Let it die

Let it Die

Lenses polished.

Mirrors positioned.

Ears opened.

Heart softened.

Recently, my mother asked me why I’ve been on such a spiritual journey.  I simply stated that this was not the journey I set out on.  Then, I pondered.  When I left Texas, I had wandered quite a distance from anything resembling a higher power.  I set out to find myself and have some fun fishing.  I was running from a life that no longer made sense.  Eventually, I had an answer for my mom…  I have things to say. 

Perhaps, God let me wander because the hike back reveals beauty I never noticed with my head down.

“Iron sharpens iron”

Commonly used in Christianity as an analogous euphemism for encouraging accountability among fellow believers, it has all too often been weaponized.  It has been used to impose standards, beliefs, and interpretations.  Rather than time spent learning how we each sharpen iron individually, scrutiny from the confining cages of understudying scholars creates knicks in the very steel being worked.

As the facets of social standards fade in my rear-view mirror, the landscape ahead is morphing into different focus.  A view, for me, that is less noisy and distracted by the clutters I was conditioned to.  The more I loosen the constraints of social achievement and fold back the blinders from my eyes, the better, I believe, I am able to listen.

Christians share the same higher entity, yet we are separated into forty-five thousand denominations, lines drawn by disgruntled men who had interpretational disagreements over words written by man. Who are we, as infallible men, to impose confinements of a religion built by other infallible men, upon another infallible man?

Organized religion may well be the preferred device the devil uses to taint the very baptismal waters meant to resurrect us.  A nation divided will not thrive.  We are separated by boundaries beset against us a thousand years ago.  I cannot, in good faith, believe that God empowers us to banish our peers to study halls to study pages that have created dissension in the ranks of faith, pulling us away from the very purpose we were created for.  We are here to love the other without looking to see what books, if any, they carry in their backpack.  We are here to see other backpacks and help repair torn and tattered straps. 

In no way am I advocating for an early dismissal from Sunday school.  God is surely sitting in the pew next to you as He did me for so many years.  However, there’s no question that He’s out in the woods on search and rescue missions, looking for over-churched orphans who’ve been abandoned or shunned because they dared live the way He intended them to – free from social condemnation and religiosity.  He found me curled up under a tree by a little spring-fed pond.  He did not embarrass me by pointing out the mud on my shoes nor the absence of scripture on my tongue. 

Simply, He played with me in the puddles.

Having grown up in church, I am intimately familiar with its teachings.  I’ve even past wondered if I was being called to the pulpit.  I’ve studied many variations of the Bible, including references in Hebraic, Aramaic and Greek.  I’ve led church-based programs, gone overseas on mission trips, and helped build houses.  Then, churches and congregations began piling pressures.  Follow their rules, and if I did not, I was introduced to a hierarchy of heretics to help guide me down the well-traveled path of penance.

Fifty years of church kept me swaying on a tightrope of spider’s silk, swinging side to side with the winds of peer pressure.  For fifty years I felt I was hovering just above the fires of sin.  My prayers were for the spider to not let go of his foothold, lest we both fall. 

Salvation cannot be that fragile.  We all suffer our own path.  Who am I to question another for not following the trail before me?

Being atop mountains for the better part of the past four months has shown me a life without a smudge of a line regarding denomination, nor the liturgical societies of rote religion.  The views I’m being moved by are for believers of all versions of the story.  Man has splintered God’s love like a tree hit by lightning, then gathered the sticks in an effort to rebuild the forest. 

I arrive at those mountain peaks sucking wind, bruised, and cut up.  There, I’ve received the most appropriate medicine from a doctor who intimately feels the wounds I’ve suffered - simply prescribed, with no deductible, with no copay, and with no prior authorization required.  I’ve received humility, compassion, perspective, and… Grace – directly from the pharmacy.

The entire Universe shares the same power grid, supplying the same energy, without prejudice, yet we as humans possess a compulsion to re-label that energy, promoting better rates with a new provider.  Organized religion has been deregulated, conversely caging that which was meant to roam free…

Ourselves.

The difference, for me, has been wandering beyond the margins and bindings of a book.  I have nothing clouding my solar panels, save my own umbrellas.  Those umbrellas, assembled by life’s disappointments and positioned by their consequences, used to be giant pool shades used to block most of the light that came my direction.  Now, I am exchanging those sun blockers for miniature, colorful umbrellas.  All light is now received.  In all colors. 

When the power grid of legalism dims the lights between us, is it not more difficult for both of us to see?  Is there not room in a church pew for agreeable disagreements?  Surely there exists enough water for His love to baptize us all in different oceans.  I have been lost in the desert more than once, yet I was led to water. 

May all intonations of ‘follow my way or else’ fade with the setting suns of condemnation for fellow believers.  This is my path, highlighted on a map that I can follow.  Without question, it was drawn by a trail guide who’s most familiar with the terrain I’ve traveled, as well as the lands not yet compassed.  I believe a map has been drawn for each of us by a master cartographer.  Furthermore, though all maps start from differing dropped pins, I believe they end at the same destination.  I long for the day we all feast from the same potluck table, enjoying the unique flavor of each person’ own fare. 

