God talk

A Candle in the Wind, now a statue in the park.

12 years ago now, I began a personal quest. Like most quests, most books, most major life changes it began with some painful experiences of disunity. People who loved me suddenly hated me, supporters became detractors. The struggle was about religious views, things I had been taught all my life that flowed through me with ease and made life understandable were causing others who had different life views to be alienated. Sadly, all those people whom I loved and cared for are no longer in my life, but God, as He often does, provided a way forward, a rescue of sorts, and a place to reflect upon my little crisis.

The issues were parsed to simplicity, two simple but enormous questions emerged that have settled into my mind and heart as the rudders for the remainder of my life. What is the nature of God like, and what is this Good News that He announced to the world in the New Covenant? With those two surgical instruments I was able to go back through my spiritual, emotional, relational life to cut and to heal, knowing that my conflict were being experienced in many similar ways in this world of evangelical thinking.

Now that I have some new answers and have left some old ways of thinking behind, strangely I do not have much inclination to fight for my new ways of thinking, nor do I have much desire to try to create healthier patterns in what I now believe are dying ways of life. I am, however, still called to share and comfort people raised in that same world, many of whom have never questioned the boxes that provide the limits of their views. I cannot really tell the old, old story, when I have some new, new exciting ways of telling that story.

Bridge building is my necessary task, and I am back at it tomorrow.