Acts 17:22-23Living Bible (TLB) 22 So Paul, standing before them at the Mars Hill forum, addressed them as follows: “Men of Athens, I notice that you are very religious, 23 for as I was out walking I saw your many altars, and one of them had this inscription on it—‘To the Unknown God.’ You have been worshiping him without knowing who he is, and now I wish to tell you about him. AND ERIC METAXAS IS RIGHT. IT IS EVERYTHING TO BE GREEK. AND PAUL IN HIS DAY WILL STAND BEFORE MANY GREEKS AND PROCLAIM A BIG YES TO YOU CAN KNOW GOD PERSONALLY AND INTIMATELY! YES! YES! YES! The Golden Fish How God woke me up in a dream. Eric Metaxas/ MAY 30, 2013 Greeks in America prize their Greekness, and perhaps because I am only half-Greek, it was especially important for my dad to instill this in me. Once, when he saw the chrome fish on the back of a car, he was excited to explain that this was from the Greek word ixthys, meaning fish, because the early Christians used this word as an acronym—Iesus Xristos THeos Ymon Sotir. It stood for Jesus Christ Son of God Our Savior. It was their secret symbol. Sometime after graduation I came up with a kind of answer, involving the symbolic image of drilling through ice on the surface of a lake. It was a vaguely Jungian/Freudian idea that said the goal of life and all religions was to drill through this ice, which represented the conscious mind, in order to touch the water beneath, which represented Jungs collective unconscious—a vague God force that somehow connected all of humanity. It was an Eastern and impersonal idea of God, making no particular moral claims on anyone. How one went about doing any of this was anybodys guess. One night near my 25th birthday, I dreamt I was ice-fishing on Candlewood Lake in Danbury. I believe my childhood friend John Tomanio and his father were with me. I looked into the large hole we had cut into the ice and saw the snout of a fish poking out. (Of course ice-fishing is never this easy.) I reached down and picked it up by the gills and held it up. It was a large pickerel or perhaps even a pike. And in the dazzlingly bright sunlight shining through the blue sky and off the white snow and ice onto the bronze-colored fish, it appeared positively golden. But then I realized that it didnt merely look golden, it actually was golden. It was a living golden fish, as though I were in a fairy tale. And suddenly I understood that this golden fish was ixthys—Jesus Christ Son of God Our Savior—and that God was one-upping me in the language of my own symbol system. I had wanted to touch inert water, to touch the so-called collective unconscious, but he had something more for me: this was his Son, a living Person, Jesus Christ. And I realized in the dream that he was real and had come from the other side and now I was holding him there in the bright sunlight and at long last my search was over. And I was flooded with joy.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 20:02:26 +0000
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