I started back at uni this week. I’m squeezing in one subject, because that’s all my brain can manage at the moment. This time round I’m doing an Introduction to the Old Testament. The concepts are building on the stuff I learned in last semester’s Intro to the New Testament. Digging down into the way the books were put together and who wrote them and looking at strategies for understanding the way these books were intended to be used.

I’ve only done a week’s worth of reading so far, and my brain is already spinning.

To be honest, I feel as though the rug has been ripped out from under me. I have had questions about the historicity of Old Testament accounts for some time — I never knew if they were actual literal accounts of stuff that really happened or if they were stories to illustrate a point. Were the people real? Or are they merely characters in a story? I grew up in a religious tradition that taught that it if it was in the Bible it was literally true…but is it?

The proverbial rug has been moving for awhile…now it’s well and truly gone. I have to go back to square one, strip away all of these childhood indoctrinations and denominational assertions and try and get an objective view of what these writings were intended to be. Which in reality is not entirely possible all theology is subjective to a degree, but I have to look at these writings at the very least from an academic, theological stand point rather than looking at the Bible through the sanitised and stylised lens of Sunday school stories or through the lens of the church (whereas the church should probably be viewed through the lens of Scripture). I need to find out what these writings were intended for. How are they meant to be used if not to beat me over the head with and have me living in a perpetual state of guilt and angst? How am I to relate to this book?

Discovering that it is accepted scholarship that the accounts in Genesis of the creation, and the flood have been taken and adapted from cultural stories and traditions (some books call them myths) of the region that predate the Israelites and not a unique account of the origins of the earth and the following years was a revelation. The thought that the Hebrew manuscript account of creation indicates that God brought order to chaos rather than creating from nothing in the beginning is an interesting theory that brings more questions about creation versus evolution and the age of the earth. The thought that the creation account is not a statement of fact or scientific description, but a poetic liturgy is a curious twist.  The differences in how the two Genesis creation accounts talk about men and women is another curiosity. The possibility that Moses’ brother Aaron might not have been a man at all, but a representation of another competing religious system….mind blowing! I had no idea that there were other theories or explanations for these things! And I’m only just beginning to scratch the surface. What will I find next?

Learning that the Bible is not a book of historical reportage when I thought it was, is mind-blowing. I don’t quite know where to turn now. I feel as though I’m floundering.

I need to learn to understand how these ancient cultures worked and how the Bible came to be and how it has endured as the normative representation of the origins of Judaism and the Christian faith (not to mention the other canons) and about the the adaptive nature of the canon itself through history.

So many questions!

What does the Bible mean when it says to let nothing be added or subtracted from the word of God….and yet the whole development of the Old Testament appears to have been a process of cobbling together multiple accounts and traditions and a continual reimagination of the stories to suit the needs of the audience…when the Bible as we have it today wasn’t “closed” until the 1600s and yet the majority of it was written thousands of years beforehand …or that the same words appear in other canons and yet by virtue of the fact that it’s a different canon, has had material added or subtracted? I don’t yet know how to reconcile this stuff!

It has become startlingly clear to me that I have been idolising the Bible. The Bible has been my anchor all these years…and now that I am digging and relearning a whole bunch of stuff about it that I don’t yet know how to process…I feel as though I might be sucked into a black hole. But for my personal experience of Jesus in my life, I fear I would be lost. I can no longer just “take it on blind faith” I have to dig and test and discover and find my footing again.

I don’t want to do the typical evangelical thing of swinging to the polar opposite view and ditch the Bible altogether!

I have to rediscover how I am to relate to this collection of reminiscences…to this epic story…to this relating of how people interpreted God’s actions through the millennia. How it came to be viewed as the word of God. I need to find out if and why the Bible has authority.

This picture came into my head very vividly as I prayed and journaled about this the other day:

I have a 3000 piece jigsaw in a box in the cupboard. The problem is that the puzzle pieces in the box are not right. They don’t match the picture on the outside of the box. The box represents the Bible and the picture of God that I currently am familiar with. My historical picture. I have opened the box and started to put the pieces together. The puzzle is God. I know there’s a coherent picture there somewhere if I can manage to put some of the pieces together, but the thing I thought would be the greatest aid in putting the pieces together is no help at all. I have to take my view of God and the Bible out of the tightly controlled box it has been in and check it out in a broader context. I need to get the puzzle pieces to click together so that I can see what sort of picture it presents. It’s a challenge of discovery. I am getting the impression that God is not who I thought he/she was. And that’s probably not a bad thing.

