Sacrilege

I grew up in a Christian home. That's how a lot of testimonies start out - I grew up in a Christian home. Of course, that could mean anything, really. There are a lot of different kinds of Christians. I don't think my parents ever felt bound to one denomination, and so we attended a lot of different kinds of churches. To my mind, non-denominational was the same as it's okay to disagree. Doctrine is a brick house, and Spirit is wind. If you're going to insist on having walls, it's good to have a lot of windows open.

Protestants don't really do sacraments, but we bicker about the two that we have - baptism and communion. Can you be baptized by having water poured over your head, or sprinkled over your head, or do you have to be dunked completely under? And can your father maybe baptize you, or does it have to be a minister? And how old do you have to be? If you were baptized as a baby, before you were old enough to make a personal decision for Christ, does that even count?

And communion - the symbolic body and blood of Christ - does that have to be bread and wine? Can we use grape juice and crackers? Actually, how about using Oreos and milk? And how old do you have to be before you can participate in communion? And what exactly does it mean to take it in an unworthy manner?

It's getting more and more difficult to know what is worth getting upset about. I don't personally have an investment in the particulars of how the sacraments are administered. I've participated in a variety of communion services, and have seen a variety of elements distributed in a variety of settings. I was taught that God is concerned with what is in our heart.

When my brother and I were young, our mom usually told us if she knew it was going to be communion Sunday, so that we had time to prepare our hearts - because that was the thing that mattered. Your heart. You have to prepare it. You have to make it fit for communion - because God is holy and communion is sacred, and you don't just do it. If you are fighting with your brother, you need to make that right before you leave for church. If there is sin in your heart, you need to repent of it. Quiet your heart. Prepare ye the way of the Lord. In your heart and your mind and your body, prepare yourself to take and to eat.

Maybe all she really wanted was quiet in the car on the way to church. I don't know. But it worked.

Do this in remembrance of Me.

What does that even mean?

Hey, remember Jesus? He was such a great guy.

Yeah, he was awesome. Remember when he died for our sins?

Well, you know I wasn't there, but I heard about it. Broken body, blood spilled out. It must have hurt a LOT.

Nobody loves like Jesus. Nobody will ever love you as much as he loves you, and don't you forget it.

All this talk about old times really makes me miss him. I wonder when he's coming back?

I'm not a theologian, but I don't think that's what it means. I don't think taking communion is about reminding ourselves and one another what Jesus did two thousand years ago on the cross, or how we are the center of his universe and how everything he did and does is for us, lest we forget. It's not about training our hearts to achieve appropriate levels of gratitude.

Wheat is such a great metaphor for the life of Christ in us, and for the Christian life. Jesus said, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. In this way, in the physical realm, we get it - that to die is gain. Spiritually, we have such a hard time with it.

What value is there in meditating upon the broken body and spilled blood of Jesus? He's not dead. Why meditate upon the crushed grain, the pressed fruit? Why do we take time to ritually reflect upon brokenness and death and its exponential power in our lives? Because that is the Christian life. That's it. It's not about privilege, it's about sacrifice. Like the Christ that we follow, for the joy set before us, we are called to a cross and to brokenness.

These little rituals that we do - they hold no power in and of themselves, but they do express something of great importance. They are acts of obedience. They are physical expressions of holy confessions. They impress upon our hearts those things that are sacred, to be set apart and reverenced.

And so this made me cry.

This made me cry because I was actually served this in church, and I was not in a Monty Python movie. This made me cry because it was so jarring - I hadn't had time to prepare my heart for this. I feared that, maybe for the first time in my life, I was taking communion in an unworthy manner. Honestly, I almost didn't - and let me tell you, there is something quite horrifying about finding yourself holding the elements of communion and considering letting them pass you by because they are offensive to your spirit. That is completely backwards, any way you look at it. I actually felt God tap me and say, it is God who sanctifies and who makes the unclean holy - including my own sanitized heart. And this reeked to high heaven of sanitized. I almost gagged on all the sin that was in that cup, and I didn't want to drink it.

I am a recovering Pharisee - I'm not saying this to be self-righteous. It was like being handed the quintessential metaphor for all the sin and the shame of the church today, and being asked to take it and eat it in remembrance of Christ, and nobody was being ironic about it.

