What do faithful people do when experience exposes something their inherited map cannot adequately explain?
When I was a boy, Sunday night church was simply part of the rhythm of life. Sunday morning meant Sunday school and worship. Then we came back on Sunday evening. Every so often, instead of the usual service, we would have a “singing.” The congregation got to choose the hymns. People would call out a favorite, someone would find the page number, and then we would sing.
My brother and I occasionally entertained ourselves by picking hymns we hardly ever sang. We thought it was funny to send everybody searching through the hymnal for some obscure song we had discovered. It was not the most reverent contribution to congregational worship, but we enjoyed it.
I also remember singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” more than a few times. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…” It is a stirring hymn. Even now I can hear the congregation swelling into the chorus: “Glory, glory, hallelujah!”
But I remember something else.
Even as a boy, the military images felt a little awkward to me in a Christian hymn. I could not have explained why. I had no theology of war and peace. I knew nothing about just-war theory or Christian pacifism. I certainly knew nothing about the woman who wrote the words.
I simply remember wondering: How did marching armies and swords and battlefields fit with Jesus?
I carried some version of that question with me. Years later, as a religion major at Belmont and then as a seminary student, the question became more complicated. I encountered Scripture differently. I learned more about Christian history. I began wrestling more seriously with peace and war and with the uncomfortable ease with which Christians sometimes place God alongside our armies and national causes. The certainty of the hymn no longer came quite so easily.
Only much later did I learn that Julia Ward Howe herself had undergone something of a journey. Howe wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1861. She was an abolitionist, and the cause she championed was righteous. Slavery was an evil that needed to end. Her hymn gave theological voice to that moral conviction. Its language is biblical, muscular, certain. God is on the move. Judgment is coming. History has a direction.
But Howe lived long enough to see more.
She saw what war did—hospitals and grieving families, widows and children whose fathers did not come home. Then, only a few years after the American Civil War ended, she watched Europe descend into another bloody conflict in the Franco-Prussian War.
Something began to change. The woman who had written one of America’s most stirring battle hymns increasingly became an advocate for peace. She eventually issued an appeal to women around the world to oppose war and work for reconciliation.
I find myself drawn to that part of Howe’s story now. Not because she repudiated everything her younger self believed. She didn’t. And not because the older Howe had finally become enlightened while the younger Howe had been foolish. Life is rarely that tidy.
I am interested because she lived long enough—and apparently remained open enough—to allow what she experienced to interrogate what she believed.
Perhaps that is one of the graces of growing older.
When Experience Complicates the Map
There is a story in Acts that I have come to appreciate differently over the years. Peter had a map. He knew the boundaries between clean and unclean. He knew something about who belonged and who did not. These were not merely prejudices he had picked up somewhere along the way. His convictions were grounded in Scripture, reinforced by tradition, and shared by the religious community that had formed him.
Then came Cornelius.
The story is familiar. Peter receives a strange vision. He is told to eat animals his religious formation has taught him are unclean, and he objects. Then he is summoned to the home of Cornelius, a Gentile.
What happens there is more important than Peter’s argument. The Holy Spirit shows up. Peter sees something happening among people his theological map has placed outside the boundaries. And now he has a problem: God appears to be doing something Peter’s map says should not be happening.
Peter could have protected the map. Instead, he asked a question: “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”
Peter did not decide that Scripture no longer mattered, nor did experience replace theology.
Experience forced theology back to the table.
Peter had to reconcile what he had always believed with what he could plainly see God doing. I increasingly wonder whether that is one of the most difficult acts of faithfulness.
The Cost of Being Teachable
We often speak of teachability as though it were a pleasant disposition. Stay curious. Read widely. Listen to other viewpoints. Keep an open mind. All good advice.
But genuine teachability can be costly.
Our deepest convictions do not sit neatly in a filing cabinet marked Ideas. They become connected to people, places, memories, communities, and our understanding of ourselves. A theological conviction may have been taught to us by the pastor who baptized us. A political identity may connect us to family and neighbors. A way of understanding church may be tied to people who sacrificed to build the congregation we inherited.