I don’t know how to approach the Bible any more. I need a re-jigged interpretive framework. I still believe it is my best bet for understanding the God of the universe…but how to interpret it, understand it, appropriate it in today’s world…I don’t know. If this collection of traditions and stories has sustained life and faith for this long, there’s got to be something to it.

Sorry for the long, brain dump of a post. I know this stuff probably sounds heretical. Maybe it is. I don’t know. For me they’re just questions that need to be answered, and I have a whole semester of study to go yet.

Have you ever thought about this stuff? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Merry Christmas my beautiful blog readers! I am so grateful for your company each day! I hope that you are enjoying your Christmas with your loved ones.

This year I am so grateful to be enjoying Christmas again.

As only a church musician can understand….after many many years of spending my Christmas mornings rushing to church and setting up and sacrificing my family time so that others can enjoy their morning, and the preceding weeks spent planning and stressing…I eventually became numb to Christmas. It was just another source of stress and busy-ness. It got to the point where it meant very little….even that it was a relief when it was over. It was empty on a personal level. I enjoyed the ministering, but it was at the expense of so much else that I am seeing is far more important.

Then came the year where I was so resentful of the church that I didn’t want anything to do with Christmas and if I had heard another Christmas carol I thought I was going to go postal.

This year, for the first time in many years, I am peaceful and free and finally enjoying contemplating Jesus and his amazing gift of life, love, peace, grace and freedom.

There are those that want to detract from the glorious freedom in Christ and focus on the bondage of the past on this day of celebration, but blogger Lee Bezotte puts it much better than I ever could. We choose to celebrate Jesus on this day we call Christmas. Our God is big enough to redeem what was once meant to serve someone else and take the strategic advantage for his purposes! If this is the one day of the year some people set foot in church…let’s rock it!

I am loving it! I am revelling in the freedom of Christ. I am SO grateful for his gift of life and grace and freedom! I am relieved that this celebration of Jesus is regenerating my soul day by day.

God’s richest blessings to you all! See you in the new year!

A couple of months ago I read a book called Guerrilla Lovers and was inspired to demonstrate the love and generosity of God to people around me by performing small, seemingly insignificant acts of kindness for friends and strangers alike.

I have to confess that one of my vices is the occasional McDonald’s breakfast, and it has become my Friday morning ritual to zip through the drive through on the way to work and grab a Sausage & Egg McMuffin and a coffee.

It’s a celebration that the week is almost over, and it makes me smile. After I read Guerrilla Lovers I started to pay for brekky for the person behind me in the drive through. As the weeks went by the act of spending $5 or so on a stranger would spark conversations with the window staff. Sometimes I would get to share why I did it, sometimes the conversations never went that way. It was all a bit hit and miss and to be honest I was beginning to wonder if it was worth the effort. (Chalk that one up to being goal oriented and results driven.)

The a couple of weeks ago there was a new girl on the window. She was young and chirpy and chatty. When I told her I wanted to pay for the person behind me, the questions started coming rapid fire: Do you know him? Why would you do that? I don’t get it!  I told her that, no, I didn’t know the guy in the car behind me, and that he was probably going to go “What the??” when she told him that he didn’t have to pay for his breakfast, but that I want to do it because God loves me and does all sorts of amazing little things for me all through the day, and that I like to pay it forward and do that for people too. She smiled and shook her head and told me it was a miracle and I told her that God’s love is a miracle. With that we parted company as I moved down to the next window to collect my order.

