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.
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?
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