In order to discover new lands, one must be willing to boldly lose sight of the shore for a very long time...
I read this the other day and it reminds me of this picture. I feel so out of place in so many ways these days. I see the boat out there on the water and yet I am here on the shore. The longer I stay here, the more internal frustration seems to gnaw at my spiritual and emotional guts. I used to sing a song in the renewal season called There has To Be More...I ache that so deeply right now. There is so much that is attached to this following Jesus thing that seems to be dead weight and it's been sinking me for a long time, like cement shoes.
If I hear or see another Christian push their over zealous faith on a person that has not come to Jesus yet, in order to make another notch in their evangelical witness belt, I am going to get nauseous. Is this really what Jesus had in mind by loving our neighbors? Religiously befriending them in order to begin to spiritually seduce them? Friendship evangelism or evangelism as it is so often pushed on us seems to me to be so painfully disingenuous.
The whole Amwayish salesman like methodology is giving me cramps! I am in need of some serious colon blow when it comes to this stuff. The programs, the latest religious hype, the gimmicks, the books, the ooey gooey spiritual blabbering, the airy fairy lah lah land charismatic prayer warriors stuff, the high pressured emotional spin doctoring, the fear mongering and forced conversion by the tip of the truth sword is mud to me, waist deep mud.
Please, there has got to be something more than a disjointed, once a week hand shake, coma inducing sermonizing, plastic smiles and back of the head felowshipping to this church thing. As a pastor I am looking around and wondering what on earth are we really doing and if we stopped doing it tomorrow would any of this really matter?
Oh God I got to get to that sail boat out there, please give me whatever it takes to get there...
2 comments:
"A certain glorious sorrow must ever mingle with our life;
all our actual is transcended by our possible;
our visionary faculty is an overmatch for our experience;
like the caged bird, we break ourselves against the bars of the finite, with a wing that quivers for the infinite."
James Martineau, Hours of Thoughts on Sacred Things, 1879
I love this quote Dad, thanks for posting it by the way. The frustrating thing about this experience is how so much of what Jesus taught flies in the face of our most common experience. Whether it be about prayer and its possibilities, faith, the power of the gospel on and in lives, the community of faith or the nature of new life. So often it seems those truths are meant for a new creation not this old creation and yet we know that's not true. So we end up living in this place of tension that wont allow us to accept life as it normally flows and yet run up against the seemingly impossible in matters of living out the new creation. The two collide and the end result is so often, not like I read in the unfolding story in the new testament. That is my cage.
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