Dear Friend, it's been a while.

It is interesting to be on this ride...so full of excitement and joy, fear and pain, hope, frustration, love, confusion...this plethra of emotion and feeling. Sometimes I wonder what metaphor was used in the pre-rollercoaster era to describe life, and I wonder if it was as accurate.
I like being challenged. I like being pushed out of what I think I know, into something so much more beautiful, complex, and exciting. I see such beauty in the complexities of life that it is difficult for me to understand complacency and comfort. Perhaps that is why I enjoy awkward moments....they are opportunities to be thrown out of your comfort zone into a deeper, more meaningful relationship.
I've been reading lately about "neo-christianity."
I don't like the christianity or religion I have encountered in my life. To be more accurate, prior to being a christian, I thought that christians were silly and uneducated. I saw so many of them accept anything "based on christianity" without ever questioning the validity of it...or even bothering to explore the depths or consequences of it's truth. In the first year of being a christian, I loved christianity, and I came close to becoming one of those christians that takes anything at face value because it was told to me by a christian, or it was from the bible. Then came disillusionment...and oh how grateful I am that it came. It was a difficult time, because I had questions...questions I felt I shouldn't ask. I had opinions, opinions I felt shouldn't be shared. I had doubts, doubts I felt should be smothered out.
In church, I heard promises that God would give life, and life more abundantly, and wondered why, if we were promised abundant life, I was surrounded with people who seemed so apathetic, sad, tired....dead. Their eyes reflected worry, fear, and defeat...numbness. So concerned with bills, with success, and numbers and the right way to worship. In their starched slackes and church hats...they looked bored and empty. To me, this was not abundant life.
I thought that maybe my theology was wrong. And maybe it is...but I just seemed to see so much more life in the people I met that lived on the streets...the people who had nothing, the people who had left the church in search of Christ, or in order to follow Him. They talked to me about forgiveness, love, grace, hope, and most of all pain...pain that reminded them to feel, that reminded them of life, that reminded them of blessings. They were not afraid to live, and they were excited to die. In their eyes the joy of Christ was obvious, and in their calloused, dirty hands, so was their suffering. Pierced, tattooed, scarred, with rainbow hair and rumpled clothes, they were living abundant life...a different kind of abundant. A kind of christianity that was filling...baised on taking care of God's true love, people.
This is the christianity I want....desire, crave. It is the kind I hope for...it is the kind I pray some day the church will find, embrace, embody.
It's not to say that the church is wrong, but as the author of my book wrote....the church has learned how to help people step out of the darkness of sin, and into the light of redemption and grace. Value the work that they do. But it is our job as a body to keep people from falling asleep in the comfort and warmth of that light...we need to be united as one, for there is still work to be done, and it can't be done alone.