JW Study Meeting #22

So I e-mailed Uriah earlier this week and, as it turned out, he'd written something down wrong. So we met again today and spent most of the time in random chitchat. He vented some grievances about airlines and people who don't wash their hands in the bathroom, and so forth. I forget most of the things we talked about. I had to keep one of my cats away from the frog a few times, I sure recall that. I explained to Uriah that I wouldn't be available on the first day of the upcoming convention because I have to take the GRE, which I had to reschedule because of my federal jury duty in August, and he told me some stories of his own experiences in county jury duty. But we established that he'll be picking me up at about 5 AM on August 1st and 7 AM on August 2nd. I may end up spending a whole lot of time around Jehovah's Witnesses that weekend...

He also tipped me off to some eBay sales, including a Watchtower Library disk from 2005 for just $10 + SH, which I just ordered. (In the meantime, he also told me a clever tale from a seller's standpoint. He noticed that for some reason a lot of stuff by some guy named "Ed Hardy" is selling hot right now, so on an ad he has out, he abbreviated "education" to "ed." at the end of a sentence and made sure to start the next sentence with "Hardy". There's a fine line between brilliance and deceit, hahaha.)

Anyway, eventually we managed to get in a very minimal conversation about theological stuff. I ran through the arguments from my outline, which I gave him to take with him before he left. But he really caught me off-guard when we started to discuss Jesus' resurrection, and he said he believes (or at least is open to the idea) that Jesus was raised physically from the dead! True, he followed it up by saying that that Jesus subsequently became a spirit-creature. But Uriah is open to the idea that the body in which Christ appeared to the disciples was numerically identical to the one in which he died. When I brought up Russell's famed quote about the body of Jesus being dissolved into gas or preserved as a memorial in heaven, he said that that was also a possibility, and that he really doesn't know the details of the resurrection and the appearances. Hardly what I expected! (He still didn't fluster me as much as I flustered him a number of meetings ago...)

So I handed him my outline and he said he'd do some research, and I also said that I wanted to hear more of his personal thoughts on the resurrection of Christ. Then, after a bit more small-talk, we parted ways. I'm going to be at a college Bible study up at campus next Saturday, so the next time I see him will be when he picks me up for the convention that's sure to produce some looooooong reports.