After the Passion (A Psalm)

The last few days have been very tough, for all the reasons listed in my previous blog and more.  I have felt cold and empty when I should have felt joy, and lonely, even when there have been many people around me (and people who love me very much right beside me).

Last night, in the midst of all this I felt the desire to write a Psalm.  I have never tried before, nor have I really wanted to, but I started it right then and worked on it again this morning.  It is probably still a work in progress, but I wanted to share it, for, in writing when feeling low and in focussing on God as I did so - in crying out to Him and praising Him - I find my heart very much lightened.  I hope it might be a blessing to others also.

One final thing.  Psalms have a tendency to be melodramatic and, it has to be said, so do I.  That tendency has got a lot worse this week - leaving me feeling guilty every time I express myself - but here, in the context of a Psalm, it seems only a magnification, not a distortion.  I hope you read it as such.

Why so disquiet within me, oh my soul?

My enemies outnumber my friends.
They are locusts stripping my fields,
They are an army of ghosts sent to haunt me.
Their helmets shine like gold,
Their raiment like the sun at noon,
But they hide faces pocked with decay,
Their flesh is the flesh of the grave:
To rally to their call is to die.

Why have you let them come to me, oh Lord?
Why, when victory seemed so close at hand,
When I basked in the glow of your triumph,
Was it snatched away, so cruelly?

For I have seen your Holy city, Lord,
I have tasted the wine of Zion,

And drank with the family you had given me.

The air was cool and sweet,
Like honey on my lips,
Like nectar on the tongue.
Your people welcomed me
With olive branches and laurels,
With fruit and fragrant wine.
We sang and danced and rejoiced together.
My cup was overflowing with joy.

But it did not last, Lord.
Like a dream, it vanished in the morning,
Like a fox it ran with the dawn
And I was left alone.

Alone, I face this army in the desert.

Was it merely a mirage?
Did my mind deceive me?
Or are these ghosts the deception,
Sent to waylay me on my pilgrimage?

For I am not alone.

Why so disquiet within me, oh my soul,
When the one who holds the banquet
Walks beside me?

The Lord will be my shield.
He will be my armour and my sword.
His word will be the light to guide me,
The path which I must follow.

We march for home,
For the city on the hill,
Where the banquet yet awaits
And the doors are thrown wide
For the return of her Princes.

I will sing to the Lord,
And put aside the vanity that haunts me.
For the triumph was yours, oh my God,
The tears,
The sweat,
The blood,
But I rejoiced in the gift
And not in the giver.

[Selah]

It was not a dream,
For I have not yet awoken.
The city was not a mirage,
For the desert is the lie.

You have prepared a place for me,
Oh Lord, my God,
And though phantoms assail me,
Though I am faithless and weak,
You will not give it to another.

Why so disquiet within me, oh my soul?
For the Lord is my rock and my salvation
And I will sing,
Though worlds collapse around me
And tears wear gullies in my cheeks.

I will sing.

Resurrection Day!

This is, hopefully, just going to be a short post.  I have post-Easter lunch dishes to do and should really get some proper rest and a cup of tea before long as well.  I am, however, emotional, a little overwrought and just kind of desperate to keep connecting to something that has passed and so I can't be held fully responsible for the length this post reaches...

Easter has come and that means Lent is over.  I can return to Fiction.  I no longer have to deny myself the way I have for the last month and a bit.  This is fantastic news in many ways, and yet, apart from reading a chapter of a story a friend is writing (and cruelly posted just after I had started my Lent - kidding!) I haven't really availed myself of the opportunity.  I doubt this has anything to do with piety.  It's mostly because the day has been busy enough with things of its own, and it's also because I'm in a really weird place emotionally

I'll tell you the story.

So, a little over six months ago I committed to joining the Aberdeen Passion 2014.  I've mentioned this before.  In that six month period, as well as having ups and downs in 'the real world' with the arrival of a beautiful baby girl, the departure of a much loved cat, and a fair degree of uncertainty over what I should be doing with my life, I bonded with my fellow cast-members (some again, some for the first time), grew into a part I wasn't, in many ways suited for, and fell in love, once again, with acting out the events of that first Holy week.

