"Just Cruisin"

Just Cruising Along, No Heavy Sayings Okay?

By Dan McDonald

 

            Sometimes you just need to get away.  Today was one of those days.  Actually I needed to pick up some records from a county courthouse for a house I used to live in in the southern regions of Pawnee County Oklahoma.  So I drove 60 miles to Pawnee, Oklahoma the county seat and probably home to at least or at least almost a thousand people.  It has a county courthouse, a casino, and Click’s Steakhouse.  Click’s is probably one of the five or six most famous restaurants in Oklahoma once you get out of the Oklahoma City and Tulsa metropolitan areas.  I’d been there when I served jury duty back when I lived in the county’s southeastern area.  At noontime when juries recess to eat, the restaurant has a waiting line.  But if you go about 2:30 in the afternoon there may be ten or eleven souls in the place, sometimes counting a friendly waitress who ain’t running her butt off like she had to at lunch time.  So that is the time to go to Click’s and enjoy the look of a ceiling made of corrugated metal like a farmer would put atop what we in Oklahoma call a “pole barn.”  We called those “pole barns” by a different name in Illinois where I grew up.  They were just “metal sheds.”  You may have seen those sheets of corrugated metal with the ribs and little valleys running lengthways on them.  That is what Click’s has for a ceiling.  It is better they say than asbestos.  But when you get your steak you will understand why no one complains about atmosphere.  The fixins (that would be side dishes you know), they (be or is can’t figure out the correct verb here) be alright too.  I imagine some of you’se guys(that’s Illinoisan not Okie) will just have to take my word for it.  If you are from Oklahoma, you may have already eaten there and if you haven’t just start asking somebody near you if they have and soon enough you will find someone that has eaten at Click’s.  They'll tell you I suspect that it ain't bad which means it probably is one of the best steaks they ever ate.

            The first place I went to in Pawnee today wasn’t Click’s.  It was the courthouse.  It is a nice courthouse.  It was in style back in 1920.  The doors are all shut in the hallways, and you wonder if there is anybody behind the doors going to the County Clerk’s office, or the Treasurer’s office.  They are all up on the second floor.  There is one elevator, but most everybody goes up the stairs built in 1920’s style.  It is kind of interesting to walk into a courthouse and discover that the main entrance on the ground level has a “Four-H” club area but you hardly notice any county offices on the ground level.  They are on the second floor.  I noticed some monuments on the pathway to the county courthouse but I wanted to get my business done first, so after I got my business taken care of, I went back to the monuments.  It was 9-11 today.  I have mixed feelings about patriotism.  I sort of have some feelings about patriotism similar to Mark Twain and Samuel Johnson.  Johnson said it first.  Twain repeated it enough that people attributed it to him.  They said, anyway that “patriotism is a refuge for scoundrels.”  I am though an old crotchety man.  But when I looked at the names on the monuments of all those young men who paid the price for serving their nation in a war, then I could not dishonor their name. Whether I agree with the war or not, each of those young men had a Mama and a Papa.  When the young man went to the Army his Mama went into the bedroom and probably made sure his bed was made just so right.  She wanted to make sure that bed was made just so right for when he came home.  Then someone from the military came to their house.  She looked into that bedroom and cried and couldn’t do anything but make that bed wanting to believe she could do something to bring him home if only for one more visit.  A little brother or sister would peer into the same room imagining remembering him.  I’m a crotchety old man but I can’t bring myself to speak arrogantly or hardly to speak at all in front of a granite and marble marker with the names of boys who never returned to the made beds mama had left for them.  As much as I am an old crotchety man without a sense of patriotism, I just think of those names and the heartbroken mamas, sweethearts, little brothers, and sisters.  I even took some photographs of the marble markers:

 

            I didn’t get up thinking anything of 9-11, but I guess at that marker in Pawnee County Oklahoma an old crotchety man had a change of heart.  I guess patriotism is still a refuge for scoundrels, but if you going to lose your old crotchety man status you might as well be a scoundrel.  Don’t play Lee Greenwood or I’m liable to just post Buffy Ste. Marie singing in a “you tube” version of “Universal Soldier.”  But not today the crotchety old man gave way to thinking of mama's making and keeping a bed for her boy that will never sleep there ever again.  We'll keep building monuments with the names of those boys and now more and more often our dearest ladies as well until a day comes when swords will be beaten into plowshares and when young ladies and young men pick flowers for loved ones they are going to hug and kiss instead of flowers for a grave over which they will weep.  I will respect them that they died, I just want to make sure come the next war that we don't send them to die unless it is absolutely necessary.  I hope you understand that is my way of supporting the troops.

            While I was in Pawnee I wanted to get one more photograph in honor of one of the town’s famous folk.  Even a town of a thousand gets somebody sort of famous.  You young ones that wear cell phones on your ear like grandma wore ear rings, may not realize that back in 1930 or something Dick Tracy had a watch that he could use as a phone.  Dick Tracy had the first mobile phone back in the comics a long time ago.  The guy who created that comic was Chester Gould born in the year 1900 and he came from Pawnee, the county seat of Pawnee County in the Great State of Oklahoma, and he was born here before it was even a state.  He imagined cell phones as wrist watches on the arm of Dick Tracy when he was chasing Flat Top and all the other bad eggs threatening society.  The city of Pawnee has a mural just around the corner from their “Subway” sandwich shop.  I had to get a picture of that too.

The captions have the little boy saying, "Little crimes lead to big crimes" and Dick Tracy says, "Crime doesn't pay."

There was one other photograph I got in Pawnee.  I took a wrong turn trying to get to the mural with Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy on it.  I had to go a few blocks out of my way, but it was worth it when I saw what seemed to me to be the neatest outdoor church sign I had ever seen.

 

                                   The sign said:  "This sign broken, come inside for message."

I enjoyed my trip to Pawnee.  I took some coconut cream pie with me after my Rib-eye at Click’s Restaurant.  I got a haircut and stopped at some stores back in Tulsa later.  Lately I’ve figured I’d written enough words to get me almost into trouble with too many Facebook and Twitter friends, old and new.  I know sometimes I say too much.  That’s when maybe I just need to get out.  You may see the best idea for a church sign you ever saw in the most unexpected place when you make that wrong turn that turned out to be just the right turn.  I’ll be in Dallas the next four days with good friends, two former pastors, new friends as well as old.  I plan on letting the emails and Facebook posts and Twitter Tweets pile up.  But there are so many of you out there old and new that mean so very much to me.  This morning I was sort of afraid I was going to ruin that by talking too much.  Then I got out and my perspective it is a lot better now.  So, if you are getting stale and spending lots of time on your social media, take a journey to a little town with nothing in it except what you really need.  I’m signing out.  I’ll be back tweeting and posting and blogging Monday.  Lord willing, that is.

