My Journey

I was tempted to blog about Rob Bell, since most people know that I'm a fan of his, but there wasn't a lot to add to the conversation that hasn't been said over and over again in the blogosphere and on Twitter. 

Instead, I was inspired by a couple of comments from friends about the furor, and I felt that the best way for me to comment is to talk about how my journey of faith has changed over the last 10 years.

One of the comments mentioned that people in general don't care about this whole issue, they don't want to hear the "inside baseball" type stuff going on in Christianity.

I think that some people do.

I believe that there are 2 mission fields out there, the unchurched people, who don't know God at all, and the churched, yet unmotivated folks who believe that all God wants is to get their disembodied soul into heaven when they die (the frozen chosen.) And once that's accomplished, all there is for them to do is sit back and wait (and maybe have some self-help type sunday school lessons).

In order for the 1st group to be brought into the fold, the 2nd group needs to be awakened from their slumber.

The last 10 years have been a really exciting time in my journey of faith. 

In 1999, on our way home from our honeymoon, I remember sitting in the terminal at an airport, reading the Left Behind novels. I didn't know any better than to swallow that worldview without question. I grew up in the United Methodist Church, and eschatology was never really something we studied. I always figured that the end was God's problem, He doesn't really need our help.

But from there, I moved into an exploration of Christian Zionism, which seemed to me a ludicrous proposition: let's try and force God into destroying the world so that Jesus will return and we'll be raptured. That just didn't make sense to me and when I began to explore it, I discovered why. Learning about preterism made me see things in a different light.

Then, the scriptures came alive (honestly, for the first time) as added color and meaning came through learning about Jesus, the first century Jewish rabbi. I began to see the Old Testament in a new light. And piece by piece, things began to make more and more sense. I discovered the work of Ray Vander Laan, and learned to appreciate how we were grafted into the spiritual family.

And in the last couple of years, I've been exploring what the whole story is about. Though at times, his writing in other books is a bit beyond my pay grade, NT Wright's Surprised by Hope, is a fascinating read. I find myself constantly highlighting passages because it resonates somewhere deep in my being. I knew a lot of the puzzle pieces, but I never saw how they fit together. 

Sometimes I wonder, am I the only one who has never really gotten the full picture? But I don't think that I am. And I think that's why so many are frozen. They don't understand how Jesus is more than just a personal savior. The story is bigger than that, after all, lots of people were crucified, but only one was resurrected.

And where the journey goes from here, I don't know. All I can say is "Now What?"

And most of what I have learned came from branching off of paths that I discovered from listening to Rob Bell.