The South is Christ-haunted

"I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted." -- Flannery O'Connor, in her article The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South

(Just saw this quote in a Tom Cannon post and thought it was so well said that it needed to be reposted.)

tom cannon quote

When "authenticity" becomes a commodity it is immediately exclusionary and completely full of crap.

Who needs Jesus when you can just click for forgiveness?

Click.Forgive

I am not making this up. My brother-in-law sent me the link. He probably uses the level 4 Forgiveness several times a day, knowing him. He claims that not loving bacon is a level 3 offense. Who knew?

Mend broken, Make strong the weak, Vanquish evil

They were "ready, finally, with all their hearts, to take that ancient oath: to mend those who are broken, to make strong the weak, and without hesitation, [to] vanquish the evil."

Why is it more OK when owls say it? Why aren't Christians saying it more?

This makes Jesus facepalm (times inifinity)

I can honestly say that this is just as good as the original....



Don't miss these money quotes:

"God is my friend."

"Worshippin' Worshippin' Yeah!"

"Church can be fun. You know that it is."

"So excited. We so excited. We knowin' Jesus is alive today."

Oh, and please don't miss the cafe shot.

Not only did they entirely capture the simplistic, contrived feeling of the original, but they managed to map it directly onto the church. What's most frightening of all is the number of people who will watch this and think this is what church and Christianity are all about.

I think when you hit this point you stop facepalming and you just walk right over to the wall and start banging your head against it.

New Wine in Old Wineskins <- not always the best metaphor

"But the heart of Pacifica had always been and remained today the tropical islands of the ocean called Pacific in memory of the largest sea on Earth. The dwellers on these islands lived, not precisely in the old ways, but with the memory of the old ways still in the background of all sounds and at the edges of all sights. Here the sacred kava was still sipped in the ancient ceremonies. Here the memories of ancient heroes were kept alive. Here the gods still spoke into the ears of holy men and women. And if they went home to grass huts containing refrigerators and networked computers, what of that? The gods did not give unreceivable gifts. The trick of it was finding a way to let new things into one's life without killing that life to accommodate them." - Orson Scott Card in his book Children of the Mind

Part of God's Story - a series of quotes from the book, Resident Aliens

"Too often, we depict salvation as that which provides us with a meaningful existence when we achieve a new self-understanding. here, with our emphasis on the narrative nature of Christian life, we are saying that salvation is baptism into a community that has so truthful a story that we forget ourselves and our anxieties long enough to become part of that story, a story God has told in Scripture and continues to tell in Israel and the church."

"It is our baptismal responsibility to tell this story to our young, to live it before them, to take time to be parents in a world that (though intent on blowing itself to bits) is God's creation (a fact we would not know without this story. We have children as a witness that the future is not left up to us and that life, even in a threatening world, is worth living -- and not because 'Children are the hope of the future,' but because God is the hope of the future." (emphasis theirs)

"The church must be created new, in each generation, not through procreation but through baptism."

"People of God do not let the world determine how they respond to tomorrow."

"To launch out on a journey is to move toward some goal. Of course, in the journey of faith, we have no clear idea of what our end will be except that it shall be, in some form, true and complete friendship with God. For now, our daily experiences of testing and confirmation of that friendship sustain us. Perhaps this explains why Jesus' ethic was so thoroughly eschatological -- an ethic bound up with this proclamation of the end of history. Ethics is a function of the telos, the end. It makes all the difference in the world how one regards the end of the world, "end" not so much in the sense of its final breath, but "end" in the sense of the purpose, the goal, the result."

"Travelers, in the midst of the vicissitudes of the journey, learn to trust one another when the going is rough."

[The apostle] "Peter stands out as a true individual, or better, a true character, not because he had become 'free' or 'his own person,' but because he had become attached to the Messiah and messianic community, which enabled him to lay hold of his life, to make so much more of his life than if he had been left to his own devices."

-- Resident Aliens (Hauerwas and Willimon), chapter three.

What Am I Afraid Of?

I got to thinking yesterday, " What am I afraid of?" It's a long story on how I came to that question. Suffice it to say that the combination of my sister mentioning a life theory of fear vs. love, combined with a bus ride yesterday with a bunch of rather mean 8th graders got me first to wondering what they fear, which led me to wondering what I fear.  I took some time out to think about that question. I think there are specific fears for various situations, but one overriding fear that seems to dominate over all the rest is the fear of failure. What if I mess up? What if I screw up so bad that someone else has to deal with it?

