Maybe it’s just a mistranslation, like a jot or tittle got erased somewhere along the way and we’ve been thinking of this whole thing wrong for years.
Maybe it’s “with the faith of a mustard seed, you can move to the mountains.”
That makes a lot of sense for me at least.
See, I want to tell you the story. I want to tell you about how I ended up in a completely different place, looking at unfamiliar ceilings, and fighting with God a lot. But as I try to find the beginning of the story, it seems like it is always eluding me. The puzzle still seems incomplete no matter how many pieces I add. So, I’m going to start at the end, and like the years of BC we’ll just keep counting up while going backwards until maybe we find where this whole thing started.
Let’s start with how I got to the mountains.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Monday, September 22, 2014
This Sucks.
This sucks.
There was this student at the church I worked at who was passionate about service. We had just finished a conference where we focused on the power of God’s grace and how it should encourage us to serve all people, no matter what their background or current situation was. The last day of the conference was on Sunday, so we had some students share stories in the main service about what happened. He stood up in front of the whole church and said something that would completely rock my world.
“Without grace, we would be screwed.”
That’s true, isn’t it?
Is there anyway to live this life without grace? Without forgiveness? And if there is a way to live without those things, is that a life worth living?
The need for grace, and the recognition of that need are the basis of the Christian faith. Grace should change the world, and knowing that we need it, that without it we would be screwed… well that’s something that should turn your whole life upside down.
So I wasn’t surprised to hear that people were upset about what he said. I was just surprised at what specifically upset them.
“screwed.”
It’s lewd language. It’s crass. It’s immature. It’s sexual, and aggressive, and it’s just wrong. So we don’t say it in church, and if we do we need to learn better, and grow out of our childishness and become true Christians.
There was this student at the church I worked at who was passionate about service. We had just finished a conference where we focused on the power of God’s grace and how it should encourage us to serve all people, no matter what their background or current situation was. The last day of the conference was on Sunday, so we had some students share stories in the main service about what happened. He stood up in front of the whole church and said something that would completely rock my world.
“Without grace, we would be screwed.”
That’s true, isn’t it?
Is there anyway to live this life without grace? Without forgiveness? And if there is a way to live without those things, is that a life worth living?
The need for grace, and the recognition of that need are the basis of the Christian faith. Grace should change the world, and knowing that we need it, that without it we would be screwed… well that’s something that should turn your whole life upside down.
So I wasn’t surprised to hear that people were upset about what he said. I was just surprised at what specifically upset them.
“screwed.”
It’s lewd language. It’s crass. It’s immature. It’s sexual, and aggressive, and it’s just wrong. So we don’t say it in church, and if we do we need to learn better, and grow out of our childishness and become true Christians.
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