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“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

Finding My Place

George 0 Comments

This excerpt from iMonk’s blog grabbed me:

A healthy Christian person must find a place where they can be themselves, and that place won’t be identical to our definition of “success.” Even if we succeed, the experiences that bring make us who we really are won’t be found in the spotlight of success. They will be found in God’s version of our wilderness.

That place may be a nursing home, or a tiny college, or a farm or a forgotten mission to the poor. It may be in another universe from the latest conference or well known ministry. It may have no potential for anything but small acts done with great love. If that is so, you should embrace it as your place. Yours, and a gift to you.

Is God really enough?

George 0 Comments

In a recent sermon, Pastor Steve Elliott shared this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“I have discovered that having God is enough.”

Steve went on to say, in part:. “If you find your meaning in work, family, et al, when it all goes away where will your find your meaning? God gives us himself. It is more important to have Him than our circumstances. God presence is all the meaning we need.”

If you are like me, your response to the question “Is God enough?” is a reflexive “Yes, of course.” For Christians, the question and answer falls into a category of “how could you answer any other way”. The problem isn’t getting the answer correct, the problem is living our lives consistent with our answer. I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks.

Here are some ideas, quotes etc I have come across in the course of considering “Is God really enough?”

It seems to me that we can only truly know that God is enough when we are faced with the gallows/altar (i.e. Bonhoeffer, or Abraham sacrificing Isaac). In the absence of the gallows (hopelessness), we can only say we believe God is really enough. We will cling to our illusion of independence and self sufficiency until there is no other choice. Even in our sincere belief that God is enough.

“We are the ones who appear to not believe in the God we say is real. We are the ones who seem to be forcing ourselves to believe with bigger shows, bigger celebrities and bigger methods of manipulation.”

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/reatheism

1 My heart is not proud, LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.

2 But I have calmed myself
and quieted my ambitions.
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.

3 Israel, put your hope in the LORD
both now and forevermore. Ps 131

God gives us hope by meeting us not at the lofty summits of human achievement but at the point where all purely human hopes have shrunk and collapsed; it is here that exhausted human hope can be remade out of inexhaustible possibilities of God’s love.

(Jeremy S. Begbie, Resounding Truth)

Parable of the Japanese Shrine

George 0 Comments

While reading “Here Comes Everybody”, I came across an illustration that I believe is more useful as a parable. Think about it.

The Ise Shrine, a Shinto shrine in Ise, Japan, has occupied its current site for over thirteen hundred years. Despite its, advanced age, however, UNESCO, the UN cultural agency, refused to list the shrine in its list of historic places. Why? Because the shrine is made out of wood, never a material prized for millennium-scale structural integrity, and so it can’t be thirteen hundred years old. The Imbe priests who keep the shrine know that too, but they have a solution. They periodically tear the shrine to the ground, and then, using wood cut from the same forest that the original was built from, they rebuild the shrine to the same plan, on an adjacent spot. They do this every couple of decades and have done it sixty-one times in a row. (The next rebuilding will be in 2013.) Because the purpose of the shrine is in part to delineate the difference between sacred and ordinary space, from their point of view they have a thirteen-hundred-year old shrine, built out of renewable materials. This argument didn’t wash with UNESCO; the places they list enjoy the solidity of edifice, not of process.

A wrecked castle that has stood unused for five hundred years makes the cut; a shrine that is rebuilt once a generation for a thousand years doesn’t.