I thought of death or of being in a situation like Joanne, where she had a debilitating stroke several months ago and is taking slow steps down the long road of recovery. But neither of those things scared me. What scared me was that if I died, someone else would have to come in and go through the piles of stuff I haven't gotten through in my office. (It also makes me very sad to think of what my family would go through. But that's because of my love for them, not for any fear of what they'll experience. I know they'll find a way to carry on without me, even if they miss me a great deal.) I fear messing up when I'm talking to someone - of saying the wrong thing or not saying what I want to say in a way that the other person will comprehend in the way I want it to be comprehended. I guess when I boil it all down, I fear that I'll get it wrong. I fear that I'll do or say something that impacts someone else negatively, in a way that they'll be left cleaning up my mess whether it's physical or emotional or maybe even spiritual.

My fear might seem very silly to you, but it's very poignant to me. It's pretty central to how I think about myself. I am a person who orders things. You might not think that from looking at my house or my back yard. But when I write a newsletter, I'm not only organizing words into a coherent and hopefully interesting portrayal of information, but I'm also organizing the blocks of text and images on the page. When I do the book keeping for the church or for CFHL, I'm ordering numbers - moving them in and out and keeping them all lined up in a row as I do so. I organize my kids schedules. I order the morning routine so that the kids can sleep as late as possible and still get to the bus stop on time. I take in and organize information for the kids school and send it out to the PTO and other parents. I take in, I rearrange and organize and then I send out. I wish I had a more ordered house and yard, but that one gets away from me, which I'm sure is why it comes at me in my fears.

So yesterday, while I was lying on my bed thinking this stuff through, I managed to ironically do what I feared. I messed up. Nathan had a 3:30 doctor's appointment and I entirely forgot about it. I had remembered it yesterday morning. But by afternoon I was exhausted and the appointment wasn't on my radar. When the office called to see what the deal was, I lost it. I broke down. That was it. I'd messed up. My greatest fear came rushing over me to overwhelm me.

It hasn't left me there. I've tried to walk myself through some of the things that I have been encouraging Nathan to do when he hits something that throws him for a loop. I've tried to look at the bigger picture. Sure, this happened and I screwed up, but what will that matter a year from now? Five years from now? It won't. It really wasn't that big of a deal. But it felt like a big deal. I'm still holding on to that feeling of it being a big deal, even if it wasn't.

I'm at Everyday Joe's right now sipping on my new favorite tea, Margaret's Hope Darjeeling, and reading Resident Aliens (Hauerwas and Willimon) and I hit this bit, "True freedom arises, not in our loud assertion of our individual independence, but in our being linked to a true story, which enables us to say yes and no. Our worst sins arise as our response to our innate human fear that we are a nobody." That, combined with several other bits that I'll probably share in another post, helped me to see that looking at the long term regarding my mess up wasn't really looking at the entire big picture. There's more that, if I really want to heal from this, I need to do. I need to allow for grace.

When I missed Nathan's appointment yesterday I was frustrated with Rob because he just didn't seem to get it. He didn't get that this was a major mess up. He wasn't as upset as I thought he should have been about it. He didn't jump in to be my superman, fixing the screw up that I had made. But looking back on it, I see it a different way now. Rob saw the situation with more grace than I did. He knows it's not the end of the world and he treated the situation as it deserves. He didn't get bent out of shape. He shrugged it off and moved on. Granted, it wasn't his mess up. But even though it was mine, that doesn't mean I need to hold on to it.

Jackie, Nathan's doctor, also dealt with me with grace. She talked to me on the phone about how Nathan's doing and she got us set up with an appointment on Wednesday next week. Though I'm sure it was frustrating for her to wait for us and we didn't show, she didn't express any anger with me. She didn't even show her frustration. She dealt with the situation and moved on, according it only what it required and not pouring extra meaning into the event that it didn't have.

And God forgives my screw up. When I stand before him at the end times, he's not going to pull out his notebook and say, "Dang, Meg. What's this about you forgetting that doctor's appointment?" There are much deeper heart issues that he's concerned with, and me messing up isn't a central issue. He knows I'm human. He knows I'm fallen. A central issue is that I let my fear of messing up define me. I let my belief that I can hold it all together, and that if I don't I'm worthless, be a driving force in my life. That's the heart issue. That's what's important. And I can't let go of that belief until I start to see the grace that is being offered to me by those around me and accept that grace from them, most especially God's grace.

God hasn't set me on the planet with some directions and then nudged me out to do it or fail. He has set me on this planet and then he's put himself beside me. We walk together. Even when I forget to let him lead (He's the one that knows the way after all. He should be the one leading.) and I try to take over with my own map and my own agenda, he's still there beside me. He's committed himself to get me through this. Some would say he's covenanted himself. This is one of those footprints in the sand times and I can choose to let it reinforce my fears. Or I can acknowledge that now is when there's only that one set of footprints in the sand and they sure aren't mine. I can't do this on my own, but then again, I don't have to. Thank God.