God is holy. We say that, but we don't even know what it means - because we don't consider anything sacred. In the Hebrew Bible, if a person laid hands upon the ark of God's covenant, they died. The ark was a carved box of wood and gold, and it was not to be touched. It was constructed to be carried on long poles on the shoulders - an honour strictly reserved for the Levites. It was the place of the Mercy Seat. It was the place of the presence of God. It was probably incredibly heavy.

In 2 Samuel 6, David decides it would be more convenient and expedient to put the ark onto a cart for transport. He is not intending to be disrespectful - he just wants it to be quicker and easier in the delivery. He puts it on a brand new cart. He gives it an escort. He and his entourage go before it celebrating with all their might before the Lord, with castanets, harps, lyres, timbrels, sistrums and cymbals. When they come to the threshing floor of Nakon, the oxen stumbles. Uzzah, walking beside the ark, reacts, reaches out his hands to stop the ark from toppling, and drops dead. David was angry. At God.

What kind of God kills a man for touching His stuff? We might as well say it - because I suspect that that's really what we think. We think that when God acts like that He is not being very loving - maybe being a little full of Himself. We think we are sacred all on our own, without any help from Him.

We don't like our God to be angry with us for doing what He asked us not to do. We are actually offended at the thought that God should be so petty as to demand that level of reverence. David was. How much more so are we, now that we hold the cross of Christ like an ace up our sleeve. We are so grateful for Jesus - we can dispense with all that reverence business. We have been made holy, co-heirs with Christ, and we can put our hands on anything we want to. We're like a kid who just inherited his Daddy's business - we take every opportunity to streamline and to simplify God's expectations in His covenant of mercy with us. We want to make it all more marketable, more convenient, more efficient, less burdensome.

We want the body and the blood of Christ. We want his life, we want his joy, we want his power, we want his grace. We want his peace that passes all understanding. We want unrestricted access to his presence. We are more than happy to take and to eat and drink, and to reflect upon how loved we are. We are not obedient. We have dispensed with reverence. We have lost the fear of God. We are brazen and without shame, and have actually allowed the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ to be a market, for the sake of our own convenience. And why not? The whole entire bride of Christ is one big, fat, trillion dollar market.

We are so far from reverencing the depth and the magnitude of the beauty that the act of communion symbolizes, that we permit God's perfect metaphor - the very emblem of His own sorrow, His own suffering, His own glory completely emptied and spilled out, His own Love - to be placed into a pre-filled, pre-portioned, pre-packaged, gluten free, dairy free, sugar reduced, spill free, disposable, dove stamped juice cup/crispy cracker combo with a long shelf life that makes a little crackling sound like candy wrapper when you open it.

Because it is convenient. Because it is practical. Because it is cost effective. Because we don't have to worry about left-overs. Because we have dietary restrictions and we are afraid of germs. Because people are busy and tired. Because the more people you have, the longer it takes to fill all those little cups and break the bread into tidy little pieces and clean up after. Because there are just too many of us. Because just look at how darling they are.

We have made it all about us. And it's not about us - it's about Him.

What is in our heart? If communion isn't sacred, then why do we bother? In everything, if the sacred is not worth our effort, then what is even the point? If we are always just going through the motions of our Christian faith as pleasantly and efficiently as possible, we are not remembering what it means to be a follower of Christ - we are acting. We are making all kinds of clanging and gonging, and singing songs with all our might, but we are being disobedient to the very heart of God's word.

Here's a thought. Why don't we just all pretend we are taking communion - just say the words, and imagine it - and just dispense with the elements altogether. Because it's not a pill. There's nothing in it but the solemn remembrance of our Christ and our own call to obedience, to brokenness and death and life abundant.

We are called to a life of radical inconvenience. We are the People of the Way, and the way is through the cross of Christ. The way is pouring yourself out in love, even to the point of ridicule and pain, even to the point where you have no more to give, even to death.

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 

Remember that when you take communion. Remember what manner of love it was that bought us, Whose we are and who it is we are being asked to be in return.

To die is gain.

Do this in remembrance of Me.

Smashed Alabaster: The Importance of Brokenness

Now one of the Pharisees was requesting [Jesus] to dine with him. And He entered the Pharisee’s house, and reclined at the table. And behold, there was a woman in the city who was an immoral woman; and when she learned that He was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing His feet, and anointing them with perfume. Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet He would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is an immoral woman.”

