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“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

Month: December 2008

A Shared Longing

George

Michael Spencer hits home with me again as he describes the deep longings shared by many evangelical Christians, including myself.

… we- are longing for authentic humanness in the Gospel. A full and genuine human experience. Normal human life as God created and recreated it. Not more information in a competition to quote the most scripture and do the best imitation of a walking apologetics class. Not more religion of the (fill in the blank) _______ sort. No….humanness made alive in the incarnation. Created, incarnated, redeemed, resurrected humanity.

We long to be human beings, fully alive to who we are, to God, to one another and to all that being made in the image of the incarnated God means.

We long for beauty, for multiple expressions and experiences of beauty.

We long for relational and emotional connection; to know we are not alone; to love and be love; to be heard and to hear our human family.

We long for worship to engage the senses, the body, the whole personality. We long for mystery, not explanation. We long for symbolism, not just exposition. We long for a recognition of what it means for God to be God and for each of us to be human, not for more aspirations to know as much as God and instructions on how to be more than human.

We long for Jesus to come to us in every way that life comes to us, and not just in a set of propositions.

We long for honesty about the brutal pain and disappointments of life, and we long to hear the voices of others experiencing that brokenness.

We are tired of the culture of lies that Christians perpetuate in their fear that someone will know about the beer in the fridge, the porn on the computer, the affair, the repeated abuse, the unbelieving child, the nagging doubts, the frightening diagnosis and the desperate fears.

We long for a spirituality of stillness, contentment and acceptance in the place of spiritual competition and wretched urgency. We have grown weary and sick of being “challenged” to do more, be more committed, more surrendered, more holy by our own energy.

We long for prayer that is not a means to accomplish things, bring miracles, generate power, impress the listener. We long for the depths of spirituality, not the show of being spiritual.

We long to be loved, to be quietly accepted, to be told to lie down in green pastures, to stop the race, to pray in silence. To be given a spirituality of dignity, not a spirituality that is a feature of this week’s sermon series on how to have more sex, make more money, have better kids, smile more, achieve great things and otherwise turn the salvation of Jesus into a means to an American end.

We long to understand the spirituality of those whose religion does not drive them crazy. We long to know the Bible’s message and then be free to live it. We want to be lifted up, not beaten down. We hope for a simple spirituality, not an exciting, never-before-experienced high from the show.

… Some of us will finally say good-bye to this insanity. Some of us will stay, but we will not be listening anymore. Some of us will discover others ways, other paths, other pilgrims and friends.

Family Christmas

George

Yesterday evening we had a family Christmas celebration. Not all the children could make it this year but we had a great time. Melissa and Ryan, Kyle, Tyler and Madison; Scott and Alison; and Tanya and Daniel and Jerod, Meredith, Blake and Grayson gathered for food and fun. We started out with dinner at La Casa de Jose’s restaurant in downtown Wilmore. Returning to our house, we opened gifts and had lots of goodies. We played games. The weather was warm enough for the kids to play outside. We continued our tradition of exchanging gag gifts. The grandkids really get into it (everyone else, too).

What are you suppose to think when one of the gag gifts is your framed 11×14 senior high picture? Here’s a video and some pictures.

From the Warehouse to the Shack

George

In Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson offers the following illustration adapted from Karl Barth to demonstrate the powerful possibilities in spiritual reading of God’s word.

Imagine a group of men and women in huge warehouse. They were born in this warehouse, grew up in it, and have everything there for their needs and comfort. There are no exits to the building but there are windows. But the windows are thick with dust, are never cleaned, and so no one bothers to look out. Why would they? The warehouse is everything they know, has everything they need. But then one day one of the children drags a stepstool under one of the windows, scrapes off the grime, and looks out. He sees people walking on the streets; he calls to his friends to come and look. They crowd around the window -they never knew a world existed outside their warehouse. And then they notice a person out in the street looking up and pointing; soon several people are gathered looking up and talking excitedly. The children look up but there nothing to see but the roof of their warehouse. They finally get tired, watching these people out on the street acting crazily, pointing up nothing and getting excited about it. What’s the point of stopping for no reason at all, pointing at nothing at all, and talking up a storm about the nothing?
But what those people in the street were looking at was an airplane (or geese in flight, or a gigantic pile of cumulus clouds). The peopIe in the street look up and see the heavens and everything in the heavens. The warehouse people have no heavens above them, just roof.
What would happen, though, if one day one of those kids cut a door out of the warehouse, coaxed his friends out, and discovered the immense sky above them and the grand horizons beyond them? That is what happens, writes Barth, when we open the Bible -we enter the totally unfamiliar world of God, a world of creation and salvation stretching endlessly above and beyond us. Life in the warehouse never prepared us for anything like this.
Typically, adults in the warehouse scoff at the tales the children bring back. After all they are completely in control of the warehouse world in ways they could never be outside. And they want to keep it that way.

The illustration stirred me deeply. In the warehouse I see church as I experienced it. I, like the kid who cuts a door out of the warehouse, have discovered “immense sky above and grand horizons beyond “; “a world of creation and salvation stretching endlessly above and beyond”.  I have moved from the warehouse to the shack.