 

Dan McDonald.

What to make of his touching a leper

What to make of this touching a Leper?

Written by Dan McDonald

            I am trying to learn to blog.  If I read enough of my newfound millennial friends’ blogs they might lead me by example.  In a pre-cell phone era long ago in a forgotten galaxy (somebody made a star wars comment) I wrote essays in philosophy classes and argued for perspectives in history classes.  I thought I was heading to seminary to study theology where I would write more papers arguing for the summation of all things pertaining to a subject.  That isn’t the way of the blog.  A blog, well it can be just about anything, but usually it is something personal rather than detached.  It is an insight instead of the summation of all the evidence heretofore presented for the jurors to decide.  Perhaps it is expressed best by one of the millennial bloggers whose blog is among my favorite to read.  She presents it as “my truths.”  The philosopher-historian-theologian in me always wanted “The, with a long e at the end of the in “the truth.” But the millennial blogger I mention is content to speak of “my truth” as if in the end it is God who grades our thoughts and determines which ones are “the truth” out of all the writings we present as “my truth”, even when we pontificate as if we are speaking “the truth.”  Another millennial has reminded me that we all get to have our assumptions challenged in life.  I am beginning to learn that there is a reason for wisdom to be associated with old age.  It is not only that we have so many experiences by that time, but also because it takes that long for the children to grow up who will lead us.  I really am not trying to be funny.  The children of a next generation have insights we could never have as part of our own generation and they speak them as a matter of fact, and if we listen in our old age; fresh thoughts will take shape because a child has been appointed to lead us.  I am reaching the age when I am growing content to realize this is becoming their world now and I am here more for the ride and to encourage them and not to tear them down.

            Every once in a while I get a thought bouncing about my noggin and for me that sort of means I have to write, like when an allergy gets up there and I have to sneeze.  A thought in the noggin and I imagine I am called to write something.  Once in a while it works, any time else the readers wisely move on to the next blog.  These millennial kids have to budget their time.  In order for them to have as much time to spend on being narcissistic as my generation claims them to be, they have to keep their time reading bad blogs to a minimum.  So they concentrate their time on good blogs and then spend time developing their skills in narcissism.  (The first clear cut example of sarcasm is a sign to get to the real message of your blog, so here goes).

            I have been thinking a lot lately about how Jesus reached out and touched a leper saying he was willing to heal him.  If you want to read the story for yourself it begins at Mark, chapter one and verse forty.  Otherwise you will trust yourself to a guy, who usually has at least “some” and most often “several” errors he misses in proof-reading the things he writes.  We could look at so many things about how Jesus heals the leper. But really one thing captured my attention.  Jesus touched him and then healed him.

            That has always been something of a mystery to me.  For if we know our Old Testament Scriptures the moment someone touched an unclean person, and a leper was an unclean person, that person became unclean.  What about Jesus?  He touched this unclean leper and the leper became clean.  The woman with that blood issue touched the tassel on his rabbi’s cloak and her issue was healed.  How did Jesus remain clean?  That was the question that forged my former answers to such passages.  Surely it was because he was our appointed Savior.  Surely it was because he was fully God as well as fully man.  That was my answer to the mystery for all my years.

            But lately as the lady in her newsroom told me, we all have to have our assumptions challenged.  One day, I don’t know why it seemed that as I was thinking about this leper that Jesus healed I thought of how the text never tried to explain how Jesus kept from becoming unclean.  Then one day a new thought challenged everything I had ever assumed about the text.  What if, instead of Jesus remaining clean while he healed everything around him that was unclean . . . what if he actually did not remain clean, but instead became unclean?  Does that sound like something horribly sacrilegious?  Thoughts began to accumulate and encircle this seeming contradiction to my more safe more accepted perspective I had always embraced.  I had imagined that the one solid truth to be accepted was Jesus had the power to touch a leper and remain clean.  But here was this thought, so unordinary and so seemingly sacrilegious.  I tried to put it away from my mind.

But I read from Hebrews 5:8 that though he were a son (God’s son) yet he learned obedience through the things he suffered.  I learned, by reading St. Paul’s gentle letter to the Philippians; that he learned this obedience and then he went the distance to the point of death, even death on a cross.  (Philippians 2:8)  Then I read Isaiah speaking of how he looked at a suffering servant whom we despised and esteemed not.  In fact Isaiah’s suffering servant became acquainted with grief.  For that reason when we saw him, we hid our faces from him.  I know that is not our response when we put on our Sunday school tinted shades.  For then we talk about sweet Jesus.  But if we saw him like Isaiah or the disciples saw him, we would all have hidden our faces from him.  He had become something horrid to look at.

            That is when I saw something in the leper account I had never seen before.  Jesus touched him and became unclean.  Could that be the key to understanding the Gospel’s description of Jesus’ touching a leper.  Maybe that was his mission on earth, nothing else makes sense when you think of the Gospel message.  He came to heal the broken, to protect the bruised reed, to be legs for the lame, eyes for the blind, ears for the deaf, healing for the leper, and righteousness for the depraved and the sinner.  How did he do it?  He did it by reaching out and touching a leper and internalizing into his own body and blood our infirmities, weaknesses, sins, and grief and owning them as his own.  He set his face thus to Jerusalem, to Golgotha, to the cross and to death.  He had taken everything of ours worthy and descending towards death and made it his own.  Here was this one priest of a different priestly order than all others who presented no bulls or lambs or goats for our sins but his own body and blood.  He spent a lifetime gathering into his own body and blood, the corruptions of a human race.  He learned obedience through suffering.  He learned obedience through such suffering even to his death on a cross.  He became acquainted with our grief, and even became sin for us.  This is how we understand the Gospels.  The Son of God is taking man’s troubles into his own soul and taking them into his own body and blood.  He is taking them in until the day comes when he will go all the way in his obedience to the point of death, even death on a cross.

            The ancient theologians called his becoming man an assuming of the flesh.  They agreed that if Christ did not assume a true humanity in all its faculties then we remained in our sins.  So he assumed our nature and then he assumed and gathered into his body and blood, our sins, so that he became sin for us.

