steven

let me tell you about steven.

steven is this old indian guy who is often hanging around the place where i hang around when i wait for The Wife to pick me up at the end of the day. he's skinny to the point of scrawniness, has sparse, greying hair, a pronounced slouch, and a slightly not-so-nice sort of smell. not that i go about sniffing him, it's just one of those things that one can't help noticing. he would usually be wearing an old-looking checked shirt, a dark-coloured pair of slacks rather worn at the knees, a pair of black canvas shoes, and a pair of broken glasses fixed with a rubber-band around the left lense.

we'd previously exchanged pleasantries and introduced ourselves. he told me that he's a catholic, and he seemed pretty alone in the world. but yesterday, The Wife was late in picking me up; so, there was time for some deeper conversation.

though previously he had told me that he's a catholic, believes in God and Jesus and all that, now on probing deeper i found that he held some rather contradictory viewpoints.

on one hand, he believes in witchcraft. he insists that it's real and powerful and dangerous. he thinks that he lost his job because he was a victim of witchcraft. i said that as Christians who know and believe in the Almighty God, we have nothing to fear from witchcraft because Christ who is in us is greater than any of these evil forces. and his reply was that only a naive person who knows nothing of the reality of the world would say something like that!

now i'm not saying that witchcraft isn't real and powerful and dangerous. it is. but knowing the God who created the Universe, and knowing His Son who died to set us free from all such darkness, what have we to fear?

so after some argument, he asked me how i knew that God is more powerful than witchcraft. and of course i said, i read it in the bible!

and he proceeded to tell me about what an old, antiquated, irrelevant book the bible is. he claimed that science has superceded the bible. he told me about how men have gone to the moon, and sent monkeys to mars (i think he was mistaken about mars. we've sent unmanned probes there, but no monkeys as far as i know). he told me about the big bang. to which i replied, what was before the big bang then? why did the big bang happen?

i tried to help him see that the discoveries and progress of science have not disproved the bible in any conclusive way. i tried to explain to him how the existence of God is the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to life - science can't do that.

he didn't seem to realise that witchcraft and science don't exactly mix well, either. but i didn't have the chance to point that out to him, because finally, The Wife came for me. so i said goodbye and left. but i do hope that some of the things i said got through to him.

strange how a man can call himself a catholic and a christian, and yet seem so far from the saving knowledge of Christ.