After a conversation with the bestie...

Tonight Lyss and I went to Starbucks and chatted and I would have to say that while I find myself all the more frustrated after the conversation I feel so much better after just having been heard out.  I need that sometimes... just to express my continued frustration with the face of christian religion in America today... and just to know that someone knows that I'm frustrated and why and understands... even if we do end up on different sides of the coin at the end of the day... at least I'm heard... and loved. 

I thought about why I left Bethel... we talked about how that works with my relationship with God.  Admittedly, things between the Big Guy and me haven't been the best over the past year.... but they are at least on the road to better after leaving... it's hard in my job not to stop sometimes and see the ugly and to feel the inexpressible pain at my inability to make things better for some of these little ones.... I can do so much and if others don't take the puck once I pass it, it's not going anywhere. I'm not going to lie... I don't like that.  It doens't seem fair and some times I go home at the end of the day and wonder if its worth it.  My point is... I want to make things better for people... and I heard someone say once that the first rule is to do no harm.  That's why I left Bethel.... they were doing harm. 

I understand that there's truth out there... that it's absolute... that it's certain.  I believe even that it can be found.  I also believe that the truth when found will set me free.  I believe that love is truth.  The greatest truth is love.  Love brings with it Christmas... hope.... joy... goodness... idealistic everything.  I believe it requires action.  To believe it is to do it. 

I was thinking at one point in the conversation about a quote I found in a book about a guy who went to live as a homeless person for several months.  What he did was beautiful and what he learned was near devastating.  Instead of finding people who would call themselves followers of Christ to be loving and kind and accepting and helpful... he found self-righeousness and pride and arrogance and ugly.  He looked at what he saw in the Bible and he looked at what he saw in these groups of believers and he saw a problem.  However, sometimes he'd find the occasional person who made a difference and loved the unlovely just as Christ did.  One person that he talked to said the following quote. 

"...I do this because my faith tells me to. The Bible clearly says, if you see someone hungry, feed them; if you see someone naked, clothe them. Those words weren't written for us to make books and sermons about. They're written so people don't go hungry and naked. And they require action from all followers of Christ, not just the rescue missions."

I love that... Countless times in the churches that I attended since birth I've heard a thousand and four sermons about how we need to care for the poor and the broken in our cities.  They inspired me to go.  I always wondered why I always felt so alone in college in my desire to see these people fed and clothed and able to take better care of themselves and their families.  I remember how uncomfortable and scary it was every time I went out with the Open Heirs team from Cedarville or during each ministry that I did with the Philadelphia team... or the Jeremiah Project.  I remember that I finally just had to admit that rescue mission work wasn't my "calling", and that I just wasn't good at it.  But I knew that I needed to do what I could and I still know that.  I want to be  a part of working to make Scranton a better place to live and providing ways for people to lift themselves out of their personal "economic depressions" to make their world and the world of those around them better.  Jesus did it.  He hung out with lepers and poor people and my goodness... Jesus hung out with Prostitutes!!! SCANDAL! 

These things weren't written so that we can write books and sermons.  They were written so that we could take action.  When I land on a "religion" it's going to be one that follows Jesus AND believes in making the world a better place.  I don't think it's possible to separate them. 

Carry your candle, run to the darkness
Seek out the lonely, the tired and worn...
Take your candle, go light your world.

Currently The Jackson 5 Christmas Album By The Jackson 5 see related

So I know it's a little early but...

This afternoon as I was busy getting ready for the day, I was listening to Christmas music (yeah, i know haha i'm a lameo but you love it too so just admit it and don't judge).   A couple of songs really caught my attention.  I've been wrestling through a lot of things as of late concerning matters of spirituality, really the foundations of churches and denominations and who has the most important truths right. 

Earlier last month the kids at the school I was placed at with a client were working on their annual christmas program and they are doing a version of a christmas song by the Jackson 5 called Someday at Christmas.  The song is a typical anti-war song and hearing the song from the lips and voices of children really gets to me for some reason.  Just thinking that someday these kids will be the adults that run the world and each of them will have dreams and ideals and many of them will be crushed by the pressures of the world... drugs, abuse etc... it kinda hits me where I live.  As much as I have at times hated working with children for the past year it has really taught me a lot about myself and about the world.  One thing is that kids are impressionable and extremly important to ideals for the world. What I do with the kids that I come into contact with and what I teach them by my example matters greatly because they will one day be where I am and where I will be.   For now though, I wanted to discuss Chrismas and what I was thinking about this morning. 

In Evangelical circles it is said that "salavation" is by grace alone.  By that they mean that entrance into the after life and into the abundant life that Jesus answers here on earth is by his choice and his provision... not based on anyone's good character or works.  Evangelicals also would like to separate themselves from more orthodox traditions (such as Roman Catholicism) by saying that these traditions say that "salvation" is by works (the sacraments etc...). 

When I think about Christmas and the story of Jesus, I can't help but see grace from a different angle than salvation from grace alone. 

