The Long Start

I’ve been on a journey . . . I’m not sure for how long. Well, it’s been more like wandering in the wilderness, albeit an artificially made one, while God made me and the future ready for a promising horizon. At different times, I thought I had come to a place of understanding, a landmark of bearings, a vista where I could see and tell others how to get there—that they needed to climb there, too. Coming back down, though, I’d get lost again . . . closer to the truth than before but not knowing how far away I still was.
Since I left college and the legalistic safety of fundamentalism, God has needed to bring me to many moments of, “I can’t.” He has stripped away the things I trusted in for ministry, for security, for figuring out my spiritual caste. He still is.
At each juncture and with each enlightening moment, it’s been very uncomfortable. I’ve been miserably naked, ashamedly moody, passionately frustrated. I’ve tried to wrestle with notions, concepts, and meditation. But more often than not, I’m wrestling with the wrestle—thinking about the meditation rather than meditating—impressing myself with the thinking.
When I first came to Blue Ridge, the wrestle intensified. There were so many methods and intrinsic concepts askew from my tradition that I was once again thrown into the questions of why I did what I did—more than motives—and why for so long I’d assumed (or worse: been taught) that certain traditions, specific lifestyles, and bedrock religious systems were based in Scripture. As I tried to prove them biblically wrong, I found them more right than my long-held scaffolding.
I began to realize that I needed to indulge the Spirit within me, to explore the Bible straight-up. To question everything without rebellion but to know why I believed it. Not gospel and doctrinal stuff. The application areas, the practical implementation of my beliefs past the “I don’t do this, but I do practice this.”
I wanted to write a book—at least essays, to educate people before I even finished the allegorical degree. And I realized . . . I realize now . . . that this is what new believers with an overtly secular past must feel when they get saved: the fervor, the uneducated passion to save those around them, the trembling vulnerability that is as exciting as it is terrifying.
On my first night of Imprints, the study of what the Christian life and the New Testament church should look like, I felt the first-day-of-school excitement all over again. (I was one of those strange kids who always loved school.)
We listened to Erwin McMannis explain how and why Jesus praised John the Baptist for being a barbaric Christian, along with Erwin’s roof-jumping and rhino illustrations, the jail and snow stories. Afterward I talked probably too much in the small group time. I think I saw scared-mixed-with-bewilderment on some of the encircled faces. I don’t know. But the brimming, throbbing stretching something inside me grabbed for my voice and story. It proved cathartic yet at the same time insufficiently so.
I needed to be there that night for that message and the moments that followed. It was as powerful to me as when I saw The Passion of the Christ on Easter a year or two ago.
I picked up the course book to read that we should be journaling during this journey [which in turn will beget yet a longer one]. I grabbed what futile words I could from the stampede of thoughts and emotions—to just jump into this . . . this rough record of my baby steps, small as they be after a decade or two of civilized Christianity.