Tag Archives: Sin

November 13, 2006

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Maybe I’m a little less petulant today. But how am I really feeling? There was a little bit of lightness yesterday. Working on the art project was good. I woke up in the usual place I do this morning. Everything is so dark.

Can I let go of the rest of all this junk? I feel the anxiety of getting  tasks done pressing in on me. Mostly the worship concert and the candle lighting service. They are looming large – but I have delegated much of it – so it’s just the sense that “someone” has to be worried. That’s my job. To worry.

I feel a desire to be near God. A desire to be still. I miss Brenda.

Lord, I just want to feel you. I want to be free in you. I need to feel your love regardless of what I do. I need to know that I’m ….what I want to say is “loved” but I’m really thinking “doing the right thing”.

I want to be the hero. I want to be the ONE who loves J.R., Jill and Tim just “right”. I’m still so caught up in myself.

Talking with Jan on Sunday was good. I felt the sense that you were really speaking through me – I felt “wisdom” happen, and it all applied to ME not just Jan.

I can choose to “legitimately” put the victim uniform on. Or I can choose NOT TO. I can turn right and take my ball and go home. I can quit in protest of injustice. I will be justified by my peers. I can turn left and become a mewling beggar for pity. Living off table scraps of sympathy that fall from the banquet table of real affection.

Or I can choose something other than justice. I can choose mercy. I can let it go. Walk the middle ground – the hard road where there is neither condemnation, nor license. I grow weary when I consider that. It’s the land of the here and now = NOWHERE. The moment. Stillness. Silence. Solitude. Intimacy with my Abba.

September

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The late Summer and early Fall of 2006 marked a turning point in these 7 Years of Sundays. I will let this (and perhaps a few other) summary entries span those months for a couple of reasons.

1.      This part of the journey was defined by an un-folding drama I referred to having begun back in January. The details of this journey need to remain private.

2.      In addition, there are so MANY details, that this blog would become a bog.

3.      The details frankly aren’t important as they relate to the goal of this blog: contextualize a 7 year season in one man’s life.

So here’s the stuff that seems to matter that came out of the Fall of ’06:

Sin is sin. Even those of us who try really hard and with the best of intentions to avoid creating a higherarchy of bad behavior, still do. But once you find yourself really drowning in the cold waters of sin…convinced that life as you know it is about to end; looking around for someone to blame or someone who is worse off than you can finally be seen for it’s true value: nothing.

I learned via the most visceral and kinesthetic means I can imagine that the line between “offender” and “victim” is a fiction for most of us. Certainly for me. Yes, there are VICTIMS of war and poverty and bad policy around the globe. No one brings brain cancer on themselves; calling them VICTIM is accurate. But I’m not talking about that kind of thing. I’m talking about how we judge each other. How we hold up “this” or “that” and compare it to some template of justice to determine whether OUR hardship has earned us the right to lord it over others. It’s the national past time of the USA and it has been refined to an art form in the church, and I am guilty of doing it.

World, please forgive me.