I see grace in the story, but I don't think grace is the point.  I think the point of the whole story is hope for EVERYONE.  As I wrestle with what salvation is or what grace does or what man's choices do for him... I can't help but feel a great relief as I watch the events of Christ's birth unfold.  We see a people who have waited for hundreds of years for this promised event to occur and here he is.  As I was listening to music today the song Oh Little Town of Bethlehem came on. 

O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

I never noticed before the picture the writer of the song is painting.  You see a late night where the streets are quiet and inside houses people are sleeping... but they aren't dreaming.  Dreamless sleep... While I'm not 100% sure that this is what he's getting at it seems to suggest that the people are slowly losing hope.  While everything is dark and dreary something is shining.  The hopes and fears of  all the years... that is something... it's the universality of it all. Not only does it include all people from all nationalities and faiths but it includes all the years.  There's hope!!  I was taken by this a couple of years ago at Christmas time when I was really struggling to "get into the holiday spirit".  It's about hope.  That's the point. 

Jesus came that they might have life!  It's not so much about who goes to hell and how everyone is going there unless they do this one thing and believe in him.  That might be true, i'm not sure yet.  But that's hardly the point.  If we live our lives as people who are desperately trying to single handedly tell everyone because they're all going to hell I suppose that is a noble cause... if that's the truth... but it's hardly the point of the "gospel".  The point of the gospel is not to make us feel guilty for what we have done... it's about all the beautiful oppostie things such as hope and love and goodness..... all those things that are supposed to be included at Christmas just because it's Christmas. 

So in conclusion, maybe songs like the Jackson 5's Someday at Christmas are more the point than the perspective that the world is going to hell unless it gets "saved". 

Someday at Christmas men wont be boys
Playin with bombs like kids play with toys
One Warm December our hearts will see
A world where men are free

Someday at Christmas there'll be no wars
When we have learned what Christmas is for
When we have found what life's really worth
There'll be peace on earth

Someday all our dreams will come to be
Someday in a world where men are free
Maybe not in time for you and me
But someday at Christmastime

Someday at Christmas we'll see a land
With no hungry children, no empty hand
One happy morning people will share
A world where people care

Someday at Christmas there'll be no tears
Where all men are equal and no man have fears
One shining moment, one prayer away
From our world today

Someday all our dreams will come to be
Someday in a world where men are free
Maybe not in time for you and me
But Someday at Christmas time

Someday at Christmas men would not have failed
Hate will be gone and love will prevail
Someday in a world that we can all start
With hope in every heart

Currently The Shade of Poison Trees By Dashboard Confessional see related

Is there ever a good reason to leave?

That question has flooded my thoughts and dreams in the past few weeks more than I would like to admit.  While everything else is going on around me, I had that thought on my mind a lot.  It seems my decision has been made. 

Early this evening I received the word that one of my best friends had also made the same decision.  He had amicably parted ways with our senior pastor and heartbreakingly walked away without looking back.  I don't know what the next step for either of us will be... but I do know that it's not going back. 

I'm not sure if it's the "right" thing to do.  Mostly, I haven't had a conversation with God about this church in months.  And when I do...its like those conversations you have with people where you're talking and listening but you're just not connecting.  Some people end relationships over such things, thankfully however, God is not one of those people.  But regardless... it makes it really hard to tell if I have done right by him or if I'm just drowning in the raw emotion of everything. 

I wrote before about the fog.  I feel as if the fog has intensified its hold over me.  Tonight, my friend and I had an honesty talk where he voiced some concern over where I was headed.  It wasn't criticism... but it echoed back to me my own emptiness over the whole thing.  I do not have a place to belong.  You see, since moving out here... I have lost much of my roots.  I have lost friendships to time and distance and I have lost the connection that I ever had with my family over the same thing.  I knew that it would happen and for most of the past year or so it has felt ok.  It's now that I'm just not sure where to land.  I need a home to go to at the end of the day that is stronger than the friendships and relationships that I have now.  Mostly, I need God to show up.  I don't need prayers or pity... or maybe I do and I'm just too proud to want it... I really don't know. 

I'll be honest here... I'm not really sure what is best for me at the moment.  The only thing I know is that I can't go back. 

If you knew, what I knew would you try...

The fog

It's that surreal feeling you get when you're driving into fog or heavy snow.  You look around and all you can see is white.. sometimes if it's really thick you can easily get disoriented. 

I remember one time driving in snow so bad that I couldn't even tell if I was on the road or not.  It was horrifying.  I wondered if that was what crazy people felt like all the time, only... I wondered if they didn't know they were crazy so it felt normal to them.  And then I wondered if I was crazy and didn't know it. 

Right now, I feel like life is similar to that kind of disorientation.  I can't tell which way is forward, which way is sideways and I have no idea when that next killer curve could that I'm about to drive off of and plummet God knows how far down.  It's very surreal.  My whole life I've had a steady direction (or at least since about 7th grade, when God supposedly got a hold of my life and changed me... or was that just the charasmatic camp speaker telling me that?  see, I don't really know).  After that fateful day at summer camp when everything suddenly made sense (or was that just the hormones talking... because the cute college aged male counselor had actually smiled at me 10 minutes before that)... and then I knew I was supposed to give my life over to Jesus.  As you can see, I'm questioning everything I ever believed about Christ and the Bible and living for something bigger than myself. 

