Life goes into a sort of regular system of happenings

Currently things are pretty calm. I am about to head to bed, but I thought I would tell you what I did today. Not that it is all that exciting.

I woke up and went over to my friend KatieAnn’s house so we could carpool to church. My friend Ben was speaking. I had some coffee, which is something I don’t usually do in the mornings…but there are times when you just need a cup of coffee. This was one of them.

Part of me wondered briefly this morning if going to church out in Bellevue was worth the drive. I quickly remembered that it was once I got to church and exited the raging storm of girl talk that was the car I was in. I really like my church a whole lot. I go to a Mennonite Church by the way. We sing out of hymnals, have liturgy that is flexible, don’t think people should kill other people in any circumstances, and have a very multi-generational sort of gathering. Older folks, 20 somethings like me and Ben, and little munchkins too. Really, you should consider going sometime…Everyone would love to meet you. Just like they met me and Ben during our first time there. Then we just kept going.

I have been thinking a lot lately about a couple things. One of them is how much I dislike postmodernism. That is the idea that truth is relative to experience. What is true for you can be true for you based on your experience, but in mine it is not. Another thing about it is that there is no absolute Truth. There is no undergirding to anything and everything really ought to be ok. As a result there is no authority of authorship to books or poems or the bible. So, an author (or God inspired author) can write something, but you don’t have to take it as he says if you’re a postmodernist…you get to take it as it is in your experience and then you can take what is true for you and leave out the parts that aren’t. I’m sorry, but that is absolute nonsense. Firstly, let’s take a look at it from a philosophical perspective. The idea that there is no absolute Truth is heralded as an absolute truth. That is ironically stupid. It’s as though you made a sandwich  on national television while stating to the world that sandwiches don’t exist. Well…that is dumb. Secondly if we as Christians use this as a guiding philosophy it makes Jesus a relative truth. More or less we say that “Jesus died for me in my experience. But Everyone else is true in their experience.” What happens then? We make Jesus something fictional. Being Christian you assert that men need to be saved to be able to experience fullness in their relationships with others and with God, if that is only true in our experience and not true all around for everyone then Jesus might as well have been selling baloons on the street corner. If you don’t worship the One God as the One God…then you might as well do some serious pondering about just what exactly you are doing by dicking around with Christianity and postmodernist thought. You’ve gotta choose. Jesus is the savior of everyone or if you assert that He is a relative savior in your experience then you treat Him as the unimportant savior of no-one.

The other thing I have been thinking about is discipleship. That means following Jesus. Obviously we all fail at it in multiple ways, but what does that mean? I am beginning to think that this means several things. A) We need to keep trying. By that I mean actually try. None of the thing I do a lot and claim to try, but really I just declared that I was trying to make myself feel better. I mean sell-the-farm try. Go for it. Try to love God with all you are until you cry out of frustration. Then at this point I think we need to think about point B) God is a redemptive savior. God is not content to leave us as He finds us. We are not the only ones striving for our relationship with God to be a functional process of increasing humanity and wholeness. God strives right there with us. He died so that this process would be possible. He also knows that we suck sometimes. Do you think that Jesus in all the time He spent on earth experienced some sort of wishy-washy universe in which men never screwed up? Nope. He was friends with chumps. He spent three years physically on earth turning chumps into champs. Thankfully even when He stepped out of the physical dimension, He didn’t stop working on us. The point is that even when all hope seems lost, even when the world has turned wrong and the One True God and Messiah is crucified on the hill on Friday…There is still an Easter Sunday to come in which God rises and takes us with Him. Even in the darkest moments of our lives God is still there, all we have to do sometimes is as the psalmist said “Wait on the Lord.”

PS: After I went to church I went out to lunch, which Ben payed for. Then I went to the library for a really long time. Too long. Anyhow. that’s that.