            By the time he reached the Via Dolorosa, the path of suffering remembered in the ceremonies marking the Stations of the Cross he must have been feeling as full of our sins as a pregnant woman trying to give birth, feeling as if she were near ready to explode.  I am a man I know nothing of such a feeling.  But our Lord Jesus was also a man but he knew the fullness of such a feeling multiplied I would dare to say.  He now contained in himself the sins of the world which would be nailed to the cross in him.  He had gathered the pain, anguish, sin, death, and grief of a human race for all his years so that he now moved forward to his date with destiny, his death on a cross.

            But Jesus was a mediator.  He represented not one party but two parties.  He represented man in all his ugliness and sin, in his weakness and infirmity, the unclean and the truly arrogant claiming cleanness.  But also he represented the living God, who wished salvation for all men and that no man would perish.  Our Lord Jesus had given his perfect obedience to him as well so that he who became sin for us never sinned.  There were twins vying to be born from him.  For even if all of our sin and death had accumulated in Jesus, so too was God’s desire for us to know life and to know life eternally.  Jesus learned obedience in his suffering, obedience to the point of death, death on a cross.  He suffered on the cross.  He died.  One of the twins trying to be born died with him.  Our sins, our death, our infirmities, our evil that had yearned to be born in the Son of God died as he died for them.  For three days the universe mourned the death of the Son of God.  But then his body and blood’s other twin rose from the death which had encompassed it on Calvary.  This was the Christ representing the interests of God who yearned for men and women of all nations, tribes, and tongues to participate in divine life.  The divine life energized the dead Son of God, for it had been gathered into his body and blood as well.  It had taken time to mourn for a solemn death.  But on the third day He rose and no stone could entomb him.  He burst the gates of hell wide open and led captive saints freely into the celestial city.

Our sins were no longer there, neither were our infirmities, nor was there any sign of death, just five wounds to hands, feet and side.  So on a Sunday morning when bread and wine are set apart to remember and reenact this death and be presented to us, I will partake remembering it was my sins that died in his death that he had taken into his own body and blood.  It is also the divine life that God wanted to give us when our sins had separated us from his desire for our good.  In the same body and blood in which our sins had been gathered so that they might die in death’s death in his death and in that same body and blood was contained also the desire of God than no man would perish but that all would come to partake of divine life.  I will eat and drink for I will partake of the divine life still contained in the body and blood of our dear Lord and Savior.  The cup from which I will drink will have no death in it like the cup he partook, but only divine life.  I will partake realizing the amazing truth that in his body and blood I died, so did my sins, so did death; and in his body and blood an eternal divine life was issued to me as a replacement for my sin and my death.

Now I understand how the leper was healed.  The divine life reached out and touched him, even as the Son of God absorbed all that needed healed within his own body and blood.  There is but one more truth to be understood and this lesson of the touched leper can be finished.  The ones who are now in Christ, who are members of His body and are in fellowship with brethren everywhere in Him are part of his body.  The High priest still is collecting the sins and grief of a world of sinners and making intercession on their behalf.  He is collecting the burden of sin and grief through men and women in his body who are filling out the suffering of Christ upon the earth until the day when sin and death will be banished from this divine blood purchased earth of ours.  We are roaming the earth as members in him and are taking in the sufferings of others and are crying out to heaven for our fellow men and women on this earth.  In the heavenly places saints, spirits of just men made perfect, martyrs, apostles, our Lord’s mother are all likewise praying.  All these prayers are captured up in the body and blood of Jesus Christ so that even if they are too deep for words our prayers are given voice by Our Lord seated upon the mercy seat in the highest realm of heaven.  He needs to present no words for arguments, but five glorified wounds.  He prays.  On earth we also pray for mysteriously we are his body on earth.  We fill out his suffering by taking to him all our desires to see men and women around us know life and that the sort of life that is described by our participation in divine life.  The leper knew the power of the divine life.  So do we, who have been granted life in Christ and to know likewise Christ in our lives.  That is my truth that I have learned in a Savior’s touch of a leper.  One day we all will be able to greet that same leper with a sanctified and holy kiss.  But for now we simply remember this:  The leper’s uncleanness did not just disappear.  It was taken up by the one who owned the leper’s cause as his very own.  The leper’s healing flowed from the mystery of divine life given to us.  I cannot really explain it, but this is my belief and my truth.  I hope you will find it worthy to be a part of your belief and truth as well.

 

Connections Part II -Boomers, Millennials Despite

Connections – Part II

A Boomer Regretting Purity Codes and Rejoicing in Millennials.

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            A motivational speaker I saw years ago on television repeated a famous phrase to his audience saying, “If something is important enough to be done, it is important enough to be done well.”  He then told how he didn’t like that saying because it kept too many people from working to the point that they could do something well.  He liked instead to say, “If something is important enough to be done well, it is important enough to be done poorly until it can be done well.”

            I am by age, a boomer.  Lately have been reading blogs mostly by millennials.  I am not an expert on millennials.  What I have been reading may not be typical of what millennials believe.  I am like someone that happened to jump into the Atlantic Ocean.  That would not make me an expert on the Atlantic Ocean, for how I would describe the Atlantic Ocean after diving into it would be dependent upon whether I jumped in near the shores of Jamaica, or if I dove in near the northeast coastline of Newfoundland.  I would only be able to tell you about the Atlantic from diving into one small portion of that ocean.  That is about how well I know millennials.  I’ve read some blogs and have felt a connection to those whom I have read.

            I am trying to write honestly in this blog while writing with two groups of people in mind.  I want to write something to encourage some newfound millennial acquaintances and I want to write to my fellow boomers because ultimately I believe both the boomer and the millennial need each other for the sake of the cause of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I say this despite some tendency toward very different understandings of life in Christ.  I and many of my old Boomer friends tend to be conservative, traditionalist, and patriarchal.  Many of the millennials I am reading announce themselves as progressive, feminist, and Christian.  But I think I am learning that a lot of differences matter less if you are willing to get to know a person enough to get to like them.

