On being “born again”

Just had one of those mental “thunk!” moments. So often in evangelical circles the phrase “Born again” carries with it an arrogant swagger. As if the proponent had been born again, complete and fully formed, replete with all the answers to everything.

Perhaps we’d do well to remember that when one is born again, one starts out as a child, with a lot of learning and development on the road ahead; a lot of baggage to dump; a lot of assumptions and certainties to be challenged and discarded.

If any one thing stuck from school and university, it’s that at almost every new stage you start by learning that a lot of what you learnt previously isn’t quite true. It was just all the truth you needed, or were equipped to handle at that point. It served to teach enough to then allow it to be refined, replaced with a deeper more complex understanding. But at the time, what you knew, you knew.

Here’s to the journey, and an open mind …