About a week ago, I set our DVR to record this CNN report called God’s Warriors. Christiane Amanpour spent 3 nights looking at the big 3: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. For each, she talked about how they think they are the most righteous, the importance of Jerusalem, and the ways that they go about waging war. We just finished the Christian one this evening during dinner. I am embarrassed. I knew it was bad, but not this bad. We both thought that Greg Boyd, who Christiane said all the big wig Christians called a heretic, was the most down to earth guy on the show. Just to show how bad it was, Ron Luce looked quite moderate compared to some of the other guys. These guys are giving Pat Robertson a run for his money. After reading Shane’s book, it was almost horrific to see how much money is spent on getting people to vote one way or another, like enforcing a law in America introduces people to the love that Jesus brought to earth. Now I just want to know what Christiane thought about all of it. She was very unbiased, with a few moments of “Are you serious?” poking through. She’ll never tell though.
I have embarked on ridiculousness. All this has happened in the las couple of weeks. I started a series of 4 online courses that stagger start one per week and end in October. I started back teaching at Las Plumas High School. I added Physics to my list of classes I teach. The AXIOM, our youth center we have been trying to open for a year opened up. I launched the 150 hour website for theAXIOM, www.theaxiom.org. I bought a new guitar (which will never get played).
In the meantime I have been enjoying the sounds of Mae Singularity, Me Without You Brother, Sister, and The Send Cosmos.
Within the next few weeks I will be starting 2 fantasy football teams, setting up meetings as the senior class adviser for what needs to happen this year, quitting my gym membership (because who needs to waste money on that?), reading Acts, sending my broken coffee maker back to Starbucks, squeezing in a few chapters in Sex God by Rob Bell, and stopping by theAXIOM to wish I could stay longer.
Forgive me if I seem silent.
This book has gripped me. It is like I have lived in this shelter, and this book has deconstructed the shelter. And now, ideas that were just small inlets of light into life are vivid realities, all around me. I’m gripped. It’s like I’ve realized all of these personal and corporate limitations on God, and now that I know that I’ve been suffocating myself, I need to shake it off. It’s a process that I need, and I can’t even explain it in a way that is going to make sense, but this book just makes sense.
Velvet Elvis made me think, “Where was all this info before, and why didn’t my sunday school teachers know this stuff?” Then Blue Like Jazz vocalized the things I felt inside in a way that led me to tears as I dealt with the words on the page breathing life into thoughts that had just been bouncing around inside my head, like Donald Miller was speaking for me. And this book just ripped the blinders off. It was like here are some ideas, these are how these ideas worked for me, and now, these ideas are real, and this is what it looks like to take Jesus at his word. I finished it this morning, and I brought it with me to Mugshots in case I needed to quote stuff from it, but I can’t think of just one thing. I guess the most real part to me, the part that sets the stage for everything else is in the beginning when he talks about how we hear over and over how people’s lives were going to crap, and then they met Jesus, and they just can’t thank him enough for pulling them out of that life. But when you grow up in the church, and you hear that story over and over, this new life doesn’t really feel so much like life. “If God was as boring as Sunday morning, I wasn’t sure I wanted to have anything to do with him.” He goes through what it was like to really follow Jesus, and as he is introing this idea, he says “…me, I had it together. I used to be cool. And then I met Jesus and he wrecked my life.”
As I process this stuff, it starts to freak me out, but I hope for fire. I hope that I live in this community, and the sparks catch kindling, and another world clashes with this one.