And Jesus answered and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he replied, “Say it, Teacher.” “A certain moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. Which of them therefore will love him more?” Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have judged correctly.” And turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair. You gave Me no kiss; but she since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My feet. You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with perfume. For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” And He said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven.” And those who were reclining at the table with Him began to say to themselves, “Who is this man who even forgives sins?” And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”  (Luke 7:36-50)

God has been doing most of the talking in my life as of late. I have a billion things in my head, a billion things I want to try to say, but God said loud and clear to me - almost audible - "Chew with your mouth closed". So I've been thinking on some things. Chewing. Swallowing. Being nourished. Expelling some waste.

I've been thinking an awful lot about Smashed Alabaster. I've been thinking about how very attached I have been to the memory of that alabaster box that I broke years ago at Jesus' feet. Sentimental. I kept all the pieces of it - poured some cement, pressed them artfully into a nice round mold and made some stepping stones out of them.

I let go the fragrance.

Somewhere I started to have the idea that breaking the alabaster box was about the sacrifice, pouring out tears before my beloved Saviour God, spilling an offering precious and costly and impossible to retrieve. I thought it was about me, about dying to self, about how much I was willing to surrender, about How much do you really love Him?

God is not a narcissist.

So I am interrupting my blogging hiatus, because I really, really wanted to share a little of what I'm chewing on:

RETURN TO LIFE

Crows talk about you, you know. They have the unsettling ability to remember, and they have been known to hold a grudge. They remember your face. They chat to their neighbours about you, describing you in such vivid detail that crows who have never laid eyes on you will know you on sight. I'm not saying that they're petty - but don't ever throw stuff at them. 

 

I was very, very nice to them last year, and so far they don't seem interested in much more than stopping by. There has been no swooping, and I don't get the feeling that they're plotting against me. I did take this picture through the window from inside my house - just in case they're camera shy.

Crows are definitely eye-candy - like a big bag of horrible licorice gumdrops. When it comes to Spring fever, I really prefer the strong, silent type.

Enough said.

GRAFTED

For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please… Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarned you that those who practice such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. ~ Galatians 5:17-23

I am developing a tree obsession – a deep study of the beauty, the intricacies and the out workings of any one single tree could easily inspire a year’s worth of blog posts. I have two plum trees growing in my back yard that wrap around each other like lovers, side by side as though one tree. They were planted that way, for fruit bearing purposes – only when they are bare can you tell them apart.

 

I believe that everything God creates speaks something to us about the Ineffable – mysterious, unknowable, unspeakable things that are within the Divine heart. There are things that are too Spiritual to elevate us while harnessed by words.

Trees have sacred carved all over them – devoted to God for Divine purpose. Not carved totems of Theology, but living witnesses to the workings of the mysterious, unknowable Knower. Trees are preachers of Truth that is at once both wild and ordained – they make entry into our most pivotal stories, from the Garden of Eden to the crucifixion to the New Jerusalem.

Standing in a forest, we feel the importance of the created thing – our hearts instinctively grow quiet, swelling up with poems and songs and meditations that are all completely inadequate to express what is inside us. We want to breathe deeply, we feel pressed with the need for silence. The hush is a reaching out, a soul response to the Good News we hear preached to us, each in our own language – a response to their heavenly glossolalia, like the tongues of angels – words we hear and understand, but that we cannot repeat back.  

Sacred can’t be uttered – the best of words can diminish it making it appear trivial, exaggerated and ornamental. You have to climb a tree. You have to sit in its branches, wrap your arms around it, feel its strength and its bending, its roots and its reaching, and be one of the living things that nests in it. You have to smell its blossoms, get scraped by it, sit under it, pick its fruit, rake its dead leaves, be still and contemplate.

In contemplating the metaphor of the fruit bearing tree, and exploring whether or not a person might realistically be able to grow an apple tree from seed, I discovered something completely fascinating about the nature of apple trees. You can grow an apple tree from seed – but the fact is that if you want to grow a particular kind of apple, this is not how the tree is reproduced. You cannot plant the seeds from the fruit in your lunch, and expect to grow a tree bearing Golden Delicious apples.  

It has everything to do with the birds and the bees – Spring air, blossoms and pollination. The seeds an apple carries are not clones of it, but are rather a combined genetic coding of two separate trees – the parent tree that it grew on, and the random tree with no name that fertilized it. If you grew an apple tree from seed, it could take ten years of watering, pruning, fertilizing, de-bugging, watching the weather, before you had any idea what kind of apple you were even growing. Chances are good that it wouldn’t be tasty, and you’d love it for its profusion of blossoms. Chances are good that the baby daddy would be a crab apple.

