In bygone days I used to be highly-compensated for choosing words.  Let me take this space to apologize for opening my mouth way too often.  Fortunately, if one pays attention, life hands them a steaming humble pie, and you get to eat it.  While this does tend to leave one “in the red,” I suppose it is better to be broke than it is to be a know-it-all.  Often though, the humility offered to us is rejected.  We work through it to become a more brutal, Type-A, advice-offerer!  My friend S-P posted this nugget of refined gold this morning.  You can buy his book here.

When Instructing Others

Isn’t this the reality of words told in simple shapes?

When it comes to words I have made two mistakes.  I have used them too liberally, like a world-renown expert an pert-near everything.  And I have absorbed them

When the experts in a field prod an incoming class they say, “Trust the process,” the new mechanics, writers, chefs, or voodoo priests invariably wonder if the inanimate thing known as “The Process” is really all that trustworthy.  The Process has never been over for dinner.  How can you trust The Process, when you’re quite unsure of her ability to pick a perfectly paired wine?  And probably, we think, The Process is only part of the heavy regime provided by “The Man.”

This morning I let the dog out to do what he does.  It was raining.  I slid the glass door open, then, as a man bent on following a process, I pulled it shut.  I extended an umbrella in the usual way, avoiding the burning temptation to invent a new way to unfurl the umbrella.  I said, “Go potty,” in a high-pitched, encouraging female-impersonator voice, like I always do.  All of the processes (read this word: process- eeees, preferably in a low breathy voice, to sound professorial) worked as they usually do.

When there is then a bump in the more spiritual roads of life, why do we tend to curse the process, or to invent new ways and means for travel?  Or worse, dream up an alternate destination?  Probably because we’re new in this spiritual field, and we have not learned to trust The Process.

The Process of faith is always forgiveness.  It isn’t fancy spiritual gifts or glowing communicative abilities, though we are constantly tempted to accept them as alternatives.  Growing faith is more forgiveness.  That’s the process.  We are either receiving or extending forgiveness all the time, though too often we are looking for increasingly creative ways to open the umbrella.  “There must be a short-cut,” we say to ourselves, because forgiveness is really hard.

Do not be fooled: The Process for discovering peace is always forgiveness; both what you take and what you give away.

Ryan,
Grace to you! I’m sure in Christ’s time, part of the ritual of going to bed was first putting the donkey back in the stall BEFORE you brush your teeth, so all IS well… I think you’ve been quite literal with your hermeneutics. LOL!
Todd

Yes, Todd, that IS EXACTLY what I meant.  It’s all about context, people.

About every-third-day I do something as a parent that is out of character.  And if you do something every-third-day, I suppose it is not fair to describe it as out of character; it’s more like a demi-habit.

My collection of faux-pas is extraordinary; but here’s the deal: the ideal of the Christian faith is forgiveness, not perfection.  WHY DO PEOPLE NOT UNDERSTAND THIS?  (WHY DID I JUST TYPE IN CAPS-LOCK?)  I could expound from scripture, but why?  We should get this by now, because it is absolutely elementary.

You’ve been forgiven so that you might forgive.  Being committed to “training up a child in the way he/she should go” is all about forgiveness.  Sure, you instill your moral values, but when you break those same values or when your children do, will they know how to forgive you?  How to receive forgiveness from you?

Your thoughts, please…

P.S. If you have blogged on this subject go ahead and post a link!

Grace.

(For this to make sense, you’ll have to read last week’s post, a simple quote from The Grapes of Wrath.)

“That terrible action is why I perform this terrible action.”  That’s what you tell yourself.  You might be right; not excused, just correct.  When it comes to pain, anger, hatred or any other negative life experience we all look for reasons that will explain why we are the way we are or do the things we do.  We all have some pretty unsettling corners of our lives; the dark, quiet ones.

There has to be a reason why:

I drink too much.  I tell lies.  I work too much.  I don’t work.  I over-eat.  I make myself throw up.  I visit certain websites.  I’m addicted to facebook.  I sleep around.  I withhold myself from my spouse.  I judge everyone around me.  I’m greedy.  Whatever…

The road was busy, and I had been tailgated for seven miles.  I know this because I had been counting.  There was a line of cars in front of me.  We weren’t in a hurry; it was Saturday and the to-do list was mostly done.  That’s when it all began.  Tailgator crossed the double yellow into oncoming traffic in order to get one car ahead of me in the line up.  I slammed on the brakes and moved as far as I could to the right so that the poor fellow in the opposite lane could live to see Sunday.

this is not a photo from actual events described in this blog post.

What an idiot.  Then she does it again.  Double yellow, motor cycle in the oncoming lane and she pulls out right in front of him and passes one car in order to be next in line. 

Language and Epistemology of Grace

There is this woman in the Bible, if I were talking about her behind her back I might be inclined to call her “that filthy whore!”  This woman was caught in the act!  “We have laws for this kind of behavior,” cried the behaviorists.  So the behaviorists, doing what moral theorists should do, appealed to Jesus.  To whom else would you turn?  Certainly Jesus, filled with the Spirit and moral clarity with settle this one.  The moral lawyers cited Moses vs. the People of Israel

It’s Thursday.  Maundy Thursday.  Maundy is from a Latin word meaning “mandate.”  Something about the celebration of this particular day is mandatory.

The footwashing. 

The Eucharist.

If the doctrines of Christianity hold true, we must accept that God himself washed the feet of his followers and that God himself served bread and wine to these same followers.  Even the guy he knew was going to greet him with a deadly kiss.  Even the guy who would spend the rest of the thin, night hours lying about his status as a follower of this God-made-flesh.

Mandatory.

God himself… God incarnate… the God-Man… makes imitation mandatory.  That part is not surprising.  All gods mandate likeness.  This God makes non-imitation forgivable and that is what sets him apart from the “would-be’s.”

He hears the cries of Hosanna – Save us now, Son of David… Save us now, King of Israel!  And he responded.  In the way only a God who was familiar with human suffering could “save us now.”  Liberating humanity from itself.  Liberating me from me through mandating two things on a Thursday evening, “Remember what you are going to experience over the next days, and and in your remembering, serve one another.”

A far-off god would never be so silly as to entrust men with now-clean feet to walk about the world serving bread and wine.  But a God who became a man, who knew these men, even the one who would turn him over, even the one who would cower before a girl in order to deny this God, he might understand the power of liberation.  A God who would invade history from outside history might save us all from “me,” from the false comfort of becoming our own god.

The first sin wasn’t taking a piece of fruit; it was striving for equality with God.  That is the importance of the flesh cloak taken up by God himself.  In the flesh he understood humanity’s grand brokenness, the “me-ness” central to human depravity.  He demonstrated life in a foreign manner.  He did not consider equality with God something to be grasped.

Wait.

He was God.  Even in his bodily form, still God.

And yet…

He taught humanity to live apart from the constant striving of one seeking god-status.  Apart from the cover-up that sets me just a fair shake higher, nearer God than you.  Hearing the Hosannas, he responded.

Save us now, God-made-flesh.