I didn’t think too much more about the encounter until last Friday. She was on the window again, and as I told her I wanted to pay for the car behind me her eyes lit up. “You’re the lady from the other week!” I nodded. She told me how the person I had bought breakfast for a couple of weeks before had been so surprised that they put $20 in the charity cup at the drive through window. That made me smile. Then as she took my money to pay for someone else’s brekky she went on to tell me something that took my breath away. She told me how she had found God a couple of weeks before and that I had helped her. She told me that she had always found God stuff pretty hard to swallow, but that seeing me love a stranger in the name of Jesus had changed her mind. She told me that she was checking out the God stuff now. And she smiled. She said thank you, and before I had to move on, I told her that God loved her more than anything else in the world. I wanted to vault through the window and give her a hug!

Telling people about God in 120 second slices is hard! But God runs with it! It’s so cool!

I’m still praying for McDonalds girl. Perhaps I’ll see her again next Friday.

How do you show God’s radical compassion to the people in your life?

This past year has been a pretty steep learning curve in a lot of areas. So far in my sabbatical review series I have covered what I’ve learned about physical health. The second of my four life areas that I want to think about is mental health. Am I more healthy in my brain space than I was this time last year? It’s hard to tell. Its much more difficult to assess than physical health, for sure. It’s not something that I had ever given a great deal of thought before. I guess, looking back with 20/20 hindsight, I was in a tailspin this time last year.

Nothing in my life was turning  out the way I had anticipated that it might. I was in the midst of a series of situations that were causing me to ask questions about what I believed and why.

I was in a world of hurt because what I had considered to be my support structures tuned out to be the very thing causing the pain. That destabilised me and my life in a way that has sent be into some very black holes in the last 12 months.

Holes I really had no idea how to get out of.

I had experienced small pockets of unaccountable darkness in the past, but these ones lasted weeks and months at a time… and for the first time I had to learn how to deal with it…or risk getting stuck.

Some of it, I’m sure, was linked to what I chose to believe, and i found that I could manage those dark spots with prayer and scripture and lots and lots of writing. I guess some of that could have been dealt with by downloading on friends, but I didn’t feel like I had that option.

Other black holes, I think, were maybe chemical or biological. I found that I could clear the fog and darkness within minutes by engaging in exercise. Heavy weights and the hypnotic rhythm of running that allowed endorphin release would sooth my ills. I also discovered that these ones could be managed in the longer term by eliminating sugar and grains from my diet. Fascinating. Physical impacting mental. (Incidentally my sinus issues cleared once I eliminated sugar and grain too. I am convinced that sugar is evil. LOL)

All of these mental health management measures are being incorporated as habits to ensure an even and consistent countenance so far as it’s in my control. They are working for me at the moment.

However there is one element of my ongoing mental health that continues to plague me, and that needs to be worked on. A lot.

I have discovered that I am an acceptance junkie, and left unchecked, that addiction provides my inner and outer lives not only with a drug that feeds my ego like nothing else, but also with an unqualified destructive force that will destroy me in the end. This is one of my foci for the year ahead.

If I am to move forward and be the woman God designed me to be, I must deal with my addiction to acceptance and the value I derive from it. I’m finding that one tough going…its so ingrained…

In related items, I have had a difficult time turning my brain off at the end of the day and I have found it very difficult to take a full sabbath day each week. The rigors of family life make it almost impossible to take a full day …or even an hour or two to be completely alone. I have needed to develop strategies and mindsets that allow me to relax, recuperate and focus on God stuff when I have a moment to myself, all the while trying to carve out time to myself.

Alone.

Uninterrupted.

Attempting toy recover from the energy drain of work and family life where contact with people is essential.

Jesus experienced drain…he went out into the wilderness to be by himself and to pray and recuperate and escape from the company of other people. Often he just needed to be alone.

I used to subscribe to the cult of busy is better…no more. Busy is not more spiritual, busy is destructive. I need balance…but I’m not sure that the perfect balance exists. Designing a life that balances the inner life with the outer life is a skill I continue to pursue.

Do you actively manage your mental health?

It’s almost election day here in Australia, and the Greens have been getting a fair bit of attention this time round. It has made me think about conservation and global warming and what my responsibility as a Jesus follower is in relation to caring for the planet. And then I got to thinking about what God’s original plan might have been….

… and the thought crossed my mind that  if Adam and Eve had never sinned we would quite possibly all be wandering around naked in a garden talking to God.

Sounds kinda hippy

What do you think the planet might have looked like had the entrance of sin never started the degradation process?