In Compliance

Spent the early part of the morning in court. It seems that in the Commonwealth of Virginia it is against the law not to have current tags on your truck, who knew? Oh yeah the State Trooper at the road check knew.

It really was a funny moment when i got the ticket last month. i do some work for our local Community Services Board, to make some extra dough and just because i love it! There i was returning from a night on the town with a mentor kid i work with when we came around the curve, the curve that just happens to be less than a mile and a half from my house, and there they were Blue lights flashing, state troopers lined up on the middle line in their gray uniforms and black hats, orange safety vest screaming, "Don't hit this man!"
i pulled easily up to the trooper waving at me to stop, oblivious to the fact that my tags had expired. He asked if i knew my tags had run out. i responded with a deer in headlights look of surprise mixed with incredulity, "No sir," i replied. i spent the next 10 -15 minutes pulled off the side of the road waving at my neighbors as they drove by shaking their heads and listening to my mentor kid saying over and over, "You are supposed to be a good example to me, how is this a good example?!"

So like i said, there i was this morning in the courtroom, my cell-phone off - the deputy at the door had been very specific - vibrate just was not good enough the things had to be OFF. It was a bit of relief for me, i hate carrying around that electronic leash. No matter where you are or what you are doing someone always wants to give you a tug. i sat on the pew, a pew!, who has pews? Churches and courtrooms thats who. As i waited for the judge to come in i opened my book, "To Kill A Mockingbird", i figured its a great American classic and i've never read it so i may as well consume it. It was surreal, sitting in a courtroom reading through the court case of Tom Robinson. Suddenly thankful that it's 2007 and our courtroom is air conditioned, thankful that im just here for expired registration.

The judge enters, telling us all to just stay seated, he is jovial and friendly this morning; a feeling of hopefulness pours over all of us gathered there to pay penance for our traffic sins. As person after person hears their name called and approaches the bench, standing beside the particular officer who issued their ticket, the judge hands down decision after decision, to me they seem gracious and lenient, i am thankful. i watch the cases, waiting anxiously for my turn before his honor. Finally it comes, since i now have current tags on my truck he dismisses the charges, i have come into compliance with the law. Relief.

All this make me wonder, what about my dealings with the other folks who's lives intersect and intertwine with mine? i think that it's easier to be gracious to them when they come "into compliance" with my own personal law. What i want them to do. Who i want them to be. It's when they don't come into compliance that forgiveness is hard. It's then that i want to hang onto stuff, hang it around their neck like some scarlet letter, no not a scarlet letter - a millstone and then kick them off a bridge into a deep river! But people don't always come around to doing things my way. Really do i have the right to expect them to? If i don't have that right, why does it bother me so much? Why does it cut so deep when a friend steps on your sore spots? Ignores you? Why is it that deep inside of me something protests so hard when things don't go my way? Why does the same thing happen to you?


Matthew 6:14 "If you forgive the failures of others, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
Matthew 6:15 But if you don't forgive others, your Father will not forgive your failures.

Life and Powerpoint

So ive been thinking alot about life and Christianity lately.

Been thinking alot about the way we talk about life in Christian circles. Seems like the way we talk about life, especially from the pulpit, makes life sound like a PowerPoint. You go orderly through the thing and if you follow a set of bullet-points everything works out just right. But if you deviate from the bullet points things start to unravel.

But is life really like a PowerPoint? Does life have bullet points? Are there really 6 steps to spiritual success, spiritual power, happiness? i've tried to follow some of those bulletin points and it just doesn't seem to work out for me.

So what is life like? If life were written down would it be prose? poetry? song? a letter? a love note? a greeting card... defiantly not a greeting card!

i think that if we compared life to writing we would find it to be a hodge-podge collection- is life prose? Sometimes. Sometimes we go through life living out the narrative, other players in the story fleshing out the plot and dragging in their own sub-plots as we experience it all unfolding in front of our eyes.

Sometimes life is Poetry: Maybe today it's Haiku- our emotions and passions set out orderly and neat. Maybe tomorrow it flows and is a thing of beauty like a Robert Frost Poem. Sometimes it's edgy and messy, like the young poets of the 70's. Sometimes its epic like something from the pen of Tennyson. Sometimes life is lived out so that prose is not worthy of life, and life isn't worthy of prose.

Life is a song: sometimes its the rhythm, the melody, the harmony in the background that makes life so powerful. Like song lyrics that sound lame when you read them from the CD insert, but move you to tears when you hear them in the song. Moments in life, playing in a stream with your best-friend: it's not an earth-moving moment in itself, but with the underscore of the emotional instruments in the background it become a powerful thing: The rhythm of things you have experienced together, the guitar of secrets only the other knows, the low drum of the bass of intuition- the way you communicate without speaking, all come together to make the hum-drum something magical.

Life a letter? a careful thoughtful pouring out of who we are and what we've been through. Calculated and precise, like when an acquaintance is becoming a friend.
i think that if life were written down it would be like a giant compilation of all those things, like the bohemian writers flowing in and out of prose and poetry, with a soundtrack that accompanies them. A beatnik poet on the stage, sharing poems they have written, giving you the narrative, telling you the story behind the poetry before each recitation. Life is all those things.

Like God's own book, the book HE wrote through the hands of men, the book we so often refer to as "a whole library of 66 books" but i don't think of it as a library, it's one book, God's book written in all the styles, flowing from narrative prose, into song, then poetry, to letters, to the cryptic mysteries that we in Christian circles call prophecy. So seeing that the book that God wrote has no bulletin points, no six steps to whatever, why are we always trying to translate life into a PowerPoint presentation?