Ripping the back off TVs to get at the truth

Another family legend - I find this one even more unbelievable!
Do you remember a time when TVs were tubes and had pressed hardboard backs with valves and diodes and and the TV repairman turned up with a soldering iron? I do, our TV was always breaking down.
At the time of the moon landings I was just two years old. Apparently I took the back off the TV and was trying to get into it with the astronauts, or was it that even at such a young age I was a skeptic and never believed the landings took place? It is quite remarkable that I never got electrocuted; I told you I never believed this particular story. Hold on! I'm remembering more: there is a version in which I apparently pulled or pushed the TV over - image of a toddler squashed under a wood vaneered 1960s TV!! How can my family be so cavalier with history? Ah well, there must be some element of truth there.
But it does ring true, it's something I would do - not accepting the reality presented to me, wanting to get inside it and rip it apart and find out what made it tick. No, I didn't become a TV engineer or any other kind of engineer; I wanted to find the truth; I wanted to see all angles before accepting anything as fact or truth.
I did the same thing to God at the age of 15; I kind of ripped him apart . . . philosophically speaking. Thankfully, he's not a Humpty Dumpty character: he didn't need putting back together again.
When people come to God they often want or need something. Oftentimes they don't hang around for the answer; they regularly don't like the answer. They turn away.
Me? I pestered and examined. I watched and I waited. I counted the cost . . . I just wanted truth: pure, absolute and comforting. In God and in the person of Jesus, I found everything I was looking for to my satisfaction.

Smashing Ashtrays

When I was three - so family legend goes - I wandered around the house smashing every single glass ashtray I could lay my hands on. Even at the age of three I was an anti-smoking protester!

I remember nothing of this, by the way.

My parents gave up smoking 14 years later; so the ashtray strategy didn't work.

That same year I was baptised and the scripture given to me was Zechariah 4:6, "Not by might, nor by power but by my Spirit". It has stuck with me ever since, sometimes as a garland of grace but at other times as a chicken bone in my throat. God knew that beyond my teenage years I would take his purposes and try to achieve them through my own methods and my own strength. I see a little boy running ahead of his father only to fall and graze his knees or was that a rebellious toddler willfully smashing ashtrays? As a man, when I graze my knee or smash ashtrays it is a tad more serious.

I write this remind myself of those words spoken to Zerubabel all those years ago that nothing of any eternal worth is attained by the wisdom of men.

I write this to remind myself of the young zealous man I once was to somehow reignite the passion I used to have.

I write this to you the reader to promise that I won't fill this blog with foam and frippery but only what is honest, true and just. It's my contract with you.