Now I am about to let a big swear go. So frustrating to spend so much time writing a blog then I delete it when I am trying to write a title for it. Dagnabbit and Goldang! Start over.
I have not been praying for patience lately because when I do God gives me chances to grow in the patience department, and honestly I just want easy life. I don’t want anymore ‘growth’, God, you hear? No more lessons or trials or tests…please.
I always try to keep some fun reading going around the tougher books, and I just finished Jack London’s “White Fang and The Call of the Wild”. These stories are awesome as analogies to the spiritual life. The training, the difficulties, the learning identity, learning how the world works. The clubs used to discipline the dogs in the Yukon. Seems like my life, always having to learn the hard way, take a beating, because I am a fool. There are so many lines in these stories that I wish I could remember but one stands out. I can’t remember exactly, but it talks about a dog that had no spirit and was not worth beating because the only thing to break would be his bones. The dogs that were full of spirit were the ones worth disciplining and sometimes the only thing I feel like I can hold onto is spirit, something worth shaping. How many people, how many men, believe christianity is about a loss of spirit? (oops, tangent)
Richard Rohr writes in “Adam’s Return” about ‘liminal space’. I am not sure the exact definition he uses, but it seems that liminal space is the place where God can change us. Liminal space is the place outside our comfort zone, outside our control, the situations God uses to train us.
We can choose to pursue liminal space, or God will bring it to us, because God promises to complete the work he began in us (Philippians 1:6) and liminal space is where he will do this. After being baptized by his maniac cousin, Jesus went on his forty day fast. John the Baptizer seems to have lived in the liminal space, totally against the culture of the times, and Jesus went to him for this ‘initiation’. Jesus went to his cousin, who was living in liminal space to be brought into and to begin his liminal space. I believe most of the people who are credited for their faith lived in this liminal space.
Jesus had no home, Abraham left his home to wander, Noah and his whole adventure, David out with the sheep and then his wilderness, Moses leaves Egypt, lives in liminal space for 40 years then he goes back to Egypt and brings God’s people out into liminal space for another 40 years. After his Damascus road experience Paul enters his liminal space in the Arabian desert for a few years (I don’t know the exact time frame) before his ministry begins. So, it seems to me that this liminal space comes before the MINISTRY begins.
Well ‘liminal space’ sucks. I read my last blog and laughed at it, every day here is a struggle. Every day on the world race is another day in liminal space. A training ground, a journey where we are being shaped and it is not easy. It seems funny to me that this world race would be the liminal space for so many before their actual ministry begins, that this journey for many might be our first time actually entering this liminal space, this refining process. This place where I find out that I might not be a super christian.
Life was easy for me, sitting on a couch, under the air conditioner, watching ESPN or a good movie. Life was good, as my t-shirt said, when I was sipping an IPA or a new beer I had never even tried, eating a snack, petting Sequoia, alone. Life became a little more difficult for me when I had to share the remote when Linnea came home, when I had to do the dishes and share the tv. Oh the struggles of being a newlywed! The liminal space of marriage!
We have 70 days left of this liminal space, and then what? Where do we live? What is next? We have ideas, dreams, we will pursue, but the details I don’t know. I do know I look forward to some time with the remote control, the dog, the couch, a beer. I keep telling Linnea that when I get home I will learn a new hobby, like smoking a pipe. How cool is that? (I know not really cool, but I am not sure if I am joking at this time)
And for these hot and humid and hungry days I will someday thank God. For these blogs that I am not sure what I am writing and I think differently on a subject as soon as I post them, or get great comments that show a different point of view, even when my pride and irritability don’t want to hear it at first, I am thankful.
I remember getting told when I was younger that I had a chip on my shoulder, and sometimes I think that is true, and it sure is not holy, why do I always have to be battling something? My emotions battling an idea or an issue? Should I write about it? Does it matter? Maybe I am just constipated?
Maybe I am blogging when I should just go take a dump? Thank God for real toilets at the mall, hey Linnea, got the TP?