A tree will always produce the same kind of apples, but the seeds its apples carry may be different with every harvest. If you want to grow a tree that will produce the same kind of apple as the one you hold in your hand, you can’t do it from seed – a chosen rootstalk must be grafted with a branch from a tree that bears the desired fruit.

Grafting is a simple process of making a split into the branch of a tree or into a rootstalk, into which a branch from another tree is inserted. The grafted branch is bound tightly and eventually fuses together with the rootstalk, becoming part of the tree as it grows. Amazingly, through grafting you can actually grow peaches, apricots, cherries and plums, or grow several different varieties of apples, all together on one single tree at the same time.

This, of course, makes me think about Romans 11, where Paul refers to the church in Rome as a grafted in branch – a wild olive branch grafted in to a cultivated tree. Apparently, like virtually all fruit trees, olive trees that have been grown directly from seed do not generally make for tasty fruit. Olive trees grown from the seed of cultivated trees backslide into wild olive trees – the fruit they produce is almost certain to be bitter and tiny, inedible though pretty to look at.

I am pondering the metaphor – wondering what exactly God desires me to see. I am wondering which I am – the seeded tree, or the grafted branch – or if I am somehow both.

I see how I am part of the great, blended family of undefined parent origins – one part of the Tree, one part of the world – Divine nurture and sin nature wrapped in rings through my growing. I bear fruit of peace filled with wild seeds, reproducing in my own sullied image, involuntarily spreading, prolific without intention – sometimes tasty, sometimes tart. I am part of an ever enlarging kingdom of trees growing Spirit fruit – created to sow seed, to expand, to branch off, to spread wastefully without trying, seeding new and differing apple trees with every season.

Some of what comes out of me is fit for human consumption, some feeds the birds, some feeds the earth – but the Spirit of God is somehow at work in it all. God alone is able to distinguish the good from the bad, the ornamental from the necessary, letting it all grow together, fully able to work all things together for good for those who love Him and are called to His purposes.

This truly is how we grow. We are each unique – whatever our doctrine, its outworking in our lives never looks the same. We don’t bear fruit or reproduce trees that bear fruit with the exact quality and flavour as any other of our type. We don’t bear fruit in every season. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – these can seem somewhat subjective. One person’s love is another person’s hate. One person’s faithfulness tastes sweet while another’s is bitter and sours the stomach.

We are all intentioned to make an offering of the small, simple, honest thing that is in us, though it varies greatly in taste and appearance – to let joy ripen and drop freely from our branches, and to not concern ourselves with what lies dormant inside it, or with where and what it will grow. To explode wastefully, bountifully, lavishly, like God does, without thought for self-preservation or worry – to exponentially multiply the fruit of His Spirit within us for the nourishment of the world. We do not bring life to the dead seed, we do not cause the fruit to grow, and we do not control what influences its nature. We are not the Life, we are not the Arborist, we are not the Wind.

Still, I know that there is wildness in my flesh. Unless I am somehow saved from this inherent pomme sauvage savagery, there is a latent tendency both in my seed and in my very nature towards growing and exponentially reproducing fruit that is bitter, small and just for show. My goodness is so hard, so meager, it wouldn’t satisfy anybody. It is no kind of food source. Only God is good.

I am one who has been purposed by the Wise Arborist, a twig plucked out of the natural, the uncultivated, the neglected, and grafted in to the One Good Root Stalk. I have been tightly bound to the One Tree in order to be part of It, to have a share in It, to be sustained by It, nourished by It, sanctified by It – to be transformed to Its nature, in order to produce good fruit that is pleasing, satisfying, and nourishing to the world God loves. God intentioned us to carry the select fruit that His Spirit bears, choosing to supernaturally bypass the erratic, unruly nature of our seeds, going so far as to make them irrelevant. If I don’t bear good fruit, then for the health of the Tree, for the purposes of the Tree, I can be cut off to make room for a twig that will.

It is a big, beautiful metaphor – it’s bigger than me, branching off into a thousand directions. I’m not entirely sure what it all means, but I feel it diminished with every word. It makes me wish for all the world for Spring leaves to blanket the bare branches of the trees – that those two growing stark as lovers in my back yard would cover themselves and appear to me as one. I want to climb up into my best climbing tree and just sit there. I want to watch the wind moving through the green, listen to the birds, and study the bugs. I want to close my eyes and breathe deeply of God in all His mysterious splendour – feel in every cell of my body the silencing beauty of wildness. I want to be still and know that He is God.

