18 of 26

Write now Article Tools

Page 2 of 6

God in a box and all. What is amazing is that the man who most needs to see that he has boxed his God is perhaps the last one who will see and say so.

I'm no judge. I do, however, have eyeballs, and I can see a few things. When a collision occurs things are revealed. Things get turned inside out and the underlying framework is revealed, things are crushed and their fragility is revealed, and those things that were hidden come barking into the daylight for any passerby to see. I'm no judge but I'm no idiot and I have seen my share of collisions in my own recent past. The more one learns, the less one knows.

God has been pursuing me insistently. He has been using relationships, events, books, music, and I'm sure other tools of which I have no knowledge. And there have been more than a few wrecks. Things have been laid bare. For the first time since the relationship between my dad and me was lost, I have been able to feel forgiveness with my hands and assess its contours. Forgiveness is not for the forgiven as much as it is for the one who is forgiving-I think this is a building block of the Kingdom of God whose importance cannot be overstated. Through the collisions to which I have been witness, I have been able to see with clarity some of my own worst features and some of my best and in the process ascertain the state of my heart in relationship with my dad. My anger toward him is mercifully dying. Something living is standing in its place. I have a premonition that this is a process and that it has been designed to happen repeatedly-there will be further collisions. It makes one wonder if we are blocks of marble and God is Michelangelo, busy making art out of inert stone, chisel colliding with our mass. It certainly makes sense.

I was reflecting on how I was raised in the rules and regulations of the church and how that became death to me. There is a plant that grows in a rainforest somewhere called a Strangler Vine. What it does is use a host tree to support its vines, slowly growing toward the canopy and life-giving daylight where it can put out its shoots and photosynthesize and thrive. As it does so its vines grow thick and slowly strangle the host tree to death. When the host dies it rots and crumbles to dust, leaving a hollow center hundreds of feet tall in the midst of the mature Strangler Vine-a monument to the macabre power of struggle, collision, the process of life overtaking death. In an inverse way I have observed myself coming to Christ within

• << previous page
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about Sunday morning Christians?
We want to hear your view. Write now!