Anyway, tonight I am here. Listening to Castings Crowns...good band. I recommend them.
For a while, I read the Bible looking for verses that could help me right then and there. I wanted that verse that would solve all my problems in that moment. I was a selfish reader and that wasn't a good thing. Also, as I have blogged about before, I was very close minded in my reading. I didn't process what I was reading like I should have.
I think that this is a problem with my generation: reading is such a foreign thing and we don't really know how to read. At least that is what I have noticed. I am in a literature class and I am definitely finding out that I don't understand it, I miss the point of the story. I read these books thinking that the story is just boring and simply a story of events, while I miss the deeper meaning or symbolism of the book, which if I understood would help me appreciate the book. I came to the Bible like that. Just a collection of stories, of course I knew the deeper meaning, but not for myself. I had to start at square one and as I read I came to find that the Bible is really a simple book. The Old Testament makes me mad and the New Testament makes me all kinds of things.
The OT is ultimately a series of God's people turning away from him, God punishing them and teaching them a lesson, his people reconciling, then it starts over again. What gets me is that they had God among them, God spoke to them directly. He was always with them and was eminent in so many ways, yet they still repeated this cycle of ignorance and disobedience. But God always came through for them. God even worked with his people sometimes. Abraham was allowed to save his family. The people were granted a King, when God and the prophets told them that is wouldn't be a good thing, but God still allowed it. The OT really serves, in my eyes, as an introduction to who God and to teach us of his ways. Then there is Psalms and Proverbs and the rest of the praises/wisdom writings. Then the prophecies. Psalms is an amazing book to me. David shows so much emotion in his writings. I am a big believer in emotion in spirituality. But I will get back to that idea...
As for the New Testament...man. Where to start: joy, love, sacrifice, sorrow, confusion, amazement, relationship, salvation, redemption, devotion, belief, excitement. I could go on. The NT is just amazing to me. All these elements expressed in this book, but these aren't just like fictional, literary elements...they come off the pages and exist in my heart. If you have experience this than you know what I mean, and if you haven't then you may think I am just a crazy person, but I'm not.
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I see myself as one stuck in between modernity and post-modernity. I believe we should hold true to the Bible, yet feel that spirituality is mainly a relational thing and that we should be accepting of people. I also see modernity as a strict formula to spirituality, which I disagree with. Emotion is the center of a spiritual life in Christ. Like Stretch Armstrong, being pulled more and more to each view, yet the pull is even so I just stay in the center of the two, holding to different philosophies of each.
I thrive off emotional things. Anything that helps me connect to God, I like. Some music (Hillsong United, David Crowder Band, Casting Crowns), some things done in a worship setting (dim lights, silence, time to reflect, certain songs), some things with people (simply talking about belief, about love, about God, about life) just make me feel closer to God. I came to this belief because it what pulled me out of a life of mediocrity. I was so lukewarm because I didn't understand for myself what the Bible was telling me. I had always, like my literature, viewed it has stories with some meaning that the teacher would just tell me what the meant and move on. No longer, because I began to find out for myself what was in store for me. I began to see what it is that people had always taught me, yet developing my own yoke.
One sad thing that I think of when I talk about the lack of reading is the lack of culture in America. People are so dulled by the crap that this country spits out and as a teenager, speaking from experience, it is hard to appreciate things that are cultural. I think this has numbed the brains of a lot of people and people are taught to be "hard" and "tough" yet have no sense of vulnerability about them. Maybe this is because they once were vulnerable in a relationship and were hurt, therefore putting up this wall to any intimacy with others. The thing here is that God won't let us down, if we are intimate with God than we will understand who he is and have a better grasp on his ways. As a man, I see an even greater lack of love and gentleness in men. There is a way to be a strong man yet also be loving, to be tough yet be vulnerable in relationships. The men of this world struggle with idea and it has crippled the leadership in the movement of God. I see in my own Christian-based school the dry desert of love that exists in the halls.
I jump into things a lot, like ideas and in the past relationships without really examing things. My friends dad is the king of overanalyzing everything to a point of where something like going to buy groceries was like going into battle. So I used to think I should slow down and really consider things but not like that. I say all that to say that I try to find this massive event/movement that will just transform the world, when I know that I am not going to find it. Change is incremental and takes, unfortunately, patience. I lack patience, I really do. I work on it but I want to see things happen fast. I would suck at being a farmer. I get tunnel vision and ignore the process that it will take to get my desired result.
I think that if in some way, if Christian spirituality could be like reformed or something and go through this revolution, if it somehow could like just hit a bunch of people in the mouth and get them to realize what it has to offer, then we would have an amazing event on our hands. A reformation back to the Bible, wow. That would be amazing, but we already have this text and have explored it and dissected it, yet people still refuse it. So it is the believers job stand up and declare what it is that God has spoken to us. Unfortunately, it is politically correct to be a Christian so people go to church but then live freely. People see those folks and get this impression of "Christianity" that is completely false. They get 100% hypocrisy. It is a shame that Western Christianity has come to this.
So know I pray that God will bring people up, people that have been quiet yet have been given the strength of God to stand and speak. To stand for all they believe in and to truly live this life that would mirror Jesus. Not a life of someone who merely attends church and puts a smile on their face every Sunday, but a life lived that others would see the relationship that one has in Christ and will want to explore that, in turn finding the true life that we are called to.
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