There is a really strange dimension to learning sometimes. This past week has been sitting in a fourth dimension. I never really understood the fourth dimension. To be desperately honest I don’t really know what I’m learning at the moment in relation to God and life but it’s big and oddly intangible – somewhat vector like.
Here’s where I’m going to try make sense of a few things. I’m sitting at uni, typing on the dirtiest keyboard that I’ve ever seen. The keys are greasy. For the past hour and a half I’ve been sitting in the cafe that I’ve adopted on Chapel Street. I’ve been there maybe four times. The coffee is good with the densest latte froth around, it operates on an open to the street principle (If you can disregard any thought of cost to those who can’t afford a coffee), and yet is private enough to be approachable to the loner. Particularly to one who has to kill time.
Some sense has come through blowing my brains out of the constraints of ‘this is what happens’ through the somewhat controversial Brian McLaren. I have been struggling and I think have trancended the pathetic prose of A New Kind of Christian and am actually appreciating the wild ideas and concepts that he gives wordy form to.
I spent the weekend at Soul Survivor. If you asked me specifically what I got out of it, I could answer only so far as a brilliant session about mentoring and a whole stack of confusion about everything else that I cannot name. Not because I don’t want to, simply because I can’t. I can recognise that God was doing something because how I felt at the start of the week was distinctly different from how things were at the end.
Like last year, I walked out of a main session to go and spend some time alone. A mimicry perhaps of killing time in a cafe, although far less cheerful.
I have some funny idea that this was started by a conversation I had at work this week. That conversation was cut short but left me at some new end. Rhetorical questions don’t require answers. This wasn’t a rhetorical question, it was one I should’ve been able to answer and yet couldn’t.
It shaped up something similar to this, “As a group of new Christians and those who haven’t grown up in a church or a Christian home we are really just trying to work out what being a Christian actually means for how we live.”
How do you do this Christian thing/What does it mean for life?
And the frightening thing was that on that fairly standard remark – a total of something that I’ve always been a part of, I didn’t have anything to say.
The basics go unsaid. This is me. This is Jesus. I think that it is a good thing to believe Jesus and to follow him.
The surprise wasn’t in the actuality but the means. I’m not sure if I’m making a lot of sense, but it was a bit like being hit with something really old that you’ve genuinely been exploring for a long time and seeing it in a totally new light but right back from the beginning.
…more to follow.
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