            I have met most of my newfound millennial friends on Twitter.  I am only on Twitter because I read a blog that blessed me.  I wrote a blog in response to that blog, and felt I should at least tell the woman about the blog I had written in regard to her blog.  I didn’t want to write what would look like an advertisement for my blog in her comments section.  Her blog site pretty much narrowed down my writing to her through the use of a Twitter account.  I joined Twitter to send her the tweet and signed up to follow her tweets in order for my tweet to get to her.  She responded kindly to my blog and even signed up to follow me on Twitter.  I wasn’t sure about the Twitter thing so at first I tried not to bother her too much.  But she would tweet to those following her about ordinary things in life, with warmth and a sense of humor.  Once in a while we had little conversations.  I think my favorite went something like this.  She was in Tennessee on a hot day, but is a gal normally living in a cooler climate.  She tweeted, “Who invented the air conditioner and has he been sainted yet?”  When it didn’t seem like anybody was going to respond I tweeted “I don’t know who invented it, but I am sure he did more good in that invention for more people than I ever will help in my life.”  Being something of a lover of trivia I couldn’t leave well enough alone and looked up air conditioning on Wikipedia.  I tweeted to her that it looked like “Willis Carrier invented the air conditioner but hasn’t been sainted.  I added though that it took Joan nearly 500 years to be sainted.  I still couldn’t leave the thread alone and wrote back, “Isn’t getting your name in Wikipedia sort of like being sainted?”  She wrote back, “Ha! Ha! St. Willis of Wikipedia!”  When you have an exchange like that, where there is a sense of warmth (or coolness since we were talking air conditioning) and also with a bit of a sense of humor, you will probably be inclined to speak with some kindness even if you later discover you disagree with the person about something.  You won’t get in a hurry to throw bitter insinuations against the person.  Instead even if you will discover something you have to disagree about, you will want to express your viewpoint without having to forfeit the level of friendship you have come to know in your comments toward one another.  I know the Scriptures speak of how two must be agreed to walk together, but I think the converse is sometimes just about as true.  If we allow ourselves to walk with someone for a while we may well discover what we have to actually share and enjoy with one another.  Once we start walking together we will discover the reasons we were meant to walk together.

            I don’t know exactly how to describe this first of persons I met on Twitter.  An acquaintance is one to whom we offer respect and privacy knowing that we are not yet ready to regard each other as friends or kindred spirits.  Sometimes it is best to offer one the respect for an acquaintance than to too quickly speak of them as friends.  Friendship comes with a commitment cultivated by an understood invitation to companionship in this joined journey we call life. But neither do I wish to lightly dismiss the warmth of humanity I have discovered in reading and feeling her words.  I have also experienced kindness from others among my newly found friendships or acquaintances.  Friend or acquaintance, mostly acquaintance I think but friendship only degrees away.  So if I say acquaintance think it not for lack of enjoyment of what each of you have given to me; and if I describe you as a friend think me not expressing empty flattery.  Maybe this first of persons I have met on Twitter is here especially to remind me that whenever I poke out words on my keyboard to fly into the outer space of the internet, then the one reading these words will be a human being.  Some of you may not remember a borrowed VHS from a video story saying, “Please be kind, rewind.”  Such words are perhaps still good words to place upon a keyboard, or at least in my mind to be remembered when pressing a send sign.  “Please be kind, rewind; another human on the other end of this line.”

            One of the reasons I am a traditionalist is because the Christian tradition is like a meandering river flowing through the ages from its source to its destiny, soaking up human experience and offering water to thirsty souls each time it cuts its channel across the banks of humanity.  Tradition is not first and foremost something at which you point and say “tradition teaches us” as if tradition is merely meant to be a trump card in a debate.  Tradition is never that simple.  We boomers, we Evangelicals made some big mistakes in our emphases that we expressed.  You millennials have inherited the debris we have left behind.  One day in church history readings our descendants will look with strange faces and say what . . . at what you may now say what  the, you know what I mean?  Tradition weaves our human story the good and the bad to be learned from our errors and our contributions.  Tradition is a sacred stream cut along the banks of human flesh linking our source, our places, and our destiny.  Our descendants will wonder how foolish we boomers must have been to create our varied versions of the purity codes.  But they will underestimate the sorrow it created upon those imagined helped by our excesses.  Tradition will remember the story to preserve the lesson minus the sorrow.

            It was not until my new friend/acquaintance and sister in Christ wrote about her having to reject the purity codes, with a sense of sorrow near bitterness that I began to think of how my soul had been affected in a similar way.  But I was of another generation and could not yet think that what we were creating in our words of teaching were words that hindered humanity and created sorrow.  I could only imagine that I deserved to feel the suffering for my sins.  It took a voice outside of my experience to awaken in me a sense of something that had gone wrong, yes really wrong.  Believe me, for I am sure that people of my generation intended something far different from what we created.  We imagined we were setting you on higher ground than where we started, to help you when the floods came.  But it turned out we were only hiding you from a possibility of developing your humanity without the perverted strangeness and weirdness we created with purity codes.  It is what happens when we imagine that it is good to place a fence around sin.  We never by our plans and schemes can do away with sin.  We can only interrupt the growth of our humanity.  We cannot live in this world and be kept away from the temptations of sin.  If that is what is needed there is a prayer with such a petition in praying the “Our Father” but no human can create that place where we will be hidden from the temptation to sin.  That is dear millennial what we boomers forgot in our haste to create the purity codes.

            We boomers were born in a country which sort of took a lot of pride in its being a place of religious freedom, although most of us thought of that freedom mostly in terms of the varied branches of Christianity.  If you want to understand how Boomer Evangelicals were shaped you might find this original introduction to the classic movie “The Ten Commandments” interesting.  For your generation it is now clear that my generation’s hope of preserving the country through culture wars is a lost cause.  But we were shaped in another age by those who believed that a good law protected us for lives of freedom and then we began to imagine that enough laws might create in us righteousness, which was never true to the words of wisdom offered by law, prophets, sages, the divine or his apostles.  For by law, there comes the knowledge of sin and not the deeds of righteousness.  We imagined and were disappointed you did not join us in that doomed venture.  We are filled with gloom as our lives limp towards the evening and sunset of our years, while you struggle to build new foundations, to forge a new vision where God’s love may bloom and flourish.  It is easy to see now that we, in our best efforts, simply made the work you have to do all the more painfully difficult.  I think more than you realize many of us feel the pain of our follies, and it is no comfort that you too will create follies for your little ones.

            I will try to tell you how I think we created the idea for the purity codes.  I feel the need to do so first so that some of my Boomer friends who imagine they did nothing wrong in this endeavor and think it your fault for turning away from good teaching may at least come to question if these purity codes were good teaching.  But also I speak of this that you may understand with your own lives that we who are human do our greatest evil when in folly we try to create our best intentions forgetting wisdom.  Wisdom would teach us that no good thing can be added to which God gives us, who perfects our souls through the crucible and the trials and tribulations of life.  You too will be tempted to think there is a better way for your little ones to learn the lessons of wisdom in their lives.  You too will be tempted to try to hide them away from all temptations beyond their childhood even into their adulthood.

