Striving for Beauty and Truth

 I’ve been continuing to follow my general mode of doing what feels right on any given day, and so I happily surprised myself by finishing this crewel embroidery project that I began quite a few years ago and couldn’t bring myself to work on for at least a few years. I had modeled this project after one I saw online, adapting my own colors and designs, so it felt a bit stressful at points having to make so many decisions and still being a novice embroiderer. It’s far from perfect, and I bet a more experienced person can see imperfections, but I honestly am beyond concern over getting things perfect. 

I bet it has to do with my age. lol No time for that!

On another note, there are some things worth striving for…if not perfection, at least moving as close to Truth as possible. For me, that capital T stands for Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being. To me, there is nothing and no one more capital T true or beautiful than this man/God.

I’m going to share a little of my faith journey here, and I’ve lived long enough to know that faith is just that…a journey, with each person having their own experiences and understandings depending on what they’ve heard, read, experienced, etc. I want to be sensitive with this. I know that religion can bring a host of feelings, some positive and some not. With all the love I can express through this medium, I want to encourage my readers to keep seeking…whatever path you are on. I believe that sincere seekers of truth will indeed find what they are looking for. And if you’re in a place where you have no interest in reading further, please feel free to pass on the remainder of this post, especially if you find such a topic triggering.

I have been a life long seeker of God—a personal being whom I’ve come to understand as pure Love. I have followed a Christian path that has wound its way through a wide variety of Christian expressions. I grew up in  the 70s and 80s attending a mainline liberal denomination. When in my early 20s, I took a sharp right into more fundamentalist/evangelical settings. I met my husband in Yellowstone National Park. We were on a summer mission trip with Campus Crusade for Christ in the early 90s. In college, I eschewed pretty much everything I had learned and experienced at my parents’ church, thinking I had finally found the Truth. In many ways, I think I did. Liberal mainlines never talked about a “personal relationship” with Christ and that was what my heart hungered for at that point. Yet looking back, Christ was there too—especially during those Maundy Thursday services when my heart burned within me.

Fast forward 15 years into my marriage when Bill started having doubts about his faith which ultimately led to where he is now with no Christian faith at all.  (He’s ok about me sharing this…fyi.) As one might imagine, this was quite jarring for me. There are few things in life more important than my faith. I won’t dwell on the challenges this brought about in our home and family and for me personally except to say that it started a deep faith examination for me. For a while (maybe 2-3 years) I did all I knew to do. I just clung to what I knew. I also had a few “experiences” that I believe came from another realm that helped to sustain me through this trial-some time. I did quite a lot of praying and seeking, examining nearly everything I believed. As time went on, what I came to realize was that much of the foundational conservative/fundamentalist doctrines, didn’t line up with what God was showing me about himself and specifically Jesus Christ as I examined him in the gospels. 

The road was long and winding. There were a few individuals and books that really spoke to me early on. They were Phillip Yancy and his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, Dallas Willard and his book and The Divine Conspiracy. Both of these really were like a fresh wind of the spirit leading me to a closer, more intimate knowledge of Jesus Christ. From there I began to question the two big doctrines that evangelicals hold on tightly to—Penal Substitutionary Atonement and Eternal Conscious Torment. A divide began to grow between what I was seeing/knowing of Christ and what these doctrines said about God the Father (of whom Christ came to reveal). From there, I came across an article online about George MacDonald. Briefly, MacDonald held firmly to an understanding of God that mirrors Christ and his voluminous writings do a magnificent job of capturing the Fatherhood of God.

At this point, I was in my mid-40s and I knew that I had crossed a threshold. I had absolutely very little in common with the conservative/fundamentalist/evangelical faith that I had assumed was the “correct” understanding of Christianity. I will say that there is much they have right, and I am grateful for what I gleaned during those years. But I now see more clearly than ever, how their literalist (or flat) reading of scripture has shaped their doctrine and understanding of God—which to me looks next to nothing like Christ. This is where I know it can get prickly with those who still see from that paradigm. I understand that. I was clearly able to walk in that setting for nearly 20 years without having a problem with it. But I will say as best and clearly as I can that there is a different way of reading and understanding scripture that melds so much better not only with the person of Christ, but also with the understanding of the early church fathers and mothers. 

All that to say that if you’d like a more direct route to understanding this perspective, there are two books written by Brad Jersak that lay out these understandings so very well. The first is, “A More Christlike God” and “A More Christlike Word”. I might even recommend starting with the second (which I just started reading) because he seems to have traveled similar paths to my own and delineates nicely the different approaches to reading scripture.