And then came Lent.  I started this blog and set aside something that meant a lot to me in order to take up things I knew needed to mean more.  I learned a lot, I changed a little and all the while there was this new family who were (some of them at least) following that journey alongside me.  They weren't the only ones, nor were they the most important family in my life by any means - but they were welcoming and accepting in a way those you weren't actually raised by, or with (or married to) rarely are and I saw them more and more often as the weeks went by.

And then there was last week.  A sudden, final, furious burst of activity to get the Passion play finessed and ready for the stage: the final rehearsal in our old rehearsal space on Palm Sunday, the technical rehearsal in the venue on Thursday night, the full dress rehearsal on Friday afternoon and then, one after the other, with only one night's sleep in the middle, the three performances.  What a ride!  What a rush!  What an incredible experience to share with these wonderful people I had come to love - without even really knowing many of them.  And it was all to the glory of God... and yeah, we had a bit of the glory too.  How could we not with people telling us after each performance how great they thought the whole thing was, how moved they were, how one actress had set them off crying, how another actor had really made them think about that character in a new way.  It was a profoundly intense... and in a sense, profoundly intimate experience to share.

And then it was all over.

It had to end, of course.  Today's Easter Sunday and we wouldn't want to perform it again on such an important day.  We have our own families to spend time with and share the joy of Jesus' resurrection all over again.  And we carry on in the blessed afterglow of all that we've experienced too - such an amazing high, such wonderful new insights into God's love for us, such potential in the friendships we have made!

But there's a hole there now.  For a while life was sparkling and strange and just so unbelievably fresh, that to return to life afterwards, especially knowing that work - that world of dreary normality, where I don't really even know who I am any more - is just around the corner.

I've had my ups and downs all day: celebrating Easter, and yet mourning the Aberdeen Passion - because that's what this is... it's grief.  Grief at the loss of a one-off experience.  Grief at the separation of relationships.  Grief at the ending of a dream.

But this isn't the end.  If there's one thing I've been reminded of time and time again this weekend it is that that Easter Sunday nearly two thousand years ago was not the end!  It wasn't the end then and just because we've finished one way of telling about it, it's not the end now.  The same saviour we crucified on stage, the one our characters hugged with joy at the end - He was actually present with us the whole time we were performing.  We could tell.  We could feel Him strengthening us.  We were encouraged by Him when things got difficult.  It was He who brought us all together and it is in His nail-scarred hands that all those relationships and experiences rest.

This isn't just the day when we celebrate Jesus' resurrection.  This is our resurrection day too.  If we believe in Him then we died with Him and were raised with Him.  My life is constantly being renewed in Jesus Christ!

So, I may be struggling a bit just now, but I know that my life was not that one play, and nor was my experience of its glorious subject, my Lord and saviour, Jesus Christ, the man who was God, who bore the sins of the world, who is the one and only way to the Father and the gateway to eternal life - He is with me now and He knows the plans he has for me, for all of us.  I can't wait to see where He takes me next.

God bless you all and may you all have a Happy Easter!

Passion

We're into the final week of Lent.

It's hard to believe that Easter is so nearly upon us.  I think of what it felt like to begin this journey and I wonder if I'm the same now as when I began, or if there has been some transformation, however small - an evidence for the Spirit.  I incline towards the maudlin, the pensive, the contemplative.  Easter can do that, but I go through these cycles, these whirlpools of excitement and disappointment, of hope and despair, of intent and disavowal.  I get lost, sometimes, in the maze of my own complex, as if it were something real, a place of some significance, not merely a matter of perspective.

There'll be time to examine what I have, or haven't learned from this journey.  There'll be time to look deep at what I am left carrying on the other side of Easter - something precious, something worn but functional, or a piece of burnt-out wreckage.  There'll be time for the big debrief, but I gave you this little piece of my often messed-up mind just now because it sets the scene for what I'm about to talk about, which is, as John Cleese once said, 'something completely different'.  Or...?

