Think about Such Things.

I'm making apple butter in my crock pot right now and when I lift the lid to stir it the smell of fall (okay, ground cloves and cinnamon) fills the apartment. I love the smell of fall (and the season in general...). Tonight I'll make fried okra with our first crop of okra from our garden. Luke's pretty excited.

Last week we were house-sitting for some people in our church. Living in quiet Northwest for a week with air conditioning and a dish washer was like taking a vacation to a different world. Today we're back in Northeast with the constant backdrop of sirens, fan noise and loud neighbors. But this is our home for sure.

We spent the week reading through an edition of Operation World and thinking about all the places we would like to go. Yesterday Luke found a little stress-relieving ball and we spent the morning laying on a bed and throwing it against the ceiling for each other to catch and laughing. Today we spend a good 30 minutes replicating the activity with a tennis ball. What a wonderful man I've married. I'm excited that we can dream of far away adventures but also live in the present, entertaining ourselves with a tennis ball and a ceiling.

I've been thoroughly enjoying the book Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. Yesterday I was reading about when Wilberforce became a Christian and how he mourned his lost time and had tremendous guilt. He thought about dropping out of politics altogether (apparently there was nobody in politics that was religious--and if you became a "methodist" you were expected to drop out of the world--especially politics--altogether). But instead this is what his good friend, and Prime Minister wrote to him--

...Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action...

Our small group has been reading a book called The Reason for God and discussing issues that turn people away from Christianity. The book is usually pretty good, and it brings up a lot of interesting discussion. This is especially true because our small group consists of extreme liberals and extreme conservatives--both religiously and politically. This is a story that I liked a lot from last week--

In the late twentieth century the Catholic church in eastern Europe refused to die under Communism. Through "patience, candles, and crosses" it began the chain of events the brought down all those totalitarian regimes. The Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko, through his preaching and activism, led the movement for a free trade union in Communist Poland in the early 1980s. When he was murdered by the secret police, 250,000 people came to his funeral, including Lech Walesa, whose Solidarity movement would help bring down the Communist government. Many of those who went to his funeral marched past the secret police headquarters with a banner that read "We Forgive."

We've been talking a lot in small group about what it means to be Christian, especially in the world that we live in. When we have people yelling about how being Christian means being accepting of all, no matter how beliefs jive with the Bible and we have others yelling about how it doesn't matter if you call yourself a Christian if you vote for a Democrat you clearly are not how do we discern what is true and what is right?

I think that Christians today are known for all the wrong things. We are expected to be perfect and to have everything figured out, and if we do not then it means that we are hypocrites. I think that is in part our fault...I know that at least I act like I do have things figured out. But the very reason why I am a Christian is because I do not, and I should be able to confess that openly...instead I say "I'm not like those Christians..." when instead my answer should be "I'm excatly like those obnoxious, loud people, only I admit that I'm worse and Jesus makes me better by grace...because really, 'I am the chiefest of sinners'*..."

What if the thing that makes Christians different is not our morals or our beliefs, but our way to humbly admit that we are wrong in public, accept grace from God, and then give others the grace that God allows us to give. I think only then--when we are free to openly admit our mistakes and forgive those around us--can we truly move to action. Unafraid of what the world thinks, and knowing that when we make mistakes God will love us anyway.

I don't think it really matters how we vote or what we do as long as we are truly praising God. Because if we're praising God in all we do we will truly be dwelling on what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable**. We will be moved to love because we will know that we are truly loved. We will be free to act out our passions endlessly and tirelessly because we will know we have the power of God behind us...

And doesn't that sound splendid?
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*"Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life." (1 Timothy 1:15-16)

** "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things." (Philippians 4:8)