Okay…deep breath…

Wow, this is the first time I’ve written anything other than a song or a sorry-I-haven’t-called-you-back email in about a year. Ouch.

I’m sitting here in my new house in Petaluma, CA. The night is warm and dry, and the air clings to you in thin layers of heat. A musical artist I’ve just discovered, Page France, is playing over the click of my typing. It’s an amazing song, we need more writing like this. Here’s the current song that has me in goosebumps so you can listen while you’re reading:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbX1v2HZOmM

It’s been a while, so I hope I don’t drone. I hope this makes sense and I hope you’ll give me the space to say what I need. It’s been a long road that’s brought me this far, and I have a feeling it’s going to be a long walk home. But it’s scenic, there’s trees and stars and sunsets, and maybe you can walk with me and we can see some neat sights along the way.

A few days ago I took a trip to the coast. The water was beautiful, but freezing cold, ice cold. The kind of cold that makes you feel like you’ve been shot when you step into it. Sure was pretty though.

This would be the perfect time for a relationship allegory, but instead I’ll just say that I tried to go body surfing, and it really, really was not very pleasant. This is also literal, and not metaphorical. Ok, moving on. What I’m REALLY trying to get at is I haven’t been to the beach in years, and I believe it’s a place where I can really get a connection to the divine. There’s something about endless water and real air that reminds me I’m not home yet, I haven’t arrived yet, I’m small still, and there are still a lot of questions that are yet unanswered.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about God. I’m trying to unlearn a lot of well-intentioned theology that had a lot of passion without a lot of biblical knowledge, and to start over with some basics: Love, joy, peace, foundational things that were here BEFORE sin and wickedness and judgement and will be here long before they’re gone. I guess I feel like I’ve been hit with the latter three all of my life and the former are just starting to catch up with me. To be honest, it’s been some of the most clarifying few months of my life. It’s like, “Oh, this is what following the greatest Being in the universe is supposed to be about. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

Things have changed now. It’s amazing how your life looks different when you have a chance to sit back and take a real, long, hard look at it. Echoes of right and wrong still linger in the sermons I listened to and used to preach, but since It was first spoken, the True message has gotten distant and distorted, like an echo in the Grand Canyon that, when it finally comes back, is just a murmur compared to what it was before.

Am I saying everything I’ve learned was wrong? No. I think a lot of it was right, and based out of good intentions. But I do think that if you trace communication between God and man down the line — Adam and Eve: fellowship in the garden, Abram: talks occasionally, then the prophets: tell people I said this, and then 400 years of silence, and then an outburst of redemption with the cross, and then some disciples spreading the word, and then…the Bible, it almost feels like God has been getting further and further away from us. Or maybe He’s just been pushed that way. As if other men, be they well-intentioned or not, have been filtering His Words through their logic for centuries, and we’re at the tail end of the Grand Canyon, straining and trying to live our lives by this muddled murmur that we’re hearing.

By muddled murmur, of course, I’m not talking about the Bible, but I’m certainly talking about the majority of our religious culture that we’ve grown up listening to and developing our behavior around. A culture that has taken the Bible and, with the best of intentions, has built a large tower-like building AROUND the Bible and has stood back and called the whole construction the Bible, instead of just the words written in the Book in the innermost room of their complex structure.

What am I saying? Whew. I guess what I’m saying is it’s time for me to start questioning the answers I’ve been given, without dismissing the One that created me to have this inquisitive mind. I feel like this is a time where I step back and look at God myself, like I can finally climb above the pollution of the city and look at all the stars in their clarity for the first time. God is clearer now, and at the same time, more obscure than ever. Maybe the right word isn’t obscure. Maybe it’s just…amazing. Mysterious. Awe-inspiring. Wild. But good. And yes, in some ways, different than what I’ve been taught.

That’s kind of the purpose of this blog–to ask the questions that need to be asked without saying I have the answers, talking about ideas for answers, but letting all of my readers decide for themselves what they think. Because outside of God Himself, and the Book that He’s written, everything–everything–is, and should be, up for questioning. History is no argument for right or wrong. It’s amazing how long you can do something wrong if you don’t know what the right thing is. Do you know how long I lived without glasses without realizing I needed them? I was sitting less than 3 feet from the TV when my parents finally decided something was up. Love you, Mom and Dad (really, I do).

Ok, that’s it. This all might sound like a fairy tale to you, something that I’ve made up, something outside your realm of reality, but get away from the city, just once, and look up at the sky. Maybe stars will change your mind. It’s late, go to bed. Good night!

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