For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
(1 Corinthians 1:21) KJV
September 11, 2001 will live in infamy. Islamic extremists attacked the USA and destroyed the World Trade Center buildings, among other things. That was a Thursday. The following Sunday we decided to give church one last try and we walked into an Independent Fundamental Baptist church in Carrboro, North Carolina.
You cannot imaging our joy at hearing the Bible preached and people actually talking seriously about hellfire and damnation…. This was the beginning of our education, as they taught us hermeneutics, eschatology and we read the Bible 5 more times in 5 years.
We were on fire for the Lord at this time, church 3 times a week, sang in the choir, never missed a work day or an opportunity to go out doing door-to-door evangelism.
Here we learned how to study the Bible for real. Soon after they offered to let us live in their parsonage in exchange for grounds-keeping, so we accepted readily believing that this was full-time service. We were single, with two kids, two ex-wives and this was a source of discomfort to the fundamentalists. To make matters worse, we wrote a lot of work on the physics of creation and this became a source of contention between us and the Pastor.
During this time we began our work on gravity, the Geocentrospheric system and we worked out how to resolve planetary motion. We made some progress on working with the Hebrew language.
My Atlas of the Universe Miracle
How did we get our copy of the National Geographic Picture Atlas of the Universe? It was a miracle.
Things went badly wrong when we challenged the pastor on something he preached on. He said “Scientists have surmised…” while preaching to which we took an exception. The problem was that we thought that we knew so much about the Bible, especially about the creation, that we decided to explain it to the pastor. This did not go down very well, and the exchange degenerated so badly that we were subjected to church discipline, according to the process outlined in Matthew Ch. 18. We were voted out of the church.
We out-fundamentaled the fundamentalists. This was round about spring 2007. We visited Hillside Church for the first time, but we soon fell into a lazy lifestyle of not going to church anywhere.
Matty (Headwind) 