Listening To The Story

I apologize for my lack of effort here. Just not motivated to write and busyness, sickness and family issues have taken a toll on my effort and time available.

I still plan on writing some more on The Expanding Jesus, but not right now... for now let me leave you with some interesting comments from an interview with Madeline L'Engle. I have never read any of her books, but they are on my wish list now! She is a prolific author of children's fiction, poetry and theology.

• God comes to us as a human baby--a complete rejection of power. Even while Jesus is healing people, he is continually throwing the worldly power he is being offered away. They want to make him king. He runs.

• One Sunday about six years ago, I was visiting an Episcopal church in New York so low it's sort of underneath the ocean. A man stood up. "I hope this is appropriate to ask. I was an abused child. I'm terrified of being an abusive father. I need help and prayer." I knew then it was a church I could stay in. Because people are willing to be vulnerable, this church is very different. Sometimes it gets messy, but that's okay. People are not afraid to ask questions. We're able to admit we're all broken, we've all made terrible mistakes, we're all in need, and we all want things we don't have.

• It's a church in which a mother whose twenty-seven-year-old son has died is free to say, "People think I'm terrible because I can't pray." And I can reassure her, "You don't have to pray. We're praying for you. That's what the body of Christ is about." Many churches don't have that kind of freedom. I have a friend who comments, "At AA groups, I can admit my faults. At church nobody wants to hear them." What an indictment of the church!

• Instead of thanking Jesus for dying for me, I want to rejoice that Jesus was born for us, to thank Jesus for showing us how to live. The incarnation is incomprehensible love. It will never be explained.

• As a younger adult, I lived in the realm of proof. I'd had a good education, and I wanted everything explained. Now that I'm older, it's much easier to believe in--and accept--the impossible. I am able to accept more completely the idea that God loves me, no matter what I do. I have stopped wanting certainty, which will never come. Instead, I look for those things God gives us as affirmations.

• If something goes wrong, I still yell at God. But at some point I move out of this childish prayer and acknowledge, "OK, it's your universe."

• Nothing we do changes God--it just changes what we think about God. When we discovered that the earth is not the center of the universe, it didn't change God. It just changed us, and what we think. We have to be willing to allow what we think to change.