Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

I don't want to be swallowed by the darkness. Nor do I want to be blinded by the beautiful facade. No, I want to be part of a people who see the darkness, know it's real, and then, then, then, light a candle anyway. And hold that candle up against the wind and pass along our light wherever it's needed from our own homes to the halls of legislation to the church pulpit to the kitchens of the world.

Anyone who gets to the end of their life with the exact same beliefs and opinions as they had at the beginning is doing it wrong.

Set out, pilgrim. Set out into the freedom and the wandering. Find your people. God is much bigger, wilder, more generous, and more wonderful than you imagined.

Theologian and scholar Walter Brueggemann writes beautifully in 'The Prophetic Imagination' that real hope comes only after despair. Only if we have tasted despair, only if we have known the deep sadness of unfulfilled dreams and promises, only if we can dare to look reality in the face and name it for what it is, can we dare to begin to imagine a better way. Hope is subversive precisely because it dares to admit that all is not as it should be. And so we are holding out for, working for, creating, prophesying, and living into something better---for the kingdom to come, for oaks of righteousness to tower, for leaves to blossom for the healing of the nations, for swords to be beaten into plowshares, for joy to come in the morning, and for redemption and justice.

But I had to learn that taking the Bible seriously doesn’t mean taking everything literally.

If our theology doesn't shift and change over our lifetimes, then I have to wonder if we're paying attention.

Blessed are the wonderers with the courage to live into the questions. Seems to me that sooner or later, whether we like the outcome or not, theirs is the answer.

I will always pray as if this one thing is true: God is for us. And it's worthwhile to keep knocking. That's all I know about faith for sure.

I still hold my understandings loosely. Faith isn't certainty, I know that by now. If I were certain, I wouldn't need faith.

I want to be part of a people who see the darkness, know it’s real, and then, then, then, light a candle anyway. And hold that candle up against the wind and pass along our light wherever it’s needed from our own homes to the halls of legislation to the church pulpit to the kitchens of the world.

My prayer is that the Holy Spirit would sweep into our lives with holy disruption, upending our assumptions and privileges, our greed and selfishness, our pride and our stupor. To empower our work and our witness. Like Zechariah 4:6 tells us, not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord.

I know now that the Spirit is trying to birth something in my life when I find myself craving silence and darkness, when I find myself editing my circle down to just the trusted few whom I know will midwife me through this birth. It's nothing to fear; it's the time of transition.

In the Kingdom of God, we join with God in co-creation, in the work of the new earth. We love and we follow Jesus. We shape our lives into His life, to live here on earth as He would live among us. We weren't called to follow political parties or ideology, nationalism, consumerism, or power. Instead, we were called to apprentice ourselves to Jesus' way of life. We were called to be part of establishing the Kingdom of God here and now in our walking-around lives. Partnering with God to see the Kingdom come.

Sometimes our most holy calling is to listen, to bear witness.

Justice is often born in the quiet and ordinary moments long before it's seen by anyone else. Sometimes it's as simple and as difficult as listening, as learning, as laying down our excuses or justifications or disguises, as forgiveness, as choosing the hard daily work of restoration, as staying resolutely alive when everyone else is numbing themselves against it.

Then there are my Somewheres. We all need somewhere to say the private things, the vulnerable things, the scary and true things, the victories and the defeats. "I need to say it somewhere," we say. So then the temptation is to say everything, everywhere, or we end up saying nothing, nowhere. There's something between oversharing or undersharing our real lives. I have learned--slowly, painfully--to say these private things to my Somewheres.

May we be...the ones who hold our opinions loosely and yet love ferociously.

Jesus doesn’t belong to church people. But church people belong to Him, in Him, and through Him.

Jesus remains. He is worth it all. He is under the steeples and in the wilderness. He is in the megachurch and in the spiritual conversation at the bar. He inhabits our certainty and also our doubt. He is every good thing that ever was or will be, and He is still in the business of saving our lives. Really, that’s the thing. It is our hope and salvation, and everything else is just details.

You'll love the song of the stars in your hair more than you loved the contents of your life, more than you loved tidy sealed boxes and certainty.

There is a natural curiosity that is inherent to children. I think it's a bit dishonest to use, 'Have faith like a child,' an a way to shut a person down. Like, somehow, it means we're not supposed to wonder, we're just supposed to accept. Now that I have a house full of small humanity, I think I'm beginning to understand why Jesus would encourage us to have faith like a child. They don't know. And so they ask. We don't know. And so we ask.

I believe our most sacred moments are often our most human moments.

And here, at the last, as we sit here among the questions still unanswered and the path you must walk ahead, I pray for your journey as it unfolds into the unknown. I know you feel a bit out of sorts. We all do sometimes. It's okay. Don't be afraid. You are so very loved. I pray you would remember it, know it, live it, breathe it, rest in it: beloved. In the mighty and powerful name of Jesus, Amen.

this: I lost Jesus in there. It seemed one could be a Christian without being a disciple of Jesus.

I am an exile in this fallen and broken world, here to plant gardens and to prepare for the coming day when all things will be renewed and restored, to tend to the earth and to humanity—and my place in the world—with tender ferocity. We are participating in the life of Christ.

God's sovereignty is not an excuse or a reason for the bad things that happen in our lives: God is light and there is no darkness in Him. No one will ever convince me that God made my babies die or that God killed our friend with cancer or that hurricane is an act of God as punishment for sin. Instead, I think sovereignty is the promise that it will all be healed in the end. Sovereignty means that all will be held. That God is at work to bring redemption and reconciliation, that somehow at the end of all things, we don't escape from the goodness that pursues us, the life we are promised, the love that redeems.

Our faith is often embodied in the relationships and neighborhoods where we live. In our world of globalization, technology, and mobility, we've misplaced the sacredness of place. The act of staying and living in our place has an impact on us practically, of course, but also on us theologically. It's not always sexy to stay put, is it? In most of my church tradition, no one ever mentioned the holy work of staying.

Whether it's racism, patriarchy, warmongering, greed, or child trafficking, it's counter to God's Kingdom. But the people caught in those systems are rarely the enemies; often they are just as caught, as longing for a rescue as the rest of us. We don't battle against flesh and blood, not really, but against the powers and principalities that hold us all captive.

Sometimes, yes, we do speak to a mountain and it will lift up and be cast into the sea. But I've also learned over my lifetime that it is just as holy and just as ridiculous and just as miraculous for the people of God to pick up their own small shovels and get to work, a million small stones at a time.

The night that our friend's wife died, my brokenhearted husband called his mother: "What do I say?"... There is nothing to say. Stop thinking there is something to say to make it go away. It won't go away. Abandon your answers. Avoid your cliches. Don't blame God and don't blame him. Learn to sit in the sadness.