Words I Wonder About

For Wondering Wednesday...

I have a list of words I wonder about.  Words like:
protection
safety
sovereign
God's will

forgiveness

love
care
watch
guard
redeem
redemption
grace
prayer
joy
resurrection
bitter

These are all fairly straightforward words to one raised in church, right?  Well, yes and no.  These were all words and concepts that were twisted in their meaning in my theological past.  You may well ask how I know this and am I certain that it's not my present that is twisting these words.  Every move away from the IFB(Independent Fundamental Baptist) world I grew up in and birthed most of my children in, has been slowly untwisting the doctrinal tangle I was bound in.  I can follow the road and see where many of the turns were that led me closer to where I am now.  It's progressively improved so much so that I could almost have a post millenial like view on my theological journey.

My Friend, Dean

We moved to a new house in January of my third grade year.  It was a brand new house on a brand new street.  I made new friends in the neighborhood and school was okay.  My teacher was pregnant and spent most of the day sitting at the back of the classroom with her head on the desk.  We got to play on the good playground for one recess but had to play on the blacktop parking lot for the other recess.

I met Dean in the neighborhood, he was a few years older than me.  He taught me how to jump my bike and land level with both tires on the dirt course kids made out of the piles of dirt around the poured basements on the street.  I got pretty good.  He even let me ride his dirt bike, the motorized kind.  I knew I was hot stuff and special because he didn't let anyone else ride his motor bike. He also taught me karate moves and how to defend myself and fight. (Yes, I know it doesn't sound like girl stuff, but I liked the guy's kind of fun.  Barbies and board games get old real quick.)  His garage door was always open(if his parents weren't home) and that was the neighborhood source for all things illegal.  He never let any of the other guys there give me the hard stuff they were offering.  I could hang out there and smoke, but he wouldn't let me try anything with needles.  Sometimes he would shoo me out of the basement side of the garage(raised ranch style house) and it wasn't until my teacher at school molested and raped me all through the school year that I realized what all was going on in the basement side of his garage.  He was a good guy and I was safe with him.  Some days he told me I needed to leave, usually this was when his friends wanted me to go in the basement and hang out with them.  Later I realized what he was keeping me safe from.  I wish I knew his last name and could find him and say thank you.  He was kinda like an onery, getting in trouble older brother. He was my friend, Dean.

Life Together with Christians in my New World

I haven't written a blog post in a while, although I've been writing a lot for my own sanity elsewhere.  I've started reading another book, just a short little one, but it is packed with a whole lot of things new to me in some ways.  It's really not new, but reflects the cry of my heart that I've done my best over the years to bind and gag and bury it deep so I can't hear it any longer.  The book I've begun to read is Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Enter the idea of Christian community and confession.  Why in the world would I read such a book?  I don't know, I suppose it has something to do with the things I've been wrestling with for the last few months.  In good ole IFB language these would be the things I would mention as "unspoken prayer requests" back in the independent fundamental baptist church I grew up in.  Thankfully I'm not in that world anymore, but I still don't quite know how to safely navigate in the world I find myself in today.  Life Together is given as an example of how we should live life together in our Christian community.  Therefore I find myself reading it to see just what that entails.

There is a great amount of tension between confession and daily community life that I see lived out before me.  How much of your story should be known?  What sort of things do you confess and to whom?  Who can handle the really big stuff, you know, the type of things that you do need help with in overcoming, the struggles that are too hard to carry on your own?  Not too many people fit that description.  And the incredible risks involved are enough to drive you back to isolation and denial.  That's a lonely and emotionally frozen way to live.  I want to be thawed out, but I'm afraid I may be "freezer burnt" and never be able to function as a normal person in the community I am now in.  The big things like major depression that cycles around to various degrees of suicidal thoughts all the way up to the point of deciding to attempt it or not is not something most people can deal with.

Of course the ones who are "trained" to deal with it are the ones who have no answers.  What kind of help is that?  Listening to the Godless drivel that comes out and yet is called help, is enough to drive me to really go through with it.  Talk about truly depressing!  Yet these are the people that I would be referred to in the throes of being suicidal because evidently pastors, who are thoroughly trained in the scriptures and theology, don't have the answers I am in desparate need of during the times I am suicidal. (Did you notice the sarcasm here?)

QUOTES from Life Together:

"The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer." p19

"The believer feels no shame, as though he were still living too much in the flesh, when he yearns for the physical presence of other Christians." p19

"The prisoner, the sick person, the Christian in exile sees in the companionship of a fellow Christian a physical sign of the gracious presence of the triune God." p20

"He knows that God's Word in Jesus Christ pronounces him guilty, even when he does not feel his guilt, and God's Word in Jesus Christ pronounces him not guilty and righteous, even when he does not feel that he is righteous at all.  The Christian no longer lives of himself, by his own claims and his own justification, but by God's claims and God's justification." p22

"God has willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of man.  Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God's Word to him.  He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth.  He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation." p23