Please forgive my late, choppy and slightly scattered post. It took me a few days to uncurl from the fetal position as I lay there, clammy with hallucinations – ah yes, the stomach flu.
Nothing sums up “Les, you’re sick” quite like the fact that I didn’t want to eat for two whole days. Heck, going two hours without thinking and plotting my next bite is pretty risky. Eating, for me, is a passion, a hobby, a gift.
For two days, I lay in a dark room pondering on life, our Universe, the digestive system, and whether or not my vegetarian clean eating was really all that necessary. I’ve concluded that perhaps I could ease up a bit.
A few days later, I picked up my book and started back into Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. The book is a memoir of her attempt to eat off the land as much as possible. Kingsolver suggests that eating green isn’t so much what we take out of our diet, but what we add in to it. (Think pure veggies, thought and work of planting, reaping what we sow….all that fancy stuff.)
And so it goes with our Evolving Faith – gone are our days of what we can’t have or shouldn’t do. We’re replacing it with the positives of what we can have, that we are loved beyond our wildest imagination, and that perhaps there’s more faith in science and science in faith than we can learn in one lifetime.
As Christians, we tend to read the Bible and go to church and learn what we shouldn’t do. But we’re evolving our faith right here and now, and that’s the positive spin: what we can do in our faith – love more deeply, inquire more, give more of ourselves. It’s harder to add in sometimes than it would be to just take stuff out. It’s harder to be more positive than negative. It’s a bigger challenge, a bigger picture, a better outcome.
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This week, Dr. Elnes suggested we’re probably 100% wrong in our description or perception of our relationship with God but its still 100% real. That’s going to stick with me for a while. It puts things in to perspective for me.
It makes me wonder, if I could be a fly on a wall when someone asked my kids to describe their relationship with their mom… I don’t know if I’d agree with their description, but it’s still 100% real.