The Road To Hell Is Paved With Prepositions

On Highway 5 in Washington heading south toward Portland, Oregon, there is a billboard that reads, in giant block letters, "believe in the lord and thou shalt be saved," along with some random scripture citation from the book of Acts. As our car whizzed past it in the fading daylight, I sighed and rolled my eyes, as I often do when confronted with unsightly acts of religious zeal, the visual equivalent of a bouncing, yapping chihuahua.

But highways get me thinking, kind of like showers and toilets and other places from whence it is inconvenient to write down one's thoughts. If a waterproof notebook is ever invented, I will be the next DaVinci...Or my brain will do ever increasingly desperate somersaults to avoid being imprisoned on paper. God knows, keeping a microcassette recorder in the car ruined my creative flow there until I finally took it into the house.

So anyway it hit me, rather all at once, that our entire religious culture has completely missed the point of this message. The problem, I think, lies with the word "in" - it takes the whole thing and makes it passive. To believe IN someone, I don't have to do a thing but sit on my ass in my comfy armchair on the sidelines and cheer someone on. But if you remove that one little preposition (which for all we know was inserted by accident by some exhausted medieval monk in an all-night translation binge), then it becomes as simple as trust. Believe his words. To truly believe them is to own one's power, to understand that anything is possible and imminently achievable. Jesus said some truly empowering stuff, like give everybody else as much consideration as you give yourself, and everything I can do you can do better. To believe him, to truly take those thoughts in and follow that path wholeheartedly, would be nothing short of revolutionary.

See, that's the trouble with really great people: we see them as exceptional. We don't get that they could be us, that in a way they ARE us, inasmuch as we create their celebrity with our belief. We have this weird hierarchy in which some of us are deemed better than others based on how much attention we get. No wonder we trample all over each other to reach the top.

But the fact is, if we all just mind our own business and work on ourselves, turn that faith inward, each stinkin' one of us unwashed masses might see that we are messiahs, buddhas, the ones we've been waiting for. I'm not saying anything new here; this is an old, old song. But one worth singing, nonetheless.