Early Christian Comics Shaped My Beliefs

When I was a boy, I didn't read all that much because I had a visual disorder that kept my eyes from working together on the same words. As a result, I'd have to use the vision from one eye to read and subconsciously discard the vision from the other eye. Mentally, it was a stress point in my absorption and retention of information. This resulted in frustration and bad grades, especially under teachers that worked "visually," assigning independent reading, working a lot on the chalkboard, and so on. 

I loved to read what I could concentrate on, however, and comic books (no joke) were very compatible with my visual disorder. The pictures were large enough that I could go frame by frame and retain a lot more. The problem was that my parents didn't go in for comics all that much and it would be a few more years before my visual disorder would be discovered and remedied. The one place I could get comic books of any sort was the Christian bookstores my mother shopped. 

Enter Spire Christian Comics. I started with Barney Bear and then Archie and later still the adventure and biographical comics. They were benign with faith-based themes that were clearly intended for a churched, Christian audience. I still remember many of them, but I didn't realize their effects on my understanding of God until very recently.

At the risk of going on a bit of a bunny trail, I'll fill you in. I was talking with my daughter about how we can still trust God, even if it means that we would die. She had brought up Savannah and her parents, saying that their faith in God didn't protect her from death. I worked to help her understand that the question lacked eternal perspective. Life here on this planet is deceptively real. Because this world is all that we remember, we think that this life is all there is to reality, even though the Bible and even our own experiences lead us to conclude otherwise. The true foundation of reality is found in the eternal. Even Plato's cave alludes to the unseen perfection. Finally, I showed her 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul writes,

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

We were reading that together and I casually mentioned that faith, hope and love were based on time. Faith is based on things in the past. Hope is based on the future. Love is based on the present. She asked me if I came up with that myself and I did a little mental sleuthing to figure out where I caught that bit of insight. The answer: Al Hartley in one of his Archie comics! 

The longer I parent, the more it's driven home that we are shaped so much in the first 15 years or so in life. We carry forward the worldview and beliefs that we learn from childhood. This is why my family and I view homeschool as critical to our children's future.

A fellow Spire Comics collector has made some Adobe scans of his comics, long since out of print. Sadly, there are no Barney Bear scans. Maybe I still have my "Barney Bear Wakes Up!" deep in a moving box. I'll see if I can find it.

Learning Through Suffering

As a follow-up to the last post, the same folks who put on the Christians with Chronic Illness carnival also put together a Yahoo Group called Chronic Illness/Pain Devotional. The host of the group put out an amazing post on the benefits of suffering. In it, she says,

Suffering teaches us:

1. the value of full surrender to God (1 Peter 4:1-2)

2. the value of patience (1 Peter 2:20) 

3. the value of obedience (Philippians 2:8-11)

4. the value of prayer (Philippians 4:6-7)

5. the value of studying the Scriptures (Psalm 119:67,71). 

6. contentment (Philippians 4:11-12)

7. sympathy for others (2 Corinthians 1:3-4)

8. it produces the fruit of righteousness in our lives (John 15:2)

9. probably the greatest benefit to suffering in the life of the

believer is that it produces a deeper intimacy with God

This is perhaps the best "short list" of what we learn through our suffering that I've seen. I connected the scripture references, not necessarily because they are logical supports to the point, but because by connecting the points with the scriptures, I better understand how suffering relates to those scriptures.

Christians With Chronic Illness

Pay a visit to the Christians With Chronic Illness Carnival. It's their first-ever carnival and their theme is "Surprise!"

A Son Comes Home

When I regularly watched nighttime TV--I can't stand most shows now--I remember enjoying a laugh or two and then getting blindsided by a slam on Christianity or God. As a sincere follower of Jesus, those potshots usually hit a little close to home and left me thinking, "The writers just don't get it."

Fast-forward your DVRs to today where one of those writers finds himself among those he used to malign. Joe Eszterhas finally "gets it." He writes,

I am witness to and the beneficiary of God's love for all of us. ... I am witness, too, to the fact that His love is so strong that it was even able to open my rusty old closed heart. I will thank Him forever because He gave me new life and a heart which is truly able to love for the first time in my life. His love is mine.

A "cocaine cowboy" comes home and finds that God not only left the light on for him, but He ran across the north 40 to grab him up in His arms. Do we sit back like the other son, saying, "Great. Woo-hoo. Just wonderful," or do we join with God, rejoicing over Joe's life won back from death and hell?

God's love reaches beyond those rusted doors, behind the graffiti-scrawled walls, down into the lowest places we dare conceive our hearts can sink to. It reaches out, breaking through those defenses and reaching the heart of the most desperate with hope, the most abandoned with security, and the most broken with healing. His love does that. It takes the used up, the abused, the disfigured, the maligned and the humble and lifts them up, bringing glory to Himself. "The LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes."

Stem Cells: The Source Matters

Like Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinsons, I also have been hoping that stem cell research will yield new hope in finding cures for chronic diseases, including my own. Unlike him, however, I have steadfastly opposed using embryonic stem cells, the cells obtained from destroying living human embryos. President Obama recinded Bush's ban on Federal funding of the research, proving to me that he could care less about destroying human life in the name of research.

Fox is on a book tour, but on his stop at Oprah, Dr. Oz offered some great news that would surprise this "optimist" of embryonic stem cell research.



Thanks to Dr. Oz for clearing the air on this. Hopefully, more people will open their eyes to the benefits of adult stem cell research.

Prayer Needed

Folks, I need to request prayer. Tuesday night, I came down with a stomach virus that has tripped every Fibromyalgia 'hard point" in my body. Normally, I deal with one or two or three. This is all of them at once (12!), and I can safely say that I have never felt worse. It has not let up, except for the nausea, which mercifully ended today about noon.

Please pray for me to recover. Thank you.