Life’s an adventure. This has been my mantra for the past ten years or so. More accurately I might say: Life with God is at times an unpredictable and dramatically unfair adventure. Perhaps you can relate. The ups and downs, the joys and sorrows. This short stay on earth can be brutal for some of us. Well, for all of us really. My wife Kalle and I have certainly experienced deep joy and breathtaking beauty, and we have also felt our share of heartache over the years. I suppose we should be grateful for all of these experiences because they have allowed us to relate to some and to sit with others whose depth of suffering we can only imagine.
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These past several years have been a whirlwind. God blew down our little stick-built house and we have watched as God picked up the pieces and replaced it with an unshakable structure on a firmer foundation. We have more questions than ever about what this life is and who this God is. I can honestly say that I’ve never thought more about the book of Job as I have in the past three years: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Alright, alright, I wasn’t around, and I don’t know the big plan. I’m but a simple sheep. God is good at wrecking our little stick-built lives. Thankfully, God is also a master at putting the pieces back together.
Someday, you and I can grab coffee and we can swap stories. We can laugh about the wrong turns we’ve made along the way and the graciousness of our God to never give up on us. We could all write books about our journeys. We all have some little slice of wisdom to share, anyone who’s ever been alive can add a chapter to the Big story. If they’ve been paying any attention that is. I’ve always believed that I would have something to share someday. I’ve wanted to write a book for as long as I can remember. I thought someday I’d share stories about all of my international travel, the thousands of people I’ve met and the amazing lessons I’ve learned along the way. Maybe someday I’ll write that book, but not this time.
The adventure I’m about to share with you was completely unexpected and has felt a bit unfair. You see, I have grown up in a certain faith tradition, in a certain culture, in a postmodern American middle-class world, with a world view shaped by my gender, race, socio-economic status, and entitlement that comes with all the unique privileges afforded by those things. My particular growing up experience has formed within me certain cultural biases and stereotypes, some of which I’ve spent the past ten years trying to unlearn. Many of these factors have contributed to the development of a clouded lens through which I have viewed the world and others. This perspective has prevented me from seeing God in all God’s beauty and from seeing God in others. This is where our story begins — with my own failure to see.
We allhave a lens through which we view the world and others. Our individual filteris defined by things like our culture of origin, socio-economic status, gender,ethnicity, and political views. These things build the foundation for ourpersonal convictions, ideologies and philosophies. But this lens is not sufficient. We must add a new filter through which weview the world. One that is much largerand clearer. This new lens is a mosaic of sorts. One that holds ourexperiences loosely, with room to grow and an openness to newperspectives. Let’s call this the “God-lens.” The amazing thing is,God is much bigger and more beautiful and more diverse than we could ever thinkor imagine.
Knack Ii 2-1 The Adventure Begins
You see, somewhere along the way I forgot that God is bigger than the Bible, that God is bigger than our faith traditions, and that God is bigger than me. I had forgotten that God is capable of transforming my biblical interpretation. God has given me new eyes through which to view the world and others. It’s easy to ignore the fact that Jesus is alive and that He ultimately gets the Final Word. In fact, Jesus is the supreme authority over all things, including the Bible. Sometimes it’s convenient to rely on our own biblical knowledge and the ability to proof-text certain verses from scripture to support our theological arguments and cultural biases. This is a mistake because this was never how the Bible was intended to be used.
The Bible is the written account of the ancient Jewish and Christian people and their inspired experience of God. The Bible is the written revelation of God, filtered through the human capacity to hear from and understand God. One of my favorite Biblical scholars, Richard Rohr likes to say that the Bible is the word of God in the words of men. In other words, the authors of the Biblical text were regular people like you and me. They wrote from a particular place in history, saw through a particular cultural and socio-economic lens, and they had a limited understanding of biology, psychology and ecology. They were primarily concerned with telling their version of who God is and who they were.
Thus, we now read and interpret Scripture through our own historical-cultural lens. This doesn’t mean the Bible has nothing to offer us in how we should live our lives, but it does require a greater understanding of the historical and cultural context within which the Scriptures were written in order to faithfully and responsibly apply them today. When we do not have a firm grasp on what the Bible is and how the Bible should be used, humans tend to misuse the Biblical text, extracting individual verses in the Bible to support and defend our own personal ideologies or political positions. History has proven that this type of Biblical interpretation causes immense harm (e.g. slavery, divorce, etc…). So how then should we read and interpret Scripture so as not to cause harm to others? Well, a good place to start would be to examine how Jesus himself interpreted the Scriptures.
Adventure Begins Board Game
In John 5:39, Jesus reminds the religious leaders that they will not find Truth in the Scriptures, but the purpose of the Scriptures themselves are to point to the person of Jesus Christ! Therefore, we must read and interpret all of Scripture (Old and New Testament) through the lens of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. All of history is moving from, towards and in Jesus, who is fully God and fully human. So, how did Jesus treat people? What did Jesus teach? What does Jesus have to say about the nature and characteristics of God? Oh yeah, we can’t forget the presence and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, constantly guiding and shepherding us towards a fuller understanding of who God is. This is how our journey began; the Holy Spirit guiding us as we sought a bigger view of God and the Bible.
WhenKalle and I began to investigate our own beliefs around the topic of lesbian,gay, bisexual, trans-gender and queer (LGBTQ+) inclusion in the Evangelicalchurch, we were pretty convinced that our lens was the correct lens. Icould quote the seven verses in scripture that backed up my own cultural biasesand the stereotypes that had developed from my decades of growing up in conservativeChristian America. I had subscribed to the narrow views ofEvangelicalism, and I was well-versed in the nuances of how to explain tosomeone why evangelicals excludedLGBTQ+ individuals. In the past several years, however, God hasdeconstructed these arguments one by one.
What we discovered is that God had a new lens for us to see through. God has given us the opportunity to learn and to see in new ways. The beautiful thing is that God never forced us to try on these new lenses. God doesn’t actually force us to do anything. God invites us to Godself. God invites us to know more fully, to love more passionately, to feel more deeply, and to see more clearly.
Ultimately, Kalle and I decided that we didn’t have all the answers, so we chose to accept God’s invitation with open hearts and minds. We chose to consider a new perspective, to take up the call that God placed on our lives to begin a journey of discovery that would ultimately lead to transformation. We extend this invitation to you. Embark on this journey of discovery with us and hopefully you will be led to a deeper love for others and a bigger view of God.
Let The Adventure Begin
I’llbe posting a new chapter of our journey each week on this blog. Best torrents 2020 books magnet. I thought thiswould be much easier than calling each of you and telling the story of how we forfeitour jobs as college pastors at a large evangelical church in Washington. In an effort to protect the privacy of thosepeople involved in our journey, I’ve changed some of the names. Also, in an attempt to keep things short andsweet, neat and tidy, the timeline of events has been adjusted slightly. Anyway,this is how it all went down…