I Touched a Nerve

When talking to Renee last, we explored three threads that are unraveling from my past and being rewoven into my future.

What I remember is that Renee asked me to share these loose, evolving spiritual threads with her. This was a really hard exercise for me to do because it was so opposite my intuition--intuition that was founded on an evolving lifetime--but also a false foundation of rules that worked against my conscious and subconscious decision making.

I feel like my path of life has been guided by a few (maybe a lot still to discover), mistruths or thoughts actually in opposition to Biblical truth and guidance.

That first thread that I identified and has started to unravel is how I use the Bible in my everyday life. I'm flipping it...so to speak. My life lens needs to shift more and more toward a heart-shaped view of all people. A view steeped in love prompts love and kindness and, in turn, coincides with what the Bible calls the greatest commandment: LOVE. From this stance, I am practicing love, and then turning to the Bible to see what it says about love. Scripture takes on a new meaning.

This second thread, though, is hard to explain, especially to someone who's not familiar with protestant religion. I'm calling it "Christian-ease/lingo" here...lingo like "is he/she a believer?, I'll pray for you, Where do you go to church?" There are words, phrases, questions and more that well-meaning Christians use that has the potential to be exclusive.

Exclusive in the fact that, folks who don't know the Christian-talk, aren't going to understand what's being said to them, and instead of feeling included in the conversation, they become excluded because they either don't comprehend the words, they are turned off by it or some other reason that this language is a turn-off. Instead of drawing someone near, there's the potential to push people away.

This verbiage is still coming to me. It appears in my thoughts and it shows up as rules or an expectation of me to use so that I am included in the world of church and Christianity.

It's much harder to write out these feelings because they touch nerves--my nerves--by causing rules-oriented-dischord in my thought processing.

I'm not walking on a tightrope, though. That image spurs fear for me because it's so hard to balance on a tightrope, it seems so scary, and usually the fall will result in being hurt.

As I pull these strings from my life's tapestry, I see myself walking somewhere else entirely different...

{to be continued}