            One of the things that influenced Evangelical Christians in all this, was a sort of understanding of the Bible that reflected Protestant preaching since the time of Luther.  Martin Luther explained the Scriptures as a sort of dialectic, the blending of two opposing truths having to be held in proper tension to one another.  Luther’s dialectic was the Law/Gospel dialectic.  That was part of Luther’s theology, but in Evangelicalism this Law/Gospel teaching became much more exaggerated and minimized into something hardly ever seen in Lutheran circles.  So I do not condemn Luther but say a sort of strange concoction brewed from this dialectic affected many Evangelicals.  The understanding of the Gospel in these quarters became that one preaches men into knowing they are sinners so that they will seek Christ as the answer to the problem of sin.  So gradually the entire focus of such churches became the problem of sin.  That is a focus which once accepted will tend to corrupt everything.  For Christ who came to save us from sin did not come to merely drive us to anxiously seek him, but he came to deliver us from our sins by offering to us God’s own divine life as the sure anchor of a new life that will overcome sin and death.  But everything must become twisted if we imagine that always we need to be convincing people they are sinners needing always to be fleeing to Jesus, for this is strangely in its own incompetence a denial that Jesus has come to present to us eternal divine life in which he beckons us to come, to eat, to drink, and to live.

            The desire to preach men into seeing their need of Christ through their sins leads a church to be sin oriented.  A good sermon is sometimes evaluated by people in these sort of churches as a sermon where people really feel their sins and so they turn to Jesus.  Old timers called it a “come to Jesus meeting.”

            Where this sort of preaching wreaked havoc in my life was in regard to how the Bible taught that whosoever looks upon a woman to lust for her, has committed adultery with her in his heart already.  This purity code that seemed to especially crush ladies in these churches had its male counterpart in how we were taught about lust, not to help us define and eliminate lust from our human experience, but to create in us a sense of how we were terrible sinners that needed to come to Jesus.  A minister with a keen pastoral heart would not leave people to imagine that an attraction to the beauty of a woman when no sin is designed and when no evil thought is contemplated is something evil in and of itself.  But someone in a hurry to make sure people feel their sense of depravity in their lust problem will preach a whole church into conviction for looking upon a woman with lust until a guy who sees a gal he thinks is pretty in his church imagines himself beset by a great sin.  He comes to Jesus to flee not from lust but from natural human affections.  This is not a wise or healthy Christianity but merely a twisted application of what had been once a Christian sentiment.  That was the harm done in me, often through my own desire to zealously discover “my sins.”  I did this to myself in a sort of twisted narcissism even if some went a bit overboard in preaching lust until it made a circle representing humanity and crossed that circle as if to say humanity is not allowed here.  I never realized how that had impacted my life until I read a blog by a millennial where finally I could see how I had miserably failed to distinguish affection, attraction, recognition of beauty, and even innocent desire from the sort of lust that refuses to be satisfied with the wife of one’s marriage covenant.  Or from lust which would viciously dare to objectify a woman as if she were merely an instrument created for a man’s pleasure rather than a living co-equal in humanity and a precious partner in salvation.  I was failing to learn to reject real lust while I was discovering in the name of rejecting lust, to reject much of me that was human.

            The purity code is an approach to life that imagines living life protected from the possibilities of temptation.  An ethical code is formed to protect a girl from herself as she is handed off from father to husband.  It is as if a woman is created to know two relationships with men in her life; a father and a husband.  But does that ring true to the experience of women who knew Christ or the Apostles?  Christ had not only his twelve disciples following him but there were also dear ladies and young women who followed him.  We must never minimize the relationships Jesus had with the three women named Mary, and the one called Martha.  If we overlook these relationships because Jesus was Savior as well as human being, then we must be all the more careful to never overlook how the same phenomenon is present in St. Paul’s ministry in the Book of Acts.  How many women are mentioned in Acts with connections of varied relationships to the Apostle Paul?  They are described as co-laborers with him in the Gospel.

I raise the issue of St. Paul’s numerous varied friendships with Christian ministry during his ministry to remind us of something obvious that seems to have been missed or made of no importance by the purity code.  The New Testament at points recognizes that even if marriage will probably be part of most people’s future it is always in the New Testament optional.  But the development of varied human relationships is mandated by the call of the Gospel for we are to love our neighbor as ourselves and we are to love the brethren.  We are to love one another, so we have to come to grips with how we are in this life continually to be growing in our capacity to respond to Christ’s love by loving one another.  The purity code suggests that is not the case.  It suggests it is improper to have friends of the opposite sex that you will never sleep with.  Isn’t that a perverse view of humanity dredged up by an obsession with sin?  The Book of the Purity codes fails to honestly differentiate from the experience of a thirteen year old girl who needs to understand the importance of the word “no” in her youth as compared to the life of a twenty-three year old woman still being treated as a child who must not involve herself with male friendships until that right Christian man comes into her life for marriage.  This view ill prepares a woman for having friends who are Christian brothers outside of marriage, but respectful of the uniqueness of the marriage relationship.  To reject the book of purity codes is not to reject the need for faithfulness and moral consistency but it is to reject the idea that a woman is meant to be locked up in a marriage like an inmate in a prison.  If the New Testament is a proper model for human behavior then why did our Lord and his apostles have friends among women who were not their wives?  I suspect it was because they were growing in grace and discovering how to love one another without threatening the sanctity of marriage.

Perhaps I am not saying this well enough.  I am saying that the purity code concept misses the reality in the Christian life that building human relationships is mandated and not an option in the Christian life.  It is actually marriage that is optional.  That is why a purity code that seeks to preserve a woman from serious relationships with men until they are joined to a man in his holy matrimony cannot be sound Biblical teaching.  Marriage is optional, relationships are expected.

The only way to correct the errors of the purity code mentality is to create a different vision for understanding of how we are to seek to overcome sin.  The idea of repeatedly hammering away at men’s sins so they will repeatedly have fresh coming to Jesus moments is not a healthy vision of what Christ came to do when he came to save sinners.  In the historic and ancient Christian expressions of a life of righteousness at least three ingredients were seen as essential to a healthy Christian life.  First one did learn in repentance to say “no” to evil, sin, the lusts of the world, and the devil’s influence.  But no was always a way of turning ourselves from one direction we were going outside of Christ, to turn around and say our “yes” to the call of Christ.  We are meant to say our “yes” to Christ by turning to him in faith that we might live in him and that we might have him living in us.  By faith we have a full-fledged union with Christ.  Thirdly, in Christ we are to realize that we are headed towards a new destiny.  We are told by St. John that we are moving towards the time in the Great day ahead when we shall see God and shall be like him.  Imagine that my brothers and sisters in Christ.  We will see God, the one whom St. John describes saying “God is love.”  We shall see him and we shall be like him.  Presently, our sins even if we don’t dwell on them around the clock are there to kick us in the behind every now and then.  But not at that final “then” at the place of the destiny of everything Christ is doing in us.  In that day we shall see him and shall be like him and death and sin as John Donne might have said shall themselves die.  We shall see him who is love and we shall be as him who is love.  GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING!  GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING!

