Something Beautiful

Looking back at the past weeks, I can sense that something beautiful is happening to my life. The two books, ‘A New Kind of Christian’ and ‘The Story We Find Ourselves in’, have touched me deeply, like no other Christian book has done before. All I can say is: Thank You Lord, for people like McLaren, and books like these. I’m quite certain that Your Spirit is behind these books. I’m quite certain that it is Your Spirit speaking to me through them.

I feel refreshed and invigorated. It is as if I have found something new and exciting. I realize that I have found a better way to be a Christian; a way that is more Christ-like; a way that allows all my other fragmented beliefs to be embraced as a whole. The scientific side of me that believes in the big-bang, an old earth as well as evolution; my love for nature and astronomy; my wild imagination that causes me to foray into the realm of science fiction and fantasy; all these can now be made whole, as part of my story in God’s story for the whole universe. I’ve never been so excited about God, Jesus and Christianity before. It’s like I’ve found Jesus all over again! Maybe I did, in a new way! I can’t help but feel like I want to share what I’ve discovered with my friends!

God has also been teaching me a few things through these books. Firstly, it is humility. I sense a subtle change in me. In situations in which I would have been critical and judgmental, I am now able to suppress these thoughts. Secondly, as I mentioned yesterday, I am beginning to look forward to the time when I will meet God. I could feel an indescribable sense of peace and warmth overwhelming me today as I read the final chapter of ‘The Story We Find Ourselves in’. I now wonder what it is like in the next part of the story, and I am excited! Through these books, I’ve learned to look at the world and my mission here on earth in a new way. It’s not just about converting people and getting people ‘saved’ so that they can get their butts to Heaven. It is more about living out and sharing the gospel in its fullness; by loving my neighbors and making this world a better place, as well as helping others to see God’s story so that they will join Him in His mission.

It’s difficult to describe this feeling. Whatever it may be, I know that it is something good and beautiful. I have faith that it is from God. I want to believe that it came from God.

It often happens that an old brother who has spent his life making cheese or baking bread or repairing shoes or driving a team of mules is a greater contemplative and more of a saint than a priest who has absorbed all Scripture and theology and knows the writings of great saints and mystics and has had more time for meditation and contemplation and prayer. ~ Thomas Merton, The New Seeds of Contemplation

To think that a man could be proud of this joy, once it had discovered him and delivered him, would be like saying, “This man is proud because the air is free.” “This other man is proud because the sea is wet.” “And here is one who is proud because the mountains are high and the snow on their summits is clean and the wind blows on the snow and makes a plume of cloud trail away from the high peaks.” Here is a man who is dead and buried and gone and his memory has vanished from the world of men and he no longer exists among the living who wander about in time: and will you call him proud because the sunlight fills the huge arc of sky over the country where he lived and died and was buried, back in the days when he existed? ~ Thomas Merton, The New Seeds of Contemplation