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JaWS: Dodging Bullets...

I read this on the blog of someone I don't even know (yet!)... I followed a link from a friend's blog to this one...

I really identified with this post... I have both seen done to others and had done to me what was described in this blog post... it's almost like "if you have no ability/desire/capability to serve, you are not important" and somehow I can't help but feel that that is NOT Christ's heart at all!

I'm still healing and licking my wounds in VA...

I want to serve, but I also know that I need true transformation to happen in my life... I may not be able to serve in "official" capacities (not because I'm not allowed, but because I refuse to in my current condition), but no one can stop me from doing the little things... the things no one might notice...

I think about the people that were influential in my life in "leading me to the Lord"... not many of them are "walking with the Lord" today... somehow, in spite of my less-than-perfect walk, I have stuck around and they have not... what happened to them? I made a promise to God when I got saved, I said, "Lord, you can send me to hell if you want to, but I'm going to serve you the best I can from this day on". I didn't understand Grace then... I still don't think I understand it completely... and I haven't always "served Him the best I could", to tell you the truth... but I'm still here... that's gotta count for something right?

I know that in a lot of ways it is my "brokenness" that prevents me from walking in the fullness of Christian experience with God... but I also know that the church has done little if anything to help me in my pain...

It's for that reason, and others that I am so desperately searching for authentic expression of the good news of Jesus Christ. I don't see many...

Often, I have thought that perhaps it simply boils down to my wife and I just trying to do our best to live out the words of Christ (the red ones, you know) in our lives and take as many people with us and if we can get a church or two to come along on the journey, so be it, if not, que sera sera...

I'm just tired of what feels like wasting time, going to church, singing a few "nice" songs, listening to a "nice" sermon about how to be "nice" and then going home until next week... whoever said the gospel was about being "nice"? I think in reducing the gospel to a message about "niceness" we have stripped it of its power...

I don't know... just thinking out loud here...