Instead of the purity codes we should have taught our millennial children that they had an opportunity to grow in grace, to learn to love one another, to learn to love not primarily for their day of marriage, but for a yet greater day when we would see him and be like him.  There is the goal and all who have this goal St. John says will purify themselves.  That is a purity code to hunger and thirst after all the days of our life.

            I hope in writing this I have spoken to the Boomer who has made his or her share of errors in this life.  We knew better, we understood in other things that putting a fence around God’s commandments to keep people from being tempted usually only hindered them from becoming human.  We knew that and still we missed it when we created these seemingly brilliant purity codes.  We did it with the best of intentions and yet we did it to our sons and daughters, the very ones who we loved more than anything else in this world.  If we had but realized what we were doing or what harm it would do upon some of our sons and daughters we would have long ago repented with tears and begged God’s forgiveness and that of our sons and daughters.  But we never saw it.  No parent wants to put a millstone about the neck of the son and daughter they love.  But our errors may do just that.  Boomers, if we have done that let us ask God to forgive us and let us ask our children to forgive us.

Millennials be tender even though you have been sometimes hurt and your lives sometimes made a sort of hell because when you broke away from these restrictions your parents imagined you broke away from them and from the faith.  Your churches treated you poorly because you were headstrong.  You were hurt.  Even so be merciful for soon you will have your own little ones and you will imagine ways you might keep them from temptation that also will involve placing fences around the ordinary temptations of life.  By all means give a a little child your constant protection, but slowly allow them to take their steps toward adulthood and all its spiritual dangers.  Train them well and then see how well they take their training and apply their own faithfulness to that test soon to come.  My Millennial brothers and sisters you will discover soon enough that no parent relishes giving their child into the unknown of adulthood, but rest assured when they know you are making your way in our Lord, then they will speak of you with joy and pride even if they don’t quite why you feel you have to reject some things they taught you.  Let them know your heart toward Christ and toward them, that there remains love for them.  Be not hard on them for even in parenting as in all things in the Christian life, we know only in part.  Our salvation is never because we know in full but always because we are known in full.  Remember that He who secures our salvation is one who overcomes both our sins against others and those sins steeped in pain pressed upon us.

Remember that and close your eyes and let the healing begin knowing that the one thing and only thing really true in this universe is that God is love and he has demonstrated that love in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  Let that truth fill your souls and let that truth guide your future steps.

            Because we have such a Savior I believe that we who are Boomers and ye who are millennials can begin to learn to walk together towards that day.  We have sinned.  You will too.  But God in Christ is bigger than our sins, bigger than our sins against him, and bigger than the sins inflicted upon us.  I fully believe that we who are boomers will be incomplete in life unless the millennials in our lives are walking next to us.  I fully believe that millennials will be incomplete without us boomers who will depart from your lives hopefully only after leaving you a heritage for which you may be thankful until you have finished running your course.  I fully believe there is enough sin in both of our camps to ruin this world and I believe there is enough love in Christ to overcome all our sins put together.  There is an African proverb that says “If you want to walk fast walk alone; but if you want to walk far take someone along.”  I dream of seeing boomer, millennial, and all between walking together.  We will be then be joined to a future generation to be raised in the love we learned when at last we began walking together.  “If you want to walk fast walk alone, but if you want to walk far take someone along.”  God bless you with His great love in Jesus Christ.

Connections, Part I

Connections

My present struggle for humanity and making connections

Informally written by Dan McDonald

 

            This is sort of a follow up to a previous blog, “Where am I?” In that blog I reflected on my need to make connections with the reality outside the boundaries of my mind.  I had withdrawn from connecting to creation by retreating into the safety of my own thoughts and ideals.  I had awakened from my slumber to feel like John Nash, the man portrayed in the movie “A Beautiful Mind.”

            Nash had a serious problem.  His mind had invented human characters that were then projected into Nash’s perception of reality.  A girl, a college roommate, and a military officer appeared to him regularly as a part of his true reality, but they were only imagined characters projected from his mind.  He learned to distinguish between the images of characters projected from his imagination and real people because real people changed and grew older.  The characters that never changed could be gradually sequestered back into the proper boundaries of his mind’s imagination.

            I have discovered that my mind works to my disadvantage in some ways similar to that of Nash’s mind.  But I think my affliction is fairly common, and you may well have traces of it operating upon your own ability to perceive reality.  I see people, who grow older but my mind creates labels for them.  Once the labels are pinned on these people my mind categorizes these people under the tags that describe them, and then they are filed away according to the labels on their profile folders. The people grow older but the tags remain.  The people may change dramatically but my mind still sees them according to the label I used to put them away in my mental filing cabinet.

The labels say things like conservative, liberal, or describe personality tendencies, religious perspectives, and of course warning tags on those whose past may have contained information that marks the person with a stigma.  The person may have slipped up just once or twice or several times but has gotten on down the road, but the tag remains unchanged even if the person would not be characterized or tagged the same way today if I was to meet the person.  I discovered in writing the earlier blog a refreshed vision of man as God’s image projected into our creation is an interesting sort of mirror image of God.  Man is created in God’s image, but presented quite differently than we perhaps would expect God to cast his image upon the earth.  God, according to many catechisms, is spirit and changes not.  But the image of God, the shadow he casts upon the earth is bodily, living, growing in stature with God and man, being and becoming – in two dramatic words – alive and changing.  The unchanging God is imaged in changing men and women.  The never changing people we imagine are not images of God but idols that have eyes but cannot see; ears but cannot hear; noses but cannot smell; and the form of humanity but without life.

            Ultimately I woke up feeling like John Nash.  I needed to distance myself from the thoughts of my own mind so as to make connections with a vast creation living all around me.  This creation exists just beyond the narrow boundaries of my own mind.  I have begun to try to make connections to the world and universe surrounding me.  I need to be free for a while from asking “Who am I?” to simply ask “Where am I?”  My great need, at present, is not to know my mind or my personality but to realize where I am and to make connections to the world around me.  I have made tiny steps to begin to make such connections to the yet to be discovered reality around me.