From atop these mountains, I can clearly see the constraints of communal communion.  I’ve seen marriages forbidden, and others detrimentally held together, by the same denominational confines.  History is laden with lives lost in the name of interpretation. 

“I would think God’s tired of being called down to both sides of a war.”

I believe He speaks to us, individually, in a language each person can understand. A good teacher adapts the lesson plan to the students' abilities.  Too often we are approached with reproach by self-appointed hall monitors of their faith’s teachings.

Tsk tsk for the brittle steps of accountability.  We are emboldened by a word that has been transformed, inferring permission to step into someone else’s lane and impose a burden of beliefs not of their own.  When the impositions are met with resistance, that person is labeled with catchphrases like ‘backsliding’ or ‘heresy’ because they do not align with what was preached on Sunday.

I will not believe I'm lacking because I am reading the incorrect book, or no book at all.  Nor will I stand in front of someone stumbling, with my arms crossed, because they didn’t follow the path I did or head the scriptures tabbed in their book.  Instead, I will kneel with anyone for any reason and give real living the meaning for which it was intended.  I will continue to remove debris from my river so that I may offer clearer waters to those that want to splash in them with me.

I’m all too familiar with the rebuttal: “Brother, iron sharpens iron.”  Iron sharpens iron, but we must handle the blades with caution.  Many Christians I’ve known are too quick to quote scripture, like a reflex, supporting their views, comfort levels, and belief systems they’ve adopted from the classroom.

Is not iron also sharpened by leather and whetstone? 

Through the years, I have veered away from the ways of my father’s traditional teachings using a whetstone.  I grew to prefer ceramic sharpeners for a season.  I still applied the same principles I’d been taught and achieved the same result – a sharpened knife.  These methods served me well, until recently.

I’ve found the blacksmith.  He’s teaching me how to see the knife within the block of raw material.

I have my own bruises from being in the octagon with scripture.  Everyone has been up against the ropes, beat to hell by life.  I fought the only way I’d been taught – I used scripture divisively - equating my knowledge to righteousness.  I am guilty of wielding it like Excalibur, with good intentions, as the missing link to aide another’s suffering.  It only proved my ignorance and exposed my narrow, sophomoric mind, closed to the reality that a bigger picture exists beyond the frames of my mind’s aperture.  I’ve alienated many good people this way.

We are to help each other's walk, but how?  Pushing?  Pulling?   For me, peace has come by living the example with compassion, meeting people where they are, just like God met me wherever I was lost.

They'll know we are Christians by our love.   What does that look like?   If churches preached pure, desegregated love for everyone, no matter their walk, no matter their language, no matter what classroom they attend, we might realize we are all studying the same subject under the same professor.

Oh, that we would all one day sit shoulder to shoulder as classmates without pulling pigtails or spoiling the other’s inkwell.

Reading a book will not prepare me for a machete fight. 

The good book never gave me as useful a tool as the lens I now use to clearly see.  With my new prescription, I can clearly see others’ pack mules, hidden under cloaks, dragging hoof.  I see beyond their scars.  I see the weapons that caused the wounds.  Some are so troubled with steadying their own load, sometimes balanced on a needle, that they cannot even receive a simple greeting from a stranger without their stack crumbling to the ground.  Instead of eschewing junk words that denigrate the path they’re on, intimating ‘they are struggling because they’re on the wrong path’, I now go walk with them for a while.  Offer some water.  Listen to their story…

The grace I’ve received was never found in a book, by tithing, or from opening a hymnal.  I have closed those books, lifted my head up, and opened my entire being before creation.  I have never been more filled with insight and comprehension of the world as I’ve found in the whispers weaved between the trees, rivers, and wildlife.

Simply, I believe God is bigger than a book, tyrannically translated by man.  It is too often used to create wedges and steep hills.  The legalistic teachings detract from our basic human craving to be accepted where we stand.  I believe God is saddened by the fracturing of a world He created.  We’ve employed a self-serving fracking technique that only extracts the resources desired with no regard to the stability of the soils from which we’ve disrupted.  Religion has created an environment on the brink of a landslide.

God has shown me a way to walk with Him that makes sense to me, yet if my convictions become rigid enough to alienate others with tones of unacceptance, what sort of an example am I living?  How poorly am I reflecting the grace given me?  In turn, if condemnation or scrutiny finds its way to my doorstep, their ripples and waves will die with me.

I’ve traded church pews for lounge chairs in the landscapes He created.  I acknowledge I’m in a unique position to do so, but this theme will continue with me, no matter the terrain.  There still exists quiet, country roads that weave unassumingly around the tollbooths of obligation.

Whichever version of God is waiting for me when my eyes no longer open, He will not bother with the colors of my hair or skin, nor the shape of my cross.

I am confident He will not care which version of His story I read, so long as I contributed a few chapters of my own to His picture book.