Imagining Mud

This semester my goal is to post four monthly blog entries arriving on the first Wednesday of each month. My guess is that they will revolve around my class “Christian Perspectives in Health and Healing” and the main text book “Healthy Human Life: A Biblical Witness” info here.

Health and its relationship to spirituality has been an underlying focus of my time here in seminary. This class has given me language to express what the Lord has been teaching me during my time in Chicago. I enrolled in the class to gain a fuller understanding of Shalom. The idea of Shalom carries a sense of wholeness to it.

This is something I wish to explore more deeply. My faith has long been one of segregation. My mind, body, soul, and spirit were all viewed as separate things. My faith was tied to my mind. If I thought correctly, I would act correctly; and my spirit would be at peace. Care for my body was relegated to right actions. These actions focused on the negative, what I didn’t do (smoke, cuss, or chew as the old adage goes). During high school, I didn’t drink alcohol. This wasn’t because I was young and it could harm me, but because it wasn’t what “good Christians did.” Again, my actions were driven by right and wrong. My care for myself was based on avoiding sin.

Since I have come to North Park, words like, holistic, self-care, and Shalom have begun to become a part of my vocabulary, and are finding their way into my practices. Yet, I still struggle with right and wrong. I still wonder if I am doing the things that please God. I too often fall back on a false theology that states God is only pleased with me in relationship to the number of right things I do. I fall back on the false perception that right thinking leads to right action, and wrong/sinful thinking leads to wrong/sinful actions.

God is good, and God heals, however, I often feel like I am still waiting for my healing experience. I have some issues that pride and fear, as well as prudence keep me from describing in detail here on-line. What I have come to understand is that I do believe that I am loved by God. My theology states that I was created by God, but I do not think of myself as created by God.

My imagination does not see the hand of God reaching down to craft my form from mud. It does not sense the breath of God filling my lungs. I do not recognize myself to be one who reflects the image of God. Instead, I see myself as less than.

But this is okay. Because it simply is. What is cannot be changed. What can change is what will be. I currently live in community where my worth is held for me. Others know what I know (that I am made in the imago Dei) but more importantly, they see that I am made in the image of God. They see my worth, and they speak truth into my life. They give light to my soul. They hold for me what I cannot hold for myself.

Someday it will be that I see my own worth. On that day I will hold my own story, and the light in my soul will come from my imagination now freed to view myself as a worthy child of God.

 --Serving Him alongside all of you, just from further away
 --Jesse Letourneau

More than we see

I think we see in each other more than we ever see in ourselves.

A few months back I drew a picture for a friend of mine. It was a farewell present as he moved on from the camp where we (and I still do) worked to a new chapter in his life. I was quite happy with how it turned out, and I did put quite a bit of work into. Since then I have constantly been requested and encouraged to do more works of art.

Here is the thing, I can't draw very well. I can doodle. I am learning to play with colors to add shading and depth, but I can't just up and draw anything I want and have it look like I want it to. I certantly am not at a point where I could make any kind of living with my skills.

Yet those I work with see me as someone with a greater level of skill in drawing than I actually possess. This can be frustrating at times, as it is hard to convince people that I actually know my limits.

Yet limits are tricky things. Watch a kid cry before they jump off a zip line platform, or a sixth grader try and climb a rope ladder, slip, hit the ground, and immediately get back up and try again, and you quickly learn that limits are not set in stone. (Don't tell anyone, but I think I have learned more from the campers than I have taught to them.)

Nearly eleven months ago, I left Grace Community Church.
Grace and Community are two concepts that I have struggled to understand, struggled to know, struggled to live, and struggled to give my whole life to.

When I was in high school I thought I didn't "need" grace, and was convinced that I didn't deserve community or at least that no one would want me in their group. Then the Lord called me on a short term missions trip to England, and I learned just how wrong my theology was.

As I prepared to come to ARCG, my understanding of Grace was being renewed in my life. And the understanding of Community was being refreshed and expanded upon. I don't fully know what Community truly means. I know that it is essential for the life of the Christian. I know that Paul's analogy of the Church as a body is deadly accurate. I know that I am constantly grateful that I don't live isolated, that I don't struggle alone, I don't have victories by myself, that my burdens and trials are not mine alone to carry.

I am grateful that others see in me more than I see in myself.