            I managed to do some lawn work.  The lawn isn’t very pretty, but I did start.  I have purchased a camera to use on adventures and to photograph people with whom I am making connections.  I am still in the process of getting all the instructions read.  Maybe soon my website won’t look like a universe of words without sights.  Words without sights, sounds, or smells are like an empty universe or many an Evangelical church, or like the theories of empiricists and idealists drawn from a barren rationalism inherited from an insane era known as the Enlightenment.  I have been awakened to my need to make connections to a universe where there are sights, sounds, smells, bells, emotions, things to be viewed, tasted, touched, and senses to be aroused and experienced.  An old advertisement to make gifts supporting colleges made the point that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, but it turns out the mind is also a terrible tyrant when it is allowed to undermine the soul’s desire to explore the universe in which we have been placed.  The mind might try to convince that everything we need is contained in its boundaries.

            Perhaps my life has been changed, or at least my direction has been refocused.  I finished a four day vacation during the week when I wrote the aforementioned blog.  I went back to work and saw co-workers differently.  I tried to say no to the labels I had placed on them.  It was as if I was beginning new with each person connected to my job.    I tried to make a joke with a younger guy that has several tattoos.  He is sometimes a little self-conscious of being shorter than average.  I told him that I understood why he didn’t like being short, “because it means you’ll too quickly run out of room for tattoos you want to get.”  He enjoyed the remark.  Mostly, I said the remark to remind my mind to get past the labeling thing, and to say to him I’m going to be here for you.  I know I need to overcome thinking of people by the labels I affix to their lives.  It is not easy for me, but I’m beginning to think that is part of what God has done for me.  That is part of what he did when he decided to descend from heaven and come into our lives so as to give us his life.  He has done so not to enslave us but to free us.  He hasn’t freed us to simply fill our lives with boring lists of daily obligations meant to fill our times in “spiritual” activities so that we could move upwards on some church corporate structure ladder as if we had arrived once we got proficient at our check-list Christianity.

If God has a special calling for any one of us, it will not be a calling meant to limit our humanity or our freedom, but a calling meant to focus our energies into the very activities for which our lives had been created and unto which our personalities had been growing for all of our lives.  He calls us to a work for which he equips us and to which our whole lives have all along been moving.  The wonderful Neander written hymn “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” contains this wonderful verse describing the matching of God’s calling with the desire of those who love God;  “Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth, Who, as on wings of an eagle, uplifteth, sustaineth.  Hast thou not seen how thy desires all have been granted in what he ordaineth?”( http://www.hymnal.net/hymn.php/h/166).  The twin themes of God’s sovereignty and humanity’s freedom has been discussed and probed by all the great theologians without ever resulting in any sort of explanation that satisfies anybody and everybody.  But we rest in the sense that God, who is the all-wise is able in his sovereignty to promote and not destroy our human freedom even with his sovereignty reaching to the ends of time with a plan for the final destination of all things.  Yes indeed our understanding finds itself only able to be expressed in a hymn of praise singing “Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth.”

            One night this week I went to a Japanese restaurant to join my four year old godson as he celebrated his birthday.  He is a lesson in itself of making connections.  Children and pets almost always make their connections to the creation around them.  The restaurant was one of those restaurants with places for the chef to cook a meal right in front of the people seated around the top of the cooking area.  As the flame leapt above our heads, my four year old godson’s eyes grew wide and excited.  He also found a fountain and watched the waters run down a wall and watched a couple of small fishes in the pool beneath a small walk-over bridge spanning the decorative pond in the restaurant.  Little children are always looking for connections to the world around them.  They want to know the creation around them.  Animals do likewise.  A cat that sits quiet on your lap for several minutes will suddenly extend his claws into your skin and leap in attack mode at the ball of string on the floor.  But occasionally there is something extremely sad that happens in human existence.  A child is born and develops autism.  The child makes almost no connections to the world outside of himself.  It is a sickness and a tragedy.  Sometimes the autism is able to be overcome through therapy and sometimes the child is a prisoner to his affliction, but surely God has a tender eye upon this one in his affliction.  Adults may not be autistic, but we are tempted to seek security as opposed to making connections to the universe around us.  We withdraw into our barren World War I style trenches, trenches of the mind looking for security even if that security exacts from us the price of withdrawing ourselves from the wonderful grandeur of connecting to God’s glorious creation.  The whole world slips beyond the reach of our souls now imprisoned in safe thoughts.  We are cut off from everything.  We are cut off until our minds are the prison bars that contain the full scope of our lives.  Technically we have not committed suicide, but how much of life must we separate ourselves from before we have virtually separated ourselves from life itself?  Is the sin of a virtual suicide characterized in our escape from the universe around us a cardinal sin or a venial sin?  Surely such a sin if categorized would lead to our great unhappiness, our ineffectiveness, and our being continually grieved and overwhelmed without hope until rescued from such a wretched condition.

            This week I also visited a dear family.  The husband had been one of my roommates in college many decades ago.  His being a roommate was a great blessing to me, and he endured the experience, which is something of a credit to him.  His wife was a literature major, whose humility is such that you hardly realize how full of thoughts she actually is on varied matters of life.  She likes to take photographs but doesn’t imagine herself as being exceptional in the photographs she shoots.  Maybe when she reads this blog she will send me a small album of some of her photos for me to add to this page so I can let you decide if she is good or really good; or almost Annie Liebovitz good but with a different perspective and spirit.  She captures so much with a camera lens in her own backyard, things which I would have walked by a thousand times and never seen take center stage in her photograph yielding a view of the beauty and wonder of creation.  Sometimes she links her photographs to humorous captions she places on her photographs.  She photographed a scene from a decaying part of our city which she aptly labeled “urban decay” and then showed a rural scene of a rotting fence which she then labeled “rural decay” to be set alongside the photograph “urban decay.”  Anyone seeing the work appreciated the photography, the titles, and the kindly spirit whose eyes captured the scene before her use of a camera showed the scene to the rest of the world; a world that would normally have walked right past the same scene.

