Where we wrestle with the sublime, mysterious, powerful and often frustrating paradox of God's necessary grace.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Cisterns




Jer. 2:13 My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me,
the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water.


It's time for a new direction for this blog.

I've explored my faults and inadequacies in detail, and explored my frustration with God and the working out of our relationship. There's only so much navel-gazing I can take, and I've reached my limit.

So, let me first say what this blog is NOT going to be:

It's not a happy-clappy isn't-Jesus-wonderful-I-could-just-hug-him-sooooo-much expectoration of pink fuzzies.

I still expect God to be God and continue pissing me off by His refusal to do things my way.

What will the blog be?

More than ever I want to honestly and without game-playing explore grace and its work and working in our lives. I confess a gloomy apprehension after reading all three of Ann Lamott's books (Traveling Mercies, Plan B, Grace Eventually) and realizing she's doing what I want to do here but doing it infinitely better.

I want this blog to be about growth and healing, redemption. I want to use lots of verbs: I went, I saw, I spoke, I touched, I felt, I ate, I puked, I prayed, I gave, I cried, I laughed, I redecorated. (You still awake? Just had to test on that last one.)

This blog will mostly chronicle my weird little walk of faith but I don't want the focus always on me. I want to have discussions with you, Reader.

So what do I know about grace? I know I experienced it this evening at church. The pastor cited the above verse as part of his message on addiction and I felt it resonate inside me. I knew I'd been guilty of "digging my own cisterns," i.e., letting my negative feelings about God stop me from taking the necessary cincrete steps in pursuing a relationship with Him. I feel like God called me to start the journey home.

Okay, okay--this is all subjective, touchy-feely stuff and I'd be suspicious as hell of it if someone else told me they experienced this. In my defense of my experience, I say: 1) This is my experience for me, I'm not putting it on anyone else. 2) God has worked this way in my past occasionally, so I do have some history of it. 3) Sooner or later I think most every believer will have a moment of unseen/unspoken connection with God, something inexplicable to skeptics. As long as the experience does not contradict schripture, nor draw one away from God, I don't see a problem with it.