I guess I'll just start out by saying no one makes sense any more... but maybe it's just me?
Where ever I go I see people living their normal Western lives and I just don't get it any more... but maybe I do?
The best way I can describe these feelings is painting in this light; As a kid I was very imaginative, my sister and I had a made up world of tree sprites, and animal royalty and all around magic and sunshine. It was like living in a secret garden, and that's very much how my relationship with God was for a long time.
But like all heroines from stories that deal with magic and fairies I grew restless and went out into the world.
I became Xena in a lot of ways, I was warrior woman with a spit fire attitude when wound up and an even keel when left to my own devices. I loved the way my life had become, and the way it looked like it was heading.
I left my safe quaint delicate little garden and roamed through fields of glory making big battle plans and working to secure a future as glorious as the grand visions my wanderings gave me.
Let me clarify that I am still that person, a rough and tough warrior woman, sword in hand and and dreams in heart but something has happened as of late.
I've been invited into a lot of people's 'gardens'. Their private lives and worship sessions and here is the part where my childhood obsession with Xena didn't prepare me for.
You see in the television show Xena traveled around kicking butt and taking names, but every once in a while she'd visit some mystic temple or lavish garden and she fit in there just as did on the battlefield.
In the real world- or the semi-parable world- it doesn't work that way.
I end up being a lumbering warrior trampling on flowers and pulling up the shrubs by the roots.
I don't mean to shake values and challenge core beliefs, but you really didn't have to worry about offending people out in the field like you do in the garden.
Home has been very much like a big open plain littered with gardens that I've visited.
Churches I've attended, Ministries I've been apart of even friends that I keep are all these gardens. While I am able to live in them comfortably I just don't fit in with them. There are always those nagging little things that make you bristle under the armor your wearing.
It's like they're from the same culture but a different tribe.
This is more of a get this weird feeling of rogue-ness off of my chest kind of blog, but I think it can be applied to a lot of people who have experienced being apart of a culture that has lived out of the status quo.
I don't just mean people in ministry I mean people have held the dying, loved the unloveable, listened to unspeakable confessions with out batting an eye and extended grace to every one they met with out questioning that persons faith or motives.
I don't meet those people often, and I don't get every one else in the world who can't do those things any more.
The Bible says "The weapons of my warfare are not carnal" and I'm starting to get that. We're not fighting a war in the traditional sense. We're taking ground empathy and grace not excluding our selves and judging others. Each battle is won by becoming part of a culture and enforcing the positive strengths of that culture rather than over taking a culture and punishing all of it's wrong doings.
So I've decided that I hate the metaphorical gardens, where they hear the stories of people doing something out side of their four walls/paradigm/every day norm and associate it with what they can understand rather than seeing it for what it is.
Ministry is about winning the lost, it's about being Christ to a hurting world.
The only time Jesus quoted scripture was to those who used scripture as a weapon, the rest of the time he just quoted his father.
That's what we do out side of gardens, we live our lives by what God says, not by what someone holier-than-thou thinks is right. And out side of gardens we get stuff done.
I'm not bashing traditional church, or any particular group, I'm just calling my self out a little bit. Garden's are great to rest in, but there no place for a warrior to live.
I'll stop tearing up your shrubberies now, I'm picking up my sword and I'm going to push out of these gates.
In the words of Xena...
