengagement

When I reached junior high school, age twelve, my mother did something that almost gave my tender, young heart a cardiac arrest. She said, You don't have to go to Sunday school anymore. I made her repeat it, as I was certain it was just wishful thinking floating through my brain. The fact was, I had heard correctly, but it got even better! Not only could I quit the weekend religion routine and the youth choir, but she also informed me I was being paroled (not exactly how she put it, but that was how I embraced it) from the yearly Vacation Bible School. Our church held theirs the first week of every summer vacation. While all the other kids were excited about school getting out, I knew I had another sentence to serve before I could enjoy the summer. After my mother's proclamation, I prayed—maybe the first fervent prayer I ever prayed. In my mind, I cried out, "Thank You, God!" And I meant it.

I happily made it to the ninth grade without being under the undue influence of any religion. Then it happened. Like many life-altering events, it happened when I least expected it—or, truth be told, never would have expected it happening to me at all…ever!

Backstory

My parents owned a bakery, and one of the nice ladies who worked for them was an Evangelical, Charismatic Christian. I didn't even know what that was back then, but I knew it included church, and I was still enjoying my freedom on the outside, so I wasn't really interested in what she was selling. I did, however, want to escape a volatile, unpleasant home life any time the opportunity arose. So when an offer to go to a camp far away from home for an entire week presented itself, I was all in, even though the word camp was preceded by the word church.

The week of the church camp excursion was pretty uneventful, until the final evening, when the headliner, an up-and-coming young evangelist, took to the pulpit and started saving souls. Toward the end of the service, there was some sort of commotion in the rafters of the big barnlike structure they were using as a sort of church sanctuary. Everyone looked up. The minister, hoping to regain some sort of control, said, Let us pray. Later speculation had the rafter noise being everything from a bird to a bat to a disruptive spirit. At the time of the ruckus, I looked up to investigate, and that's when my consciousness left me. The next thing I remember, I was running down the aisle with tears streaming down my face and my hands waving in the air—not the behavior this committed introvert would have consciously entertained in a thousand years.

A woman at the front of the stage said, Are you trying to get up here? I don't remember answering her. What I do remember is that my mouth was working all by itself, with no direction from me. I was speaking in a language I did not know—a language no one else apparently recognized either. This went on for about ten minutes, after which time I stopped uttering and opened my eyes to see people from the church I came to camp with standing around me with rather blank looks on their faces. I didn't say anything. I figured I had said enough already. I never discovered the origin of the language that gushed out of me, and I only recall one little phrase, "Ishla Allah Ma Kunda" (spelled phonetically). Oh, and did I mention I saw a vision of Jesus in a rose-colored robe, sporting a thousand-watt smile, all while I was communicating in this other language?

Thus began a rather up-and-down adventure with my faith. After being "touched by God, as some people referred to it, there were certain expectations. Now I was expected to be good. That proved to be harder than I anticipated, as everyone's definition of good" varied. My mom thought I should be more helpful. The folks in church, it seemed to me, wanted me to be more devout—whatever that entailed. The minister of the church that had sent me to camp thought I should now be following good Christian guidelines, ones I thought were in the Bible but, as I discovered later, were really just the proclivities of that particular minister.

It all started to fall apart when I thought I would host a little party for the church youth group at my house, in my parents' rec room. This family-type room came complete with a pool table. After what I thought was a successful night of fun and fellowship, I was informed by the pastor that I had been a negative influence on the young people of the congregation. Pool tables were evidently the work of the devil and only to be found in dens of iniquity—that is, pool halls. I was chastised. Later, I wondered if the good reverend had seen the musical The Music Man—you know the part in the movie when the professor sings, You got trouble / right here in River City / with a capital T / and that rhymes with P /and that stands for pool!

Reflecting on it, I don't think he would have watched a movie, as the cinema was to be my second unpardonable sin against the Christian youth. You've heard the old adage, Out of the frying pan into the fire. Well, in an effort to make amends for the pool-table debacle, I thought it would be a nice gesture to take the young church folk to the picture show, as the old folks called it. How could I afford to take a group of teenagers to the movies? Well, my parents, the bakery-business-owning parents, advertised their bakery through the Liberty Theater. As a perk, the movie theater gave the advertising businesses free tickets, which they had more than paid for to the theater for advertising. The theater was, however, very generous in the number of free seats they would allow. I admit, there was a selfish, I-want-to-be-cool factor in all of this, but mostly my motives were pure. I don't remember what film we saw, but whatever it was, it was enough to incur the wrath of the clergy. I believe there was something in the rhetoric about movies being the devil's public relations. Even religious movies were suspect, as they were never true to the letter of the Bible.

Ah, yes, the Bible. This brings me to my next spiritual faux pas. One of the things a good Christian is supposed to do, especially one who has been touched by God, as I supposedly was, is to diligently read the Bible, as it was and still is, in their estimation, the inerrant Word of God.

I had some confusion understanding the Bible right from the get-go, and I wanted some clarification, but I didn't know at the time that good Christians don't ask too many questions.

Everything one didn't understand was to be shelved under faith. Now I had experienced Bible verses here and there in the Presbyterian Church, on my way to those perfect attendance pins, but