I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn.
I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I’ve relaxed enormously since then. I’m the one who gets to say that, and not someone else.
Once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices…. Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end.
The abundance of our lives is not determined by how long we live, but how well we live. Christ makes abundant life possible if we choose to live it now.
I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that’s entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.
We’re children of God through our blood kinship with Christ. We’re also sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad.
The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.
It does seem to me that at least some of us have made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we are running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see the least.
I read more widely. I made friends more widely. I wore more red. I stayed home on Sundays. I did things that were never in the realm of possible things to do before. That was a real desert experience for me.
I found myself in a maze where I’d taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn’t doing particularly well for myself or my friends or my family, and I even found that the work for God was taking me away from God.
Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity.
Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.
I am always surprised by people who speak of faith as if it happens in the air somewhere. Our bodies are God’s best way of getting to us. Revelation begins in the flesh.
