{"id":5879,"date":"2017-03-29T06:52:53","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T10:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=5879"},"modified":"2017-03-29T06:52:53","modified_gmt":"2017-03-29T10:52:53","slug":"first-things-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=5879","title":{"rendered":"First things first"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bruce Gerencser has posted a <a href=\"https:\/\/brucegerencser.net\/2017\/03\/missing-out-on-life-when-jesus-owns-you\/\" target=\"_blank\">long piece<\/a> describing himself during the years when he was an active minister.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>This would be the first and last vacation I would take until the late 1990s. While I \u201cheard\u201d what Bruce [another pastor] was trying to tell me, his voice was drowned out by what I perceived to be the Holy Spirit telling me to <SPAN style=\"BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a8f2f5\">give my all to Jesus<\/span>; telling me that if I was a true disciple of Christ I must be willing to <SPAN style=\"BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a8f2f5\">forsake all attachments to this world<\/span>; telling me that <SPAN style=\"BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a8f2f5\">my wife and children were not as important as following Jesus<\/span> and preaching the gospel; telling me that Jesus was coming soon that I must be about my father\u2019s business, for the night is coming when no man can work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Even as a child, I thought the Creation and Fall stories were <i>highly<\/i> implausible, but otherwise paid no attention to religion; to each his own, right?<\/p>\n<p>Then I moved to a seminary-dominated town in the Bible Belt, where exactly the outlook that Gerencser describes is a commonplace, and learned my lesson: Religion is a sickness that exploits insecurities and soils whatever, whomever, it touches.  Avoid preachers and the Godly the same way you&#8217;d avoid somebody with the measles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bruce Gerencser has posted a long piece describing himself during the years when he was an active minister. This would be the first and last vacation I would take until the late 1990s. While I \u201cheard\u201d what Bruce [another pastor] &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=5879\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5879"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5881,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879\/revisions\/5881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}