I remember my grandfather taking me out fishing for my first experience. I was perhaps about six years old. He came home the afternoon before with a pie pan covered with a damp cloth. Peeking inside, I saw a number of crawdads. He explained they were soft-shell crawdads. They were to be the bait we would use to catch catfish in the river.
Later in my youth, I experienced catching mature hard-shell crawdads in the shallows of a creek.
About that time, I heard the description “hard-shell Baptists.” To this day, I don’t know the details of the meaning.
I have no clue what reminded me about those experiences. But, naturally, I thought about it.
Let’s assume that transitioning from soft-shell to hard-shell is a metaphor for becoming older and becoming fixed in our ideas. We are no longer growing. Some may add an observation “closed-minded.”
My orientation to life never lost its youthful curiosity. Every day I look for something I can learn. Some people think I know a lot about the Bible. Well, I should. I led classes in it for decades. But, again, every day I discover something new I’d never thought about.
I would hate to be viewed as hard-shelled.
Want to discover a way to look at the Bible through new eyes? We are taking a short-term class looking at the New Testament through the eyes of the North American Indigenous peoples. It’s the same story we know translated into English using the concepts native to these peoples. It forces you to open your mind and see again for the first time.
Gary Mintchell
Faith Venture 