To reconsider the conviction can sometimes feel uncomfortably close to betraying the people who gave it to us. That is why changing our minds is rarely as simple as receiving new information. Sometimes an old map is difficult to unfold because someone we loved handed it to us.
But gratitude for those who gave us our first maps does not require us to stop traveling.
I can honor the people who formed me without assuming they saw everything clearly. I hope those who come after me will offer me the same grace.
The question, then, is not simply whether I have changed my mind. The question is whether I have remained teachable.
Theology, Politics, and Church
It matters in theology because Christians sometimes treat certainty as evidence of faithfulness. Yet none of us reads Scripture without interpretation. We bring our history, tradition, experience, community, and limitations with us when we open the Bible.
That does not mean convictions do not matter. They matter deeply. It means humility should accompany conviction rather than threaten it. There are things I believe more deeply today than I did forty years ago. There are other things I understand differently. And there are some things about which I have become less certain.
It matters in politics too. Political tribes are not especially hospitable to teachability. Changing one’s mind can be called weakness, betrayal, or flip-flopping. Much of our media environment thrives by reassuring us that our side was right all along and the people on the other side are either foolish or dangerous.
But a healthy democracy depends upon something better from us. It requires citizens capable of encountering evidence, listening to neighbors, reconsidering assumptions, and occasionally saying three difficult words: I was wrong.
And teachability matters in church life. I sit with congregations now that are holding old maps—a worship pattern, a leadership structure, a way of thinking about mission, a building that once served a congregation beautifully, a definition of what a successful church looks like.
“We’ve always done it this way” is easy to mock. I have become more sympathetic to what often lies underneath those words. The old way may carry someone’s memory. That sanctuary was built by people who sacrificed for it. That worship service was where someone encountered God. That program we now call ineffective may once have changed lives.
The old map deserves respect.
But respecting a map is different from pretending the landscape has never changed. Perhaps congregations, like people, must occasionally ask whether faithfulness means holding more tightly to the map or paying closer attention to the road.
The Grace of a Long Life
At seventy, I have enough road behind me to remember earlier versions of myself with some clarity. There were things I was quite certain about at thirty that became more complicated at fifty. There are things I believed at fifty that I see differently now. And there are convictions I held when I was young that the passing years have only deepened.
That last part matters. Changing our minds is not inherently virtuous. The goal is not to become progressively less certain about everything, nor to congratulate ourselves for being more enlightened than we once were.
My younger self was doing the best he could with the map he had been given. Some of that map was good. Much of it still serves me. Some parts I understand differently now. And there are undoubtedly things I believe today that I will understand differently tomorrow.
Aging does not automatically make us wise. We can grow older and become more entrenched, spending our later years defending every conclusion we reached in our earlier ones. Or perhaps we can become more teachable.
Maybe one of the gifts of a long life is accumulating enough evidence to know that certainty and faithfulness are not synonyms. Sometimes teachability requires saying, I was wrong. Sometimes, I still believe this. And increasingly, I don’t know.
All three can be expressions of mature faith.
The Boy in the Pew
I sometimes think about that boy sitting in Sunday night church. He didn’t know enough to have an argument. He knew nothing about Julia Ward Howe or the Civil War beyond what little boys learn in school. He had never heard of just-war theory or Christian pacifism.
He simply sensed a question: How did all those swords and marching armies fit with Jesus?
I have come to believe that questions like that deserve our attention. Not every question will overturn a conviction. Some questions eventually lead us back to what we already believed, only more deeply. Others expose something we have misunderstood. Still others remain with us for years, refusing to be easily answered.
Perhaps that boy’s question was already the beginning of something I would need much of a lifetime to understand.
And perhaps that is part of the grace.
Not that after seventy years I finally possess the right map. I don’t.
The grace may be that I am still willing to take the old map out, remember with gratitude the people who placed it in my hands, look carefully at the road in front of me, and unfold it again.
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