This family asked me to bring a movie.  I brought with me a Neil Jordan movie entitled “Ondine.”  It is one of my favorite movies to show to people who have never seen the movie.  I like it partly because the movie draws parallels between humanity’s myths, Christendom’s sacraments, and our human feeling of a need to find wholeness and meaning in our existence.  In case, CB is reading this, yes I did have a bit of an attraction to the blonde playing Ondine as well.  But you knew that.  The philosophical beauty of the movie is in its exploration of how truth relates to our mythologies, to our sacraments, and to our experiences.  The movie is brought to a moment of truth when Ondine is forced to tell Syracuse (nicknamed Circus because he was to everyone a clown and a recovering alcoholic) the truth of herself.  She tells two truths, only one of which I will describe here.  She tells the truth that one truth is that she died swimming in the Irish sea when the waves overcame her and she sank and acknowledged her death and belonged to God when she was brought back to life by being caught up in Syracuse’ net.  That she says is a truth, it is one truth.  There is also a second truth that explains her life.  She knows she must tell that truth also to Syracuse but it is a truth that will lead him to either embrace Ondine or discard her like a fish thrown back into the sea.  How much is truth simply what is?   And how much is truth what we make of what is?  These are the philosophical questions that sometime capture our imaginations.  Is truth something simple or something complex?  Is there an ultimate truth or parallel truths or even perhaps trinities of truth?

In my Evangelical background there was a sense that such questions were more like temptations than gateways to more thoughtful considerations of what might be known and what might be believed and what might be the difference.  But I am more and more drawn to believe that the Scriptures themselves form the basis for such ponderings.  We ask about truth as Christians knowing that we live in one world and are of another world.  In one world we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell; while in the other world we receive by faith a message about that which we cannot see, measure, or detect.  Is there but one truth or is the answer that we must to some degree speak of ourselves in two truths yet to be resolved in that day when heaven descends into the midst of the earth and the fruit trees yield their fruit throughout the year?  Are we really able to speak one truth as we understand it or speak truth as on one hand living in a world seen and in another world unseen?  I would not tell you the answer even if I knew it.  Reason suggests to me that there is no answer, and faith tells me there is one and only one answer that connects heaven and earth.  It is the one who both descended to the earth and ascended into the heavens; who was both God and man, a mediator between God and man and between two worlds; one seen and the other unseen.

I think the Evangelical generally has tried to speak of truth too simply, as if truth could be minimized into a propositional statement with Scripture texts listed behind the propositional truth.  Such propositions are truth, as a Christian I believe such, but they don’t exhaust the questions of faith or the questions of truth.  We believe in accord with the mystery of faith, able to give answers in part and not in the whole.  Ultimately St. Paul in describing what it is to know God defined it not as our knowing God but in our being known by God.  We know him because when we died in the waters he rescued us.  Is that not the meaning of our baptism?  Dare we imagine we can give a final answer to the meaning of truth and faith?  We believe in him because he has somehow reached out to us and made us feel his claim upon us; his claim as creator, sustainer, redeemer, friend, Savior, and Lord.  Ultimately the Christian saved by grace after exhausting himself trying to give a reason why he believes simply looks the questioner in his eyes and says in a matter of fact tone of voice, “I believe because I can no longer do otherwise.”

Perhaps a Jewish philosopher’s insightful thought might help us to understand the connection between the believing of the unseen and our understanding of the seen.  Abraham Joshua Heschel suggested, in the book God, in search of Man” that the importance of believing in miracles was to lead us not to distinguish between miracles and common events but to remind us that the entirety of the creation in which we live is a miracle.  God’s very own creation is wonderfully and fearfully made, the whole thing is the miracle in which we live our entire lives.  We believe in miracles not because miracles are somehow extraordinary, but we believe in miracles to remind ourselves that everything in God’s creation is extraordinary.  The truth of the seen becomes empty apart from the truth of the unseen, but the truth of the unseen is given that we might understand that the truth of the seen is extraordinary in itself.  The world is, and that is often how we look at it, no sense of miracle, it is just there like a work week, breakfast, lunch, and supper.  But then a miracle seems to occur.  The miracle draws us to imagine one who is greater than the universe, greater than natural law, someone who is above and beside us, our origin and our destiny.  The miracle opens us up to realize that what is had a beginning and is moving towards a destiny.  If a big bang started it all, will a black hole finish it all?  It is all a matter of fact but then a miracle is noted and we ask ourselves, is it true, has this all been created by him?  Then if he can do a miracle through or in spite of natural law then what if he created all this surrounding me from nothingness?  Then would not that be a miracle?  Would not all this, the entire universe be a miracle?  Then perhaps my existence is not explained fully by two sexually active people getting together in one evening for some pleasure.  Maybe the one who did the miracle, who created the universe, had a plan in my being born, a plan that exceeded a father’s or mother’s love.  Perhaps this whole creation is a miracle and I am a miracle and my neighbor is a miracle, as well as my cat and the neighbor’s dog.  The world that is unseen is felt in a slight miracle and our hearts melt in us as we realize that in seeing the unseen I have understood that all this that I am and all this that surrounds me is a miracle. “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the king of creation.  O my soul praise him.

In a day or two, hopefully but perhaps more I will set forth second part to this blog.  In that blog I will describe how I do theology much like I keep house.  Things get cluttered because I don’t put things away and I keep adding more to the clutter and never quite am able to throw much of anything away.  That is how I also do theology.  In my life I have followed interests in theology in a haphazard way, without any plan, but have spent seasons thinking about the contributions of differing Christian schools of thought.  In the end I have absorbed truth here and there in a cluttered fashion but from the various sources there has emerged a sense that they gave testimony to the God they discovered in their seeking.  This is part of the journey of the soul towards God; knowing God only in part but being drawn forward by the pull of one who knows us in full.

In my next blog I will also acknowledge a school of thought that has surprisingly grabbed my attention.  I have been fed and nourished from a source I would not have imagined.  An article or two grabbed my attention written by millennial women, often from Evangelical backgrounds who have struggled to find a place in the faith.  They describe themselves after being disappointed in their roots by such labels as progressive, feminist, and Christian.  I don’t think they have drawn their conclusions easily but they have come to their views with much contemplation, sorrow, sometimes bitterness, and yet often with a sense of hope and destiny.  I have grown confident that their testimony is a part of the story of what God is doing in our day.  They may consider themselves progressive and feminist, which are loaded words for those of us who are conservative and traditional, but I think ultimately these are women who embrace life and feel the time is now for a reconsideration of what it means to be human.  I want to introduce some of these ladies I have discovered because I hope that as the day turns to sunset on my boomer generation, we may form partnerships with a new generation that like us boomers are those who question everything and are trying to forge a renewed vibrant humane Christianity to express to the world in the days ahead.  I better leave something for that next blog.