Saturday's Old Photo

This photo was taken before the one in last week’s old photo. The text on the back, written by my mother, says

Thelma [my mother] and some Navajo girls she taught at Intermountain Indian School, Brigham City, Utah in 195?

I don’t know much more. I do know that during the early fifties, my mother lived in Salt Lake City with her sister and worked as a legal secretary. Brigham City is sixty miles from Salt Lake, so perhaps this is a vacation Bible school class or a weekly Bible class she taught.

According to the Wikipedia article I found, Intermountain Indian School was a boarding school for Navajo children. (You can see a photo of the now abandoned dormitories here.) Why there would be such young tykes as those two in front, I don’t know. If my mother were still here, I’d ask her.

I have a round leather red, orange, and white beaded medallion that my mother was given while she worked with Navajo children. I wore it tied around my pony tail as a child, and recently I tied it to my purse as decoration, until I decided I ought to be more careful with it. Now it’s sitting on a dresser in the dining room waiting for me to decide what to do with it next. One thing I won’t do is put it away where I can’t see it. Things with history are too interesting for that.

I Started a Fight (con't.)

Episode 3: Things Get Twisted

(You may want to read Episode 1 and Episode 2 first.)

Yes, I know. Cliffhangers aren’t fun, but they are good for us. Waiting produce endurance, and endurance produces character. Buck up, dear reader, this is good for the constitution.

Now where were we? Ah yes. I was sitting in a Bible study and had just responded to the question, “Why would God have put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden?” I replied, if you remember, that God planned from the beginning for humankind to fall, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was put in place as one of the means of the fall.

There was gasping, I think, and the teacher responded to me. His words, I remember perfectly. “That,” he said, “is twisted theology.”

(If you are reading with a feed reader, now’s when you click through to read the rest.)

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I Started a Fight (con't.)

Episode 2: The Answer

(Episode 1 is here.)

When we left this true life adventure, I was minding my own business, sitting with my sister in a Bible study in church in Minnesota. I had just been asked this question: Why would God have put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden?

I thought about passing this hot potato on like another student had already done. I knew that not everyone would agree with my answer. But I do think about these things. And I can’t resist a good discussion, so I replied.

(If you are reading with a feed reader, now’s when you click through to read the rest.)

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