Monday, July 21, 2008

reflecting pool

So it's obvious to everyone by now that the church has pretty much taken over my life. Enough so that I'm starting to forget what that first rush of faith was like, and my experience of the details is very much defined by what's on my desk, the church secretary's desk.

It's not that I miss the life before the epiphany -- like life before love, or before your children, the past is without appeal -- like the pages of a pop-up book as they go by, folding flat and closed like a closet while the new life unfolds and bursts forth.

But I've been lazy about the Bible lately, lazy about prayer (such an alien confession for most of you readers, not that I mind; though I can hear some of you squirming in your seats.) I'm procrastinating my seminary app, even as JJ plows through her architecture and engineering exams; and I'm obsessing over certain items that probably only exist to distract me from the path. In short, I suppose I'm typical. Undisciplined sinner. This isn't the Catholic church, though, so nobody asks.

But I think about it all the time.

Everything I do, everything I am, is encompassed by this now. "Faith is the desperate dive from the sinking boat of human endeavor," says Max Lucado, and once you jump there's no bottom. Immersed utterly. Will I turn into a mermaid? Will I splash to the surface just as suddenly as I fell in, some day, and wonder where I've been? I don't think so. The past folds up behind you and the pages only turn from right to left, around here.

Where to now?

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