One thing I have mentioned Ad Infinitum on Facebook, but have breathed (typed) not a word of on this blog so far, is that at 7.30pm on Good Friday, I'll be joining a crowd of other Christians (and some Non-Christians) on stage at the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre for the second Aberdeen Passion: One Hope.

This is a big deal in itself, but bigger still for me, I will have the wonderful privilege and the grave responsibility of playing Peter.  This is the biggest role I have ever played on stage.

To put this in perspective, here is a potted history of my life in theatre:

When I was five I joined my first Christmas play - the Magic Garden - in the role of.... one of the trees.  I had no lines.

My second Christmas performance was to be as a reindeer, one of the ones at the back.  Again, no lines.

A later play gave me the opportunity to play Joseph - the Holy Grail of schoolboy nativity roles.  I ended up a choral shepherd in this musical version, however, on account of the fact that I couldn't actually sing high enough for the role...

In my penultimate year in Primary School, I got to play the father of St. Patrick in a mimed play about the Saint.  I mimed a version of St. Patrick's Breastplate, then was chased around the stage for a minute before being stabbed to death and not involved in the rest of the performance.

Apart from these primary school performances (I was also an advisor to Aethelred the Unready in a P7 play, which, despite being the biggest role I'd had up to that point, I can barely remember) my acting career has consisted mainly of Scripture Union Holiday Club dramas, playing singing caretakers, mad Italian chefs and slimy alien villains.

I was in the last Aberdeen Passion, One Life Given back in 2012, but even then I was a two-line Pharisee abs a one-line Angel. That experience was part of what drew me back to the Passion, but nothing I've done before has really prepared me for this. I'll come back to that - in fact there's a lot I want to say about the experience and it might not all add up to one neat, coherent narrative, I'm afraid, so I'm just going to ask you to bear with me and take what you can from my musings.

Firstly playing this role has made me look at Peter in a way I never have before. To me Peter has always been the bold, reckless caricature he is often portrayed as. A man of great faith and little time for thinking things through before hand. I say caricature, but that's not too deny that he had those traits. They are clearly to be seen in the texts of the gospels, after all. But, even so, actually playing the man on stage has forced me to look for more depth than I have usually been presented with in my previous encounters with his story.

Some of this had to do with my own weaknesses as an actor. I am not a bold person. I am not especially reckless. My faith has always been weak and, whilst the essence of acting is appearing that which you are not, I find it hard to portray a man who was, in many ways, my opposite. So I had to find some part of Peter I could identify with, a fragment of my own personality within him: the seed from which my portrayal of him could sprout. I think I found it quite early on in rehearsals.

Asked to talk a bit about our characters, I found myself latching on to the fact that Peter is, in fact, a man of some not inconsiderable contradictions. He walked on water with Jesus, was the first to recognise him as the Messiah (by the Spirit), proclaimed loudly how he would die for him; yet Peter was also the one whose faith failed him on the lake, so that he began to sink, who constantly told Jesus that the things the Son of Man predicted about his death and resurrection were 'not so' and who denied even knowing him three times to save his own skin.

The word 'passion' originally meant only 'the suffering of Christ on the cross', so it is right and proper that we use it in reference to the Easter story, but led me flip that about a bit just now by using it in its modern sense to describe the contradiction of Peter: Peter's passion for Jesus was matched only by his inability to follow through.

Taking a moment to look at that in my own life, I have often struggled with the idea of being a 'passionate' Christian, indeed, I have struggled with the concept of passion in many areas of my life.  For one who so easily gets lost in his own internal, emotional landscape, I can often seem cold and whilst I do get fired up about things, they are usually the things that don't really matter, as if it is easier to commit oneself to the frivolous than to the deeper things of life.  I have prayed for passion in my life almost as much as I have prayed for faith, and it is still something I am not always comfortable with.  One friend once told me that I was the British person she knew, and perhaps this was part of what she was alluding to?

Passion was clearly not a problem for Peter, however.  From his fervