so over the course of...well, if i am being honest here, years...i have been struggling...hmmm...maybe wrestling is a better term...trying to reconcile what i had heard about religion, faith, God, life, people, right and wrong and everything in between...trying to understand God and Jesus and Faith and how all of those things fit into my life or more importantly how my life fit into those realities...
i've read books...listened to speakers (of all faiths, backgrounds, religions and non-religions)...i've cried and prayed and screamed and kept silent and pondered...i've tried and failed...had times of striving and times of doing nothing...
donald miller wrote, "i began to believe the christian faith was a religious system invented within the human story rather than a series of true ideas that explained the story." that resonates with me...
i was wanting to know...to understand the why's of so many deeper questions and challenges...wanting to really find the God i'd been told and believed is Good and Loving...wanting redemption...wanting purpose...wanting...LIFE...
saint francis of assisi once said, "true progress quietly and persistently moves along without notice." and i believe that is what has been taking place in my life...a progress that has been moving along quietly...on the surface it seemed to be a very stormy process...but underneath it all...in the stillness of my soul, the progress has been there...the changing...the solidifying...the LIFE...the faintest spark being fanned into flame by the loving persistence of God...
there was a time i thought i knew it all...had the handle on the truth of God...and in the faithfulness of testing and hardship...in the crushing blows of rejection, defeat, disillusionment and disappointment, i found that i knew nothing, really...because if the truth that we know cannot withstand the hardships and the questioning, perhaps it is not truth we know, but opinion we have formed, that we have donned like a sassy new coat that looks fantastic, but doesn't keep us warm in the harshness of winters's chill...
i decided to study the life of Jesus...as much as i could to understand this central figure in the faith of my fathers, so to speak...and i found that i fell in love with a radical man...one who caused trouble by being kind...whose very existence rattled people, even when he wasn't saying a word...he spoke of an upside down world...about loving those who hate...about being a peacemaker...a world of opposites, which flew in the face of every rational thought of society and made the best of that culture look like a filthy thing...
and then i began to rattle cages...just by asking questions...it was funny that the people who hated the questions were the people who were supposed to be following the same Jesus i was talking about...for some, i was an annoying gnat, buzzing around and they just swatted at me and walked away...for some i was a dangerous bug to be crushed...too radical...not educated enough to really understand such a grand concept as Jesus (even though the band of men Jesus called his disciples were a bunch of blue-collar, rough-around-the-edges societal outcasts)...
but in all of this, my greater struggle was with hopelessness...when every area of your life seems to fall apart suddenly, without warning over and over again with alarming predictability, it's hard to believe that a Good God loves you...and that a God who is Able to do anything would sit back and do nothing...i questioned whether i was maybe the "esau God hated" and struggled to find the magic button to push...the perfect thing to say or do that would turn the tide in my favor...i longed for direction and purpose and found every bit of light i ran toward ended up being a train that flattened me...
deep down, i know that i believed that God was Good and that God loved me...i just wanted out of all of the pain...i just wanted a happy that would "stick"...
it took an auto accident to "ground me"...to make me stop, be still and listen...to get me quiet enough to hear God whisper...
there is a phenomenon called "spacial disorientation" which causes many unseasoned pilots to crash...they ignore their instruments which are accurately reporting the plane's position and fly based on their feelings...
this was me...all the circumstances of my life were causing me to think my "plane" was out of control...that i needed to find stability...that bad was good and good was bad and i lost perspective and direction and worst of all, hope...
the auto accident caused me to see how God was taking care of me...ordering my steps...caused me to be reminded of the very dear people in my life...to allow myself to be loved and cared for...to allow myself to stop...to just be still...to find God's presence in my life...and to allow myself to be healed...and to be reconciled...to see the smile of God in the sun on my face and the love of God in the hands of a friend...
to breathe deeply...to rest completely...to smile from the inside, out...
my story is unfolding just as it should...crazy as it may seem, at times...it is woven with happy and sad and glory and failure...triumph and tragedy...but if it is to be an epic story, it must contain all of these elements...for the joy is in the overcoming...
my story is not finished, though the pages turn faster than i would like, at times...i think it will take a chapter or two to learn to trust my "instruments" and fly with confidence...but i am learning upside down is really right side up and God is Good and my story will be beautiful yet...
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i don't even know what to write, other than to say, i sense prayers i have prayed on your behalf have been answered, and we're long overdue for a phone call :-).
lovelovelove.
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