I want to know everything within me humming in harmony to the melody of tree – Who is like Thee among the gods, O Lord? Who is like Thee, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders? ~ Exodus 15:11

By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. ~ Jesus

On Bearing Fruit

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
 A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
 A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
 A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
 Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
 Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

~ Joyce Kilmer

Living in the land of indomitable Winter, I am trying to be chill about the return of Spring. It will come. Truthfully, it’s already here – though perhaps a little climate challenged. But mid-April snowfall has me thinking about the fruit trees in my yard, and about how much I love when those first green buds appear – almost more than I love the blossoms, and certainly more than I love the apricots and the crabby apples they produce.

I love all things Spring – proof of life, and the signs of things to come. There is so very much that happens in the slow, slow metamorphosis from seed to tree, from tree to seed bearer, it’s easy to get dazzled by the process. I never enjoy breathing in more than when every tree in my yard is flowering. My small piece of Earth feels cathedral, arched pillars wrapped in green garlands, draped in white, monarchs dressed in velvets of orange and black, gathering by the dozens; everything alive, whispering of holiness, spreading itself open, drinking deeply of the Divine, giving, receiving, worshipping.  

When the trees are just there for show, for the blossoms and for what they attract, it’s easy to become intoxicated by the growing, to not have a mind to the harvest. It is easy to have contempt for what has been heralded – for the tiny, tart thing – when Safeway down the street is importing Golden Delicious. You can’t even give crab-apples away – they brown with rot, squash beneath bare feet, get shovelled off the grass by the barrel full.

If every seed in every crab-apple on every crab-apple tree died, was planted, resurrected and grew into a fruit bearing tree which in turn seeded, season after season, producing and reproducing in exactly the same way – one tree for every seed – heaven help us.

Maybe it’s because we live in the land of the grocery store, but I do sometimes forget the purpose of the fruit to the tree. I think of an apple as food – I do not think of an apple as a seed bearer. I do not hold the glossy red flesh in my hand and think orchard.

And so I think it is very easy for me to misunderstand what is fully meant by the fruit of the Spirit. I have a tendency to think, The Spirit is an energy source.  I have a tendency to think, Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control are wholesome behaviours that are accessible in the Spirit, waiting to be born in me, to be stocked up and kept cool in the crisper for when they are needed. If I am annoyed with my children or with the woman working the drive-thru at Tim Hortons, I can take a deep breath, pull out patience and munch a really big bite of it.

But I don’t think that is the full picture – I think it stops far short of the whole point. I think it makes the fruit of the Spirit sound a little bit like Comfort food – a little bit like bumbleberry pie.

I wonder if having joy, peace, or patience in your own self isn’t a lot like those first buds that shoot forth from the branch in Spring. They are proof of life – but they are not the fruit. Getting a fruit tree to actually bear fruit can be quite a complex process, with more than a few variables: the size and the age of the tree, its exposure to the sun, the fertility of its soil, which trees are growing near to it, how regularly and wisely it is pruned, how the temperature holds after the buds appear, and how well it is protected from disease and pests. A fruit tree is not reliant upon its ability to bear fruit to live, to grow, to be beautiful – one can grow tall, bud and explode with beautiful blossoms without ever once producing an apricot.

But God didn’t make us just to look pretty – we were purposed to be host for God’s Spirit, and Spirit is a tree that bears fruit. The fruit of the Spirit growing in our lives – the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – these things are not tools to equip us to be better people. They are not things that we reach for, they are not ways that we behave – they are not things that we do. They are the inevitable, natural outcropping of a life that is led by the Spirit.

Fruit is a by-product – it is the seed-bearing flesh that is picked off, rolled into a box, wrapped, and carried across borders, able to be placed freely into the hungry hands of another. It is the solid food that ripens and drops off by the bucket full, that you give to your neighbours, and that you call your friends over to help you gather, hoisting the ladder, shaking the tree – marvelling at how much, more than a person could ever hope to have a use for alone.

God has not given Spirit merely as a force to sustain us today, manna in the wilderness, fresh on the ground every morning. God has seeded into us with a mind to the harvest – in planting the seed, God has planted a tree, has planted an orchard, has planted a kingdom. The kingdom of God is tree to seed to tree again – it is ripe, bountiful and ever multiplying love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Thy kingdom come.

