Travel Journal: Cuenca, Day 11

March 3, 2020

I'm in the process of unlearning most of what I'd formerly known from being steeped in Western Christianity, and certainly all I'd internalized about "American" Christianity. I grew up knowing of "the Jesus of suburbia" and then when I was sixteen I was introduced to him. But it turned out that Jesus never lived in the suburbs. The way of Jesus is so counter-cultural because what we think is the way of Jesus is really just some of his watered-down sayings slapped over top our American priorities. Some sugar-coated, "well that's not really what that means" Bible verses on our bumper stickers and even tattooed on our skin. Crosses and crucifixes everywhere you look, " God bless you" ringing out in public spaces after sneezes, and scores of children growing up knowing that some invisible person named Jesus loves them but having no clue that, without surrender and obedience, they're actually opposing him. And finally, surpris...

March 4, 2020

Tonight while Nick and I were having good conversation over dinner, he asked when I last read my Bible. I said, "Not that long ago," to which he replied, "Was it before the weekend?" and I had to say, "Yes." He likened it to fasting for five days, which he rightly pointed out that I've never done in the natural, so why would I deprive myself like that in the spiritual? The conversation stirred up some old confusion and hurt regarding my difficulty with staying engaged with Scripture, but it also stirred up an old hunger to know the voice of God - to be steeped in the history of his speech, to be enraptured by description of who he is and rejoice with the authors of the Bible about his goodness. To know how he talks, to hear it inside my head as I read and become more and more familiar with the cadence of his conversation. I remembered being a freshman in college, newly exposed to the Pentecostal tradition and desperate to hear the voice o...

A New Thing

My worldview has been wrecked on multiple occasions over the last year and a half. I almost wish that was an exaggeration, but it is not. Sometimes for the better, always for the unknown. Each time feels unprecedented, each revelation seemingly irreconcilable with life as I have known it. But that's the point. Each of those instances has been a point of no return. One cannot put bubbles back in the bottle after pouring out dish soap. We cannot shrink our minds or appetites for adventure back down to former size once God has blown them wide open with possibility. (Plus, it's much more fun to have bubbles everywhere.) Faith tastes like the gunpowder-residue air that comes with fireworks. There's a right good chance that things will explode, but it's going to be beautiful. Whenever it happens. However it happens. Why is it that as we're eagerly searching the skies, refraining from blinking as much as we are able, barely hanging on to the edge of our se...

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