Believe it or not I am up past 10:30 for the second night in a row... VBS throws all our schedules off! But its going well so no compliants there.
My heart has been heavy for a lot of people and a lot of families here recently. It seems as if the devil has stepped right in the middle of this small space of southwest Georgia, spread his arms wide, and began war. It is something that will take more than isolated prayer to upend. I think that the battle has begun.
In less serious thought processes... Hayley is walking really well and turned 10 months old this week. Michael went to Sam's and bought a huge - 35 ounces - container of Cheese Balls, which we have shared with Hayley, but mostly devoured ourselves and relived the fun parts of childhood that cheese balls represent in the process.
I read The Shack a few months back and we got into a pretty good discussion on it at our monthly HOPE circle meeting in May... if you've never read the Shack, you should read it before you weigh any thought to the coming type from my end... if you know the background of the story, then you can follow where I start which is kinda in the middle of it all.
The Shack centers around how God works through the bad, ugly and evil things of this world, and uses it for the good. Not a novel concept by any means, something most Bible Belt Christians have been embedded with since birth.. bad things happen to good people for no good reason (that we fathom) and God swoops in and makes good things happen from it... basically. The Shack challenged my endorsement and understanding of that process to a different level of comprehension, that I think I'm more comfortable with, and is more concrete than "God is working through this." The arguing point, for lack of a better term, that the Shack presents is that God doesn't plan bad things as lessons to us, or what not, but that God allows those bad things to happen and then takes those things, works them into His glory and His plan. It is much the same way that we have free will for the good things in life, we also have used that free will to influence the world around us, daily and for generations before us, which now bear consequences on the present and future... much the way that environmentalists frame conservation and recycling. The sins of the past are the root of the problems of the present... or something along those lines. So we ask, using our churchy vocabulary, who's sin caused the bad things that happen to good people now? Whose sin caused cancer.. whose sin brought murder of innocent lives... and the list goes on... but what we argue from the guidance of the Shack, whether you endorse it or not, is that it is not the result of one specific payback for one specific sin, but rather the consequences of the concious and unconcious choices we as people make every day, generation after generation, and how those consquences transform the world around us.. into a place which has those bad things. Its not my sin that made my family member sick, or the sin of another family, but its the choices we've made as a society.. its the types of toxins and poisons we've allowed to enter into our food systems... its the choices of families to let children raise themselves, the choices of society to disengage a social rule or conduct or standard of behavior. It is without a doubt that everything bad in this world, while used quite deceptively by Satan himself, is actually a consequence of the poor choices we make with the free will that God so graciously gave us. So it is not that God is sitting up in Heaven passivly watching the bad things in life happen to teach us that He is God.. but rather He sees the bad things that are to happen and are happening and out of love, reaches down and out to us, and turns those things into something good, somehow... maybe not in a way that we understand it or not in a way that we observe it... and perhaps as Bible Belt Christians we tend to say "God is working whether you know it or not" and never conceive of the fact that the brokeness in our world breaks Gods heart equally if not more than our own. That God doesn't delight in the bad things that happen as a way of "that'll teach them" but that he journeys with us in brokenness and then steps in with healing. What a marvelous concept... God is never passive. never. He is always working, always striving, always growing with us, moving with us, covering us. always. just like that.