LET'S TALK TURKEY

I made a sincere Facebook promise that if my blog ever was read in ten countries, I would post a picture of my dirty laundry. When my audience stats crept past that mark, I was kind of excited and kind of depressed. Depressed, because my mother-in-law had just washed all my laundry and I didn’t actually have the usual Rocky Mountain high pile I was so looking forward to showing off. Excited, because, well… except for a bus trip to Kansas on a choir tour, I’ve never really been outside of Canada.

I make myself very vulnerable in this space, and I try not to think about where the words are going to end up, or how they may be interpreted. I’ve always been somewhat of an emotional exhibitionist – but every once in a while someone will leave me a comment that affects me, makes me aware of the deeply intimate, makes me think about getting a bigger fig leaf. It reminds me what a small, small world it is that we live in, and how personal our struggles truly are.

Even so, I do believe voice is given to be shared, and I believe in the freedom that comes from acknowledging and honouring what can only be common human experience.

So in celebration of Earth Day, the shedding of fig leaves, Spring thaw, bare feet, muddy floors, and the murder of crows perched in the tree outside my window, and because I am sincerely grateful to all of you who have taken the time to read my blog, I thought I would use this opportunity to share a few of my very favourite comments from kind souls in an assortment of countries that I will almost certainly never visit in the flesh. Pardon the run-on sentence, I’m just so excited. I hope you find them as inspirational as I do. One love.

Anonymous wrote: Thanks for the good writeup. It actually used to be a amusement account it. Look complex to far brought agreeable from you! However, how could we keep in touch?

Visit my site: taco bell

Isn’t that just so true? I mean, how could we keep in touch? It’s kind of like that old saying: a bird may love a fish, but where will they make a home? The wisdom for that complex life mystery reads almost like a tagline – sometimes you just have to run for the border. Deep words, Anonymous. I hear you. Thank you.

Anonymous wrote: I all the time used to read paragraph in news papers but now as I am a user of net therefore from now I am using net for content, thanks to web.

My web-site: Mexican fast food 

This simple confession about being a user of nets and webs reminded me so much of Peter – you know, casting his nets on the wrong side of the boat. And really, aren’t we all ultimately fishing for something? Yet you never can presuppose what that net will pull up. Life is a perilous voyage in a vessel of wood, and we are prone to getting snagged, stuck and rolled up in even the simplest of temptations - Mexican food. Thanks, Anonymous.  

And then there’s this one, left on one of my more intimately personal posts, Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives and Women Preachers – which appears to be a fan favourite in Turkey. It reads so simply:

Anonymous wrote: I'm gone to convey my little brother, that he should also go to see this blog on regular basis to obtain updated from most recent news.

Look into my website: youtube

Sniff. See what I mean? Yes, precious one, you tell your little brother. You tell your brother and one hundred and fifteen of your closest friends. Spread the most recent news...

It's all simply smashing.

Je t’aime.

Dirty laundry soon to follow.

SOLA SCRIPTURA

I finally had The Talk with my daughter – the one in which I told her I didn’t actually believe in a literal six day Creation. It felt a little like handing her wings, kicking her out of the nest, saying, It’s safe for you to fly – it probably shouldn’t have been so terrifying. She took it the way I expected her to. She asked if I was even a Christian. She administered The Test. She's by nature a literal thinker.

Since I was a girl I have loved the Bible. I’ve been told that it makes my eyes light up. I feel it that way, like illumination – like wrestling with Holy, and being seared from within. I remember getting my first Bible – the whole thing, not just the condensed for kids picture version. I cracked open its hard cover and went right for the words lettered in red – all the stuff that Jesus actually said. He was there, written in red, In the Beginning, but I didn’t yet have sight to see Him.

I immediately discovered that Jesus only featured in five books out of the whole Bible, and that four of those books seemed the same story told four different ways. I remember being upset. I wondered why the Bible was so very long – why there were so many words in it that weren’t God’s.

I looked at the maps in the back. I tried to read the Principals of Translation and the Explanation of General Format at the front, and I began to think that this book was a little bit bigger than I was ready for. I spent three adult years learning its languages, its context, I’ve read through it cover to cover, and I still feel exactly that way. It’s always just a little bit bigger than I’m ready for.

