It is really amazing how the complication we humans bring to this life begin to be untangled as fear begins to be displaced in our lives. A client told me today that God and life with him can't be as complicated as our religious training has made it out to be. I told her I completely agreed.
Since she and I have had many conversations around some of the things expressed in The Shack, her statement made me think of one of the many things that just struck me as being so profound the first time I read it. This flips most people's thinking on it's head. Mack has just spent some time with Sophia, the manifestation of God's wisdom and says that he doubts if anything with her is normal.
"Actually," Jesus started to speak but paused to throw one last skipping stone, "with her, everything is normal and elegantly simple. Because you are so lost and independent you bring to her many complications, and as a result you find even her simplicity profound."
Humans attempting to do it on their own have created quite a tangled web and religion just complicates it even more because it ultimately keeps the focus all screwed up. It keeps people in a pattern of self effort attempting to untangle something we can't untangle and in the process the confusion just gets deeper. Or for some it makes them feel like they have it under control and figured out. Both situations create complicated relational difficulties and the proof is all around us. Loving one another, really loving one another, remains illusive. And this creates a big problem in light of Jesus saying that the world will know we are his because of the love we have for one another.
The news of a Christian book store chain deciding to pull The Shack from their shelves got me to thinking about all of this. In their explanation as to why they have done this they said it was based on the concerns of several people about 'parts of the book lack sufficient doctrinal clarity or could even be misleading' to which my response is: Maybe on this criteria they should pull the Bible from the shelves also? And why not? It seems for years and years there has been countless examples of people being misled due to things not being made clear in it? I tend to believe the difficulty is created by the problems we have with our processors, the filters through which we attempt to understand the message the Spirit is at work to reveal to us, and this difficulty has been created by the fact that we bring many complications to something that is really simple. But the fallen mind can't comprehend these things and the fearful religious mind is no help with this dilemma.
Hopefully one of these days we'll realize that loving one another as He loves us is the expression of truth that sets us all free?...and that fighting other's in the name of defending truth is what keeps it from happening?
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UPDATE
The Christian Book Store chain has decided to put the book back out on the shelfs after they spent some time reviewing it.
7 comments:
It's so good to read your blog after my gardening frenzy!
Your point about the Bible is SO relevant. It wasn't until I met God in unexpected relationship that I began to understand what was being said from the beginning to the end. Not that I claim to understand anything about Revelation or some other hard to understand passages, but the message of restoration and grace.
Reading here is like being home again after a wacky vacation. :) (But I'm glad just about everything is planted.)
I really enjoyed this post! I've been walking this new revelation out for around 4-5months now, and it's been so life-giving, rethinking the preconceptions we've had about God through our grimy religious glasses.
It's so encouraging reading how others on this journey are growing and finding God amidst the thorns and thistles!
It's sad how our religious mindsets cause us to immediately discount something that doesn't quite fit our religious paradigms without discerning whether it's from God or not. The Pharisees fell to this with Jesus. Seems the yolk of religion hasn't changed much.
I like what you've said about loving others - and how hard religion makes it for this to be a reality. It's a little disturbing how one of the specific indications that Jesus gives of us being His followers, the lack of which is often the most spoken of trait by accusers of Christianity today.
I am so glad that Dad has broken my religious mindsets in these matters, and pointed me again to a life lived freely in Him!
Thanks for this blog, I am often encouraged by it.
cam
Hello Cam and Jennifer.
Jennifer, I'm thrilled that reading here gives you the sense of being at home and hopefully feeling safe.
Cam, what you said about a religious mindset causing us to quickly discount things that don't fit our present paradigms and then how loving others is so often absent, can more often than not be attributed to fear being in control of our lives. The Spirit is at work to change that in us. It sounds like you are finding some people that are being set free from the fear that paralyzes.
You reminded me of an NT Wright quote that I just love and has been so helpful to me over the past couple years.
"One sign of Christian maturity may be a readiness to hear the argument through to the end, rather than what many Christians are eager to do, short circuiting the argument in the interest of quick fix spirituality or missiology."
I'm glad you are finding some encouragement here.
Kent, I love it!! I am so there right now. Now just trying to sort through all the crap and slime of religion, and trying to see if ANYthing is worth keeping; apart from Father's love; which, unfortunately, is the part I find that I know least!
Thanks, once again, for your encouraging words of freedom!!
free spirit, it was a shocking realization as to how shallow things really were in the things that seem to really matter once all the religious activity was stripped away. Hopefully it's just because I am slow but this has been 20 year process for me...my hope for you is that it doesn't take that long. But with that being said, it takes as long as it takes and often it looks like you are moving back wards when cmpared to what the world around us is busy doing. It's just the things we end up seeing as valuable change drastically.
I expected nothing less from "Christian" bookstores. I mean, come on, did you think they would carry anything of substance in a place that sells "Testa-mints" for Christianized fresh breath?
If anything it just shows how much of a "system" there is in the Christian subculture.
Roger, after a review of the book the chain of book stores have made the decision to put them back on the shelves. They didn't succumb to the pressure from the vocal minority.
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