There has been brooding afoot. Quite frankly, perhaps it has only been the Holy Spirit once again kicking my ass, but I cannot say and truly fear the implications of such an idea.
However, I read my Bible yesterday in my first attempt to experience a quiet time. To be honest, it is a difficult time for me. I'm in a place away from other people my age and I know no one. I'm working eight or more hours a day at a mundane job that leaves me only a few hours of free time each day, and most of which is useless since such a job often depletes the mind of all vigor and passion.
On top of all of this, I am still just leaving the desert of my faith, a place I have wasted too much time in already. And then last weekend I spent time with my closest family friends, the Bennetches. They are missionaries, and nothing is more terrifying to the cynical. Such people insight anger and ignorance in swift blows to entire communities. But no, there was no place to run and hide, and I was in no mood to argue with large parties. Instead I stood my ground and did something I have been struggling to do for my entire life. I listened.
I left the faith over a year ago, came back seven months later, and have spent the last six or seven months as a distortion, a shadow of scholarship, questions, and yearning, caught between the worlds of reason and faith. Like a leaf in the foyer, I was constantly fluttering back and forth, unsure of where I aught to stand, and too often finding myself outside of faith and yearning to have it. And yet what does the Bible tell us? The one thing that scholarship wishes it can promise and yet can never give. The one thing that faith can promise though it does not always wish to. Ask and you shall receive!
Oh, my God!
Such a concept! Such a reality!
I knew that I was to always be a Christian, and still I never wished to neglect other faiths. I called myself a Unitarian, but I knew nothing of the word. I persisted in nothingness, both a Christian and yet not at all. And then one day the terror found me. At first just the tree scratching on my window, then long shadows in my room, and soon the mortality of my position seemed unavoidable. The great questions of such a place tore at my confidence until nothing was left. What if I am rejected by God for my own vacillating faith? What if he did spit out the lukewarm and kept both the hot and the cold? What if I were dooming myself to eternity without God? And still what is to be done about the non Christians?
Then Jenn and I were talking just this evening about it. The truth is, I cannot leave Christianity, nor stop being a Christian because that is the faith that I was given. Like Jesus' parable of the three men given three different amounts of mina (talons/talents), Christianity is my mina (talon/talent).
That is precisely when it hit me, the whole purpose for this essay. Perhaps this is exactly how we should view differing faiths, as different minas (talons/talents). We are each given our own, unique mina or minas--some are born Christian, others Muslim, others still Atheist. We are thus charged to go forth and multiply what we have been given. More than that, I'll wager that we are required to do all we can for others with it. Not simply convert, but love, heal, nurture, and renew. Do not worry of the others and their missions. Just do the duties you were given.
In this way, perhaps my feet can finally leave the desert.
