Missing the Forest for the Trees

(i am listening to 'a kiss in time' patty griffin's live album...that has little relevance to what this blog is going to be about- but its a great record, you should listen to it.)

and as sidenote #2, i love my sister, Beth. she is amazing. she has the amazing combination of an old soul and a young heart. missing her in my daily life is like a dull ache most of the time and then out of nowhere it feels like an elbow jab to the ribs again. we talked this morning on my walk through the city back from an inspiring reading/coffee session. her words are like lightning- peicing and powerful and spectacular and her listening ear like a warm blanket around you while you cozy up by the fireplace. she gets me. i have felt so stirred up and she let me pour it out and we sat down in front of those thoughts like two amateur philosophers watching the stillness of lake after a storm. her friendship is invaluable. our conversations always my favorites.

this morning i had spent a couple of hours pouring over my book about enchantment. i read about nature...wondered if i agreed with the author..then watched the trees lining Eastlake swaying in the wind and decided i did. then i read about children and how easily enchantment comes for them and how we try merciless to educate them out of their magical worlds and make sure they than can 'succeed' in our world of clocks and deadlines and so called, producitivity. maybe i will never send my kids to school...maybe we will read great stories and build forts in the woods and learn about fish and birds and flowers.

that's the mindset my reading left me with. i am going to send beth this book when i am done. she will love it. her and shawn are so alike and envy them. childlikeness marks their personhood like tasks have marked mine. climbing trees and playing in the woods and crying come so easily to them. i am opening my grip...i want to 'regress' to that place....

this all is so real to me. and then the church feels so far. we talked about that. beth is a real wreckless lover of God and honestly, she may be young, but i trust her thoughts on God more than almost anyone else. she doesn't think its a load of crap to imagine that God loves us all individually...that He is moved by us...that He has acted on our behalf and not just because He is God and that's what 'God' is supposed to do. it was a real relief to my spirit that she affirmed those things. you can almost smell God on Beth. she knows things you can't know by studying...things you can't know in an intellectual sense at all...you can believe what she says because she knows firsthand.

the church is too intellectual and its wasting time. i know some of you are offended. i am sorry. but i mean that. just hear me out. there is nothing the least bit logical about faith. you can do that old demonstration of sitting on a chair and say to me 'see you have to have faith this chair will hold based on principles you can't see.." but i am not buying. there is a big gap between the faith of sitting in a chair, when the worst consequence is falling on your butt all of two feet, and having real faith in God, when the consequences are more severe than can be imagined. faith is a mystery. and i like it that way, frankly. i am tired of everyone trying to 'prove' Christianity, God and their beliefs. so called facts mean little to me...

before you stone me to death or never speak to me again for thinking differently, hear me out....

a little over a year ago, a dear friend of mine called me on the phone and asked me a bunch of those hard questions about the Bible that we secretly hope no one will ever ask us. but she asked. and i really didn't have answers. i told her that. then i hung up the phone and went and sat on the porch swing at my parents house and i prayed. i just told God, 'hey. i have been wondering about these seeming 'inconsistencies' in Scripture myself for awhile now and i have been too afriad to ask and she was so brave, i kinda think she deserves an answer.' i swung back and forth, occasionally bumping into the cedar siding that flanks the house. then God gave me this picture (and i know it was Him, cause i don't think things up well on my own). i saw a ray of light hitting a pond. only i was viewing it like i was visiting an aquarium. i could see the line defining the water from the air and i could see the pure ray of light coming from a source above, hitting the water, and the bending in the new medium of the water. i called my friend back and this is what i shared with her.

truth is truth..it never changes. we all agree upon that , right? and we agree that God is inifinite and not bound by the laws of our existance. we are finite and live in a world of His creating...a world that has laws and general rules of "this is how it is" because we are finite and our minds, having a beginning and an end, could never take in infiniteness. Moses could only see the backside of God's glory and even that cast a glow on him to the point there was no question whom he had been speaking with. So God created a world for us and only our spirits are eternal (which is why i am inclined to trust my spirit over my mind)..anyway- time, gravity, physics...all of this only exists in this world and could arguably be completely irrelevant in eternity. stay with me, we are going somewhere....

remember the ray of light? well imagine it is truth, the air is the 'forever' of God and the water is human experience. like truth, the light ray never changes. the properties of light are the same no matter what medium it is in. light is light. but the medium (in this case, water) does change the perception of the ray. to my eye, the ray seems bent in the water and straight in the air. i wonder if truth, infinite truth, entering into the medium of human experience gets a little 'bent'. TRUTH DOES NOT CHANGE. please don't misunderstand me. but imagine being a fish and only ever seeing the light ray from the view of the water. you would have no idea that the ray was being bent by the world you live in,...and there would be no way to calculate how bent it was- or at what angle it was being bent. i wonder if when we escape this human experience and enter into forever with our God ..i wonder if it will be like coming out of the water for the first time and realizing that our world and its rules had confused our thinking about the oreintation of truth...that maybe our 'facts' were the best estimations we had and still, very skewed. that maybe everything we based our ideas on didn't really exist...

i am getting ahead of myself, bear with me...these things are hard to explain.

now, every discussion based on logic (even spiritual and Biblical topics) is based on these laws and rules of a finite world...right? the smartest person in the world cannot truly think outside the complex of time. its impossible for us. but God doesn't live in time, right? He's not bound by that rule.

so maybe even the best theologian's arguments are at best, irrelevant. wouldn't it be a shame if we got to heaven and discovered that all the topics we had hotly and passionately debated were complete non-issues in the scope of His infiniteness. what if there is no real difference between free will and predestination in light of eternity? what if it is all human thinking...the kind paul warned the corinthians to avoid? what if they are concepts bigger than we can think about and we are just reducing them to logic and then wasting time fighting about them? what a shame that would be...

i said the best theologian's artguments could be at best, irrelevant. at worst i think they could be force against the kingdom of heaven. a distraction like lust, jealousy, and arrogance..only one that has a shroud of righteousness to it....a 'form of godliness'. maybe the spirit of this world would like nothing more than to have the body of Christ demolished by arguments and futility. paul warns us to be careful that we don't 'devour' one another. seems like this isn't just a problem of our times, but rather a problem of humanity.

i pray a fresh love of God and a love for the true kingdom of God would fall on my heart and the hearts of other seekers. i pray that the veil of religion would be lifted in us and that a freshness of the Spirit would reclaim Christianity in the west. come Lord Jesus...