Red letter reading, and scanning the titles, I somehow found my way to The New Heaven, The New Earth, The New Jerusalem. If you asked me at ten years old if I was reading my Bible, I could say absolutely, yes. Yes, I’m reading Revelation. Over and over, the same words:

And the material of the wall was jasper; and the city was pure gold, like clear glass. The foundation stones of the city wall were adorned with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was stone was jasper; the second sapphire; the third, chalcedony; the fourth, emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, chrysoprase; the eleventh, jacinth; the twelfth, amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; each one of the gates was a single pearl. And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass…. And in the daytime (for there shall be no night there) its gates shall never be closed.  Revelation 21:18-21, 25

My parents bought me a book about rocks. I thought a lot about how gold could look like clear glass, about how exactly a giant, round pearl could be formed into a gate, and about why God would bother building walls around the city at all, if the gates were always going to be open. I wondered what God was afraid of.

Children have a way of asking the most startlingly obvious questions, like – If God only came to earth one time as a man in baby Jesus, how is it that grown-up God was walking around having conversations and arguments and lunch with Abraham, and why does nobody ever talk about that in Sunday School?

Why, if Love is all-powerful, couldn’t God just forgive the Devil – love him so much that Satan would repent? Why couldn’t the Devil become one of the redeemed? God is omnipotent. Love is all-powerful. Why can’t I pray for him? God can do anything. God. Loves. Everybody.

Where exactly at the bottom of the ocean are our sins, and did God put a sign there that reads, NO DIGGING? Because telling somebody not to do something is just asking for trouble, which was kind of lesson number one of Genesis.

If God is good and loving, and if He was going to do it anyway, why didn’t He reconcile Himself with Adam and Eve right there in Eden? Why didn’t God just stop walking around in the garden in the cool of the day, cut down that tree of knowledge of good and evil, use it to build Himself a cross and hang Himself on it? Really. Why not?

To this day, I only have a good answer for one of those questions.

Despite my deep passion for the Bible, I have a hard time actually reading it to my children. Cain and Abel; Noah and the ark; Abraham and just about everyone he interacted with; Sodom and Gomorrah; Lot and his daughters; Jephthah’s daughter; David and Bathsheba – a lot of what I read as a child was simply inappropriate for children. A lot of it was spiritually traumatizing. I asked my father flat out, If God asked you to kill me, would you? I took an anticipated comfort in knowing that my father didn’t always obey God.

The Bible is ancient, sacred text – it is not a collection of bedtime stories. It isn’t God’s Chicken Soup for the Soul. It’s full of tear you up inside truth, and Truth is a sword – a razor sharp, double-edged blade. If it isn’t illumined by Spirit – if we ever try to wield it carelessly in the flesh – we could cut off our own toes and completely lose our balance. We really do need to be wise.

But then sometimes we might get to being too wise in our own eyes, and miss the point all together. We might get really hung up on the Greek. We might think scripture is a pointed weapon to stab people with, dead between the eyes, in their heart or their gut, to take them out at the knees, to sever their head from their body, to have the victory. We might claim pieces of it to make justified our own sin. Even the devil knows how to quote scripture.

It takes innocence to see the obvious – I  can get so mired in the words. I need my children’s ears, my children’s eyes, my children’s questions. Does Jesus get bored sitting around in our heart not even having a television? Does God get mad when I worry?

Going back to the Greek is really not the place to find answer – we are not People of the Book, but of the Living Word and of the Spirit.

I tell my daughter to punch the air really hard, and then I ask if she thinks that she hurt it. I ask if she thinks the air is offended. I tell her God is Spirit – like air, like wind, like breath. You are in God, and God is in you, and there is nowhere to go from His presence. God moves into everything that gives Him room, filling every bit of room that is given. Worry is like holding your breath, trying to conserve the air that’s inside you. That doesn’t make God mad – God just wants you to breathe. I don’t give her chapter and verse for that, but when she looks for it I believe she will find it.

Sometimes I have to chew solid food for my children, and drop it into their mouths – like God still does for me. I want them to feel how Truth feels in their bellies, to see how it strengthens their bones, how it lights up the eyes. I want them to taste and see that the Lord is good, so they won’t hide if Truth comes like a sword.

I still contemplate closely the words in red, the ones that Jesus spoke, but I see Jesus so much larger now. I find Him all over the Bible. I meditate on the Truth in His metaphors – what Jesus said about being the Door and the Vine and the Light, and about how we are sheep and salt and fragrance. I try to make sure my children don’t gag on the literal. Truth doesn’t have to be literal. Truth can grow loftier and clearer and more transformative in power when It’s not root bound and choked out by literal.