I'll Take the Artichoke Penne with a Side of Christ

I've been catching myself having more and more conversations about faith recently. And I'm not talking about witnessing-to-the-woman-in-the-checkout-line conversations. Actually, I'm not even talking about conversations about MY faith. Just faith in general.

And when I have these conversations, I find myself using some new catch phrases. Phrases like "emerging church," "everyday radical," "interdenominational Christianity," "faith in the context of postmodernism," and maybe my favorite, "faith lived in an authentic and real way." See, I've been reading. I've read Shane Claiborne and Anne Lamott and Donald Miller. I've read articles on Wikipedia and I've read Ellen G. White. I've even read the gospels.

But reading is frightening. Knowing what to believe is frightening. Knowing how to live is even more frightening. Actually getting around to living it can scare the shit out of you. Two things scared me today. The first was something my mom said during one of our frequent meaningful dialogues on faith. It was a gentle reminder. "Ben, remember that if you become proud of the way you approach your faith, that makes you no different than the Christians you criticize." The second was a phrase in Anne Lamott's book Traveling Mercies. "The main reason [I bring my son to church] is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by." All my fears were articulated in that quotation.

If we call our Christian faith "a little light to see by," we have marginalized Christ. We have taken the focus away from the cross and instead put it on our humanity. I don't want my Christianity to be a coping mechanism for my humanity. I want it to be fucking SALVATION.

Why do I use catch phrases recently? Because I'm proud of the Christianity I've discovered. I'm proud that it's unique--it's my own. It fits with my ideal lifestyle. I'm proud that I could take something as uncomfortable as a Jesus-centric lifestyle and make talking about living it sound so damn easy. I have marginalized Christ.

See, we don't need a Christian faith that fits into our humanity. We need to sanctify our humanity to fit our Christ. Anything else is heresy.

Today at Polaris

Today a wisp of fog

blew across jackknife mountain

like the memory of your hair.

Today a loon mourned

the length of the summer sun

at Lake Aleknagik,

and I wanted to put

that call in a box

and mail it to you

with the label,

"I and Alaska

are finally one."

Today a grizzly bear reared

on the far shore.

I admired its mass,

its maw, its claw,

its eyes flat as skipping stones.

It was beautiful

and I wished it was closer.

I'm Sorry

I'm sorry I held your hand

for the first time while you were sleeping.

I was aware of your beauty,

unaware that it is a prize

only given, not received.

Only held if believed.

I'm sorry I walked past you too quickly,

as if I cared more about catching

the eastern time zone than catching you.

It wasn't true.

I'm sorry I told you I liked you

without first telling you I also like

swinging in a hammock when the crocuses are opening

the feeling of glaciers between my fingers

the rush of pine and the musk of deer.

These likes are not alike.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear.

I'm sorry I put you away in a shoebox

while your handwriting still hung on my wall.

I'm sorry you made the call and took the fall

while I drank tea without honey

watching you from the fifth floor.

I thought it meant I could see.

It wasn't me.

I'm sorry sometimes I don't listen

because my eyes are more focused on your lips

than are my ears.

My hands are too focused on your hips

my fingertips too far from your tears

my mouth too closed to draw you near.

I'm sorry for the humanity

you see in me.

But I don't mind apologizing

for eternity.

In His Time

I remember singing this little chorus in Sabbath school:

In his time, in his time,

He makes all things beautiful in his time

Lord please show me every day

As you're teaching me your way

That you do just what you say

In your time.

If everything in my life could be laid out on a table and sifted through carefully, it would say one thing above all else, God is love.

God is extreme love. He is nothing but love, and oh, how he loves us. He loves to love us. He loves it when we love each other.

Every once in a while I am forced to understand God's love in a new way. Like when I had a cabin full of kids in the middle of nowhere Alaska who puked and fought and cussed and cried and made each other cry. They were ugly kids. They smelled bad. I thought only God and their mothers could love them. I was pretty sure about God and less sure about their mothers, who obviously didn't mind a week of separation.

Five days later, I loved them, and I don't even know why. They still fought and stank and threw up (why did they always throw up?), but now I knew them. I knew Kulang kept a dictionary in his bag and was reading it cover to cover. He was in "m." I knew Lam really wanted to know his Bible. I knew David wanted to control his temper but lacked something--someone--that could tell him how. I knew that Jacob's family smoked so much weed that he couldn't get on a varsity sports team because the secondhand smoke would make him fail a drug test. I knew Christian wanted more than anything to love God as much as God loves him. And somewhere in the brokenness of these kids' lives I found that love is stronger than imperfection. In fact, love gravitates toward imperfection.

Suddenly I knew God loves me. I knew it. Maybe I even felt it.

I know how broken I am. If I could love these kids, maybe, maybe, all the songs I sang in Cradle Roll are true. Maybe God really does love us so much that he died for me.

I am so glad that God shares his love with us. Even when we don't see his love, it's there, working in us and around us. Sometimes it makes us wait...

And wait...

And wait...

And freaking wait.

But in the end, I'm compelled to realize that God's love does not take a vacation in the time when we doubt it exists. I'm very thankful that God's love brought me closer to a girl who loves God as much as I do and has the spiritual integrity to listen to a proposition that went right over my head. A proposition that said,

Wait. I love you two, but I have something better in mind. Wait. I love you, I love you, I love you. If you only knew how much I love you.

I'm starting to pick up on that love, and it's making my head spin.