When The Best Becomes Robber of Good

Since the turn of the year, I've found myself in a time of hearing the Lord and my own life speak to me.  It has been unlike any other season of the "New Year", and perhaps unlike any other season, ever.  I can't stop writing.

And as I write, the pages are redolent with inspiration and rediscovery, lines squeezed in at odd angles, in pens of various colors, words pushing their way up through the stubborn sod of mid-life apathy and anxiety.  

I would love to share the words I'm feverishly scrawling right here.  My hope is that reading them - you and I - that we will not only experience a personal breakthrough, but also the first shaping of a new, timely, contemporary appreciation of natural church.  Analog church.  Slow church.  

I am discovering that the present model of what makes for a successful church is actually an old relic, dating back to the garden of Eden.  Everything God made was good.  It was gift.  

And along came Serpent, to see to it that "the best" became robber of good...that great became the robber of good.  And here we all are, thinking that all we need is a better, best way to "be the church".

I am waving my flag, and getting off Crazy Train.  And it is beyond refreshing.  It is beyond refreshing to see God's creation, which is His church, as a place to live into the questions inevitable when the kingdom of God is supernatural and the lives of people ordinary.

It is exciting, I think, to explore a smaller yet much larger, saner perspective.  A perspective that is inherently natural and embodied in my individuality, yet entirely supernatural and only embodied in community.  A perspective that leans into ordinary life, and watches it become something extraordinary, simply because I have chosen to love what is mine.

There is this sudden, slow satisfaction of spiritual things set right.

2018, your sudden shifts are welcome here.  My pen is poised.

"My heart is inditing a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made touching the king: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer."  Psalm 45:1