There are exactly 2 things I hold certain at this point.  Jesus is God and God is a lot bigger than me.  I'm not sure what my response to that ought to be.  I was always told you should attend all the services of your church and be involved in "ministry".  That means, you ought to work with people somehow to push a sort of agenda.  I'm not going to say if I think that's a good or bad agenda... an agenda is (as defined by webster) a "program of things to be done" and I don't think there is anything inherantly evil in wanting to accomplish something.  After all, we all have lists of things that we need to do everyday and even in the deepest of relationships there is something that we hope to achieve either for the person or ourselves and I don't think that in and of itself can be bad.  It is when the agenda becomes about something it was never supposed to be about that it becomes bad.  So I have to ask myself then, is the agenda that I've been living for since the hormonal age of 13 good or bad?  And regardless of what you may think or say... I don't have a good answer for that yet.  It's part of why I feel like I'm living in a fog. 

In the past year or so I have returned to reality (as in outside the walls of a bubblized collegiate institution) to gain some experiences that have shed some light into the dark recesses of a subculture that I no longer feel in my heart of hearts is really what God has in mind.  In fact, I am going to say this despite the fact that I know I am probably going to offend some people who read this... many of which I don't know (because this xanga seems to have a more extended reach than the friends I know of who read it, as I have gotten several reponses in the form of IMs or comments), I think God is mad at a lot of what is going on.  I haven't been able to bring myself to say that very many times because I want to be careful not to misrepresent Him myself.  I think God gets mad people with selfish agendas who use his name and cause to make themselves feel more powerful or right.  So much of what I have seen in the failure of the church that i attended for the past year and in most of evangelical christianity is the extent to which respected men and women will go to be right. 

I don't want to to be right anymore.  I just want to know truth.  I think I used to be like a lot of these people... conservative in values and politics (which really are not too terribly different), angry about all the bad theology in churches who weren't calvinistic, and hungry to be right and to win arguments.  Then one day I met people.  I saw the oppresed and the weak.  I saw beautiful people who are being abused by the powers that would in churches that I associated myself with.  This isn't just another 20-something idealistic punk kid who feels like yelling at someone and being right again.  This is me trying to make sense out of the terrible mess we've made of truth.  I don't think we're supposed to make ourselves a separate culture that effs with our minds and the minds of our children to hold a perspective that is simply not realistic (and that's another can of worms that you wouldn't want to read right now... but somethign that's been heavy on my mind lately).  Odds are conservative evangelical reader, if you're not seeing what I'm seeing... you might be part of the problem and I'm sorry if that offends you. 

Truth, all truth and nothing but the truth, is whatever is real.  If it doesn't exist, it's not Truth.  I don't know all of the implications of that, but I do know it true. 

Regardless by the end of the night toinight I hope to have settled on a decision that will change the course of the months of my life that will follow in regards to church attendence at the church I have been attending for a while now.  I am deeply heartboken and distressed about having to make this decision and neither choice I have is an easy one.  To be perfectly honest, I am not even sure where God is.  In the past couple of months I have at least found myself able to pray from time to time and I have read through some portions of the book of Ecclesiastes.  It is the most I have been able to feel the existance of my relationship with God.  Regardless, it is time to step up the plate and take responsibility for what I believe is important. 

When the winds of change come, some people build walls and others build windmills.- Chinese Proverb

And here we are...

So, last night... I think I finally arrived at the the climax of this whole thing with church. I realized it was hopeless and I wanted to cry. 

I don't like to call things hopeless because there is enormous potential where God is concerned.  When you look at a person through the eyes of God, you no longer see what they were or where they came from or the weaknesses of them, and you no longer have the tendency to strive... you have all the things that the person could be, you see the good in where they are already and when they don't live up to the potential that is in them... you want to cry.  I imagine God does too.  As my good friend Maryanne said the other night, "I think God is really mad."  I think he might be... only because if I in my humanity am this upset... God in his infinity has got to be infinite times that. 

Before the service, after having heard another round of bad news from Maryanne... I went up to the sanctuary and I played the piano.  I wanted to cry... I couldn't focus my thoughts on anything other than what I had heard, despite the fact that 20 minutes or less before that I had felt fine and had told myself I wasn't going to have a bad night.  It was so hard.  I looked up at the ugly light up cross that sits behind the pulpit.  I really just wanted to cry.  I loved that room... with it's piano and all the things that I had seen it becoming from Ohio.  I saw the people who had made me feel so welcome loving the unlovables in the community.  And I swear I never saw the politics and abuse.  If I had, I knew that God could get rid of it.  I still know that he can.  Unfortunatly, if that's his goal.  I'm almost certain that he doesn't want me to be part of what changes them. 

I have never been one to give up on my "lost cause" of choice.  However, at this point it has become painfully clear that this thing is dying.  If God doesn't do something to stop the downward spiral... it's over.  People can change, because God is a God who can change them.  But if they will not choose to listen to Him, if they will continue to do what they have always done expecting different results, then they will not change... and there is nothing I or anyone else can do to change them.  It's the saddest realization I've ever come to. 

Last night Jordan preached on 2 Tim 2:24-26