Fear and faith in reading materials.

When I was an atheist, I would talk with anyone because I viewed humanity like a library full of intriguing books that might contain new insights. And because I trusted myself to judge them wisely, I never felt threatened by anyone or their ideas.

Then, when I became a Christian, I learned I shouldn’t trust my own judgment so much. So once I mastered all the right answers of Christianity, I became eager to protect myself from contaminating errors. Because I now viewed people as potential threats to my doctrinal purity, I would always intellectually “frisk” them to see if they were truly friend or foe. And if I found one error, I knew from then on to be cautious about everything they said.

But at some point it dawned on me that I was yet again just trusting my own judgment about which human books to read. Instead of trusting God to guide me toward a richer grasp of His Truth, I was trusting in my own adeptness at disqualifying unsafe people. And whereas before I had surely been allowing in far too much, I was now just as surely allowing in far too little. How many insights and relationships had I missed in turning away so many non-clones of myself?

So I gradually learned (and am still learning) to replace my interpersonal hermeneutics of suspicion with the hope that anyone God loaned me wasn’t a contaminant, but rather a vessel for valuable new insights about Him I might not otherwise ever read.