Five boxes, fifteen years. There they sat. What had once adorned the shelves of my library now rests in an indistinct corner of my overflowing garage. It came suddenly, but it was inevitable, as most things of God are. The subtlety of divine humor didn’t go unnoticed: A move of God into moving boxes stuck in a garage.
The traditions of man make the word of God noneffectual. Doctrines are the traditions man have made to explain the mysterious nature of an immense Creator. Prosperity, faith and divine healing became a doctrine that now resides in the box it feared.
The truth you know makes you free. Structures of belief never make you as free as when you know they can’t contain you in the half-truth box they fabricate around you. Spiritual warfare, authority of the believer, and praying against an enemy who was defeated 2,000 years ago, now resides on cold concrete just as it should have all these years.
The church is not the ideal place to encounter transcendence, or what should be known of as the state of grace. Churches are too stiff and cumbersome to deal with the delicate flow of grace. Books, even well written ones, have the same issues. A conglomerate of words trying to convey the vastness of the universal truth known as love filtered through a myopic world view. Take all the myopic views, bind them individually between glossy pictures and raving reviews from the camp it caters to and you have five boxes over fifteen years.
Thousands of dollars to realize a truth of how bankrupt my understanding had become. Sure, I fit in with the crowd, eager to press the palm of the apostle du jour with the newest revelation and sign up for all the latest…wisdom is the principle thing, right? It is if you tow the party line. But when deep calls unto deep, you suddenly become very aware that shallow people don’t like those who skinny dip.
While it might be tempting to say that the space created in the departure of dogma can now be used for more artistic and decorative beauty, I must recall that it is a library, not the museum it had become. The space of a fifteen-year assembly has only taken an 18-month journey to fill in ten minutes. As libraries go it now challenges you to read through the diversity. It commands you to find the flow of grace in multiple thoughts spanning millenniums. It squashes any notion that God, the true living God, creator of the universe, could be contained in any binding or box. I am… once again drawn by curiosity… and in awe of what little I know to how vast I see the potential laying before me. To be on the move again is as exhilarating as it is liberating…
So, what book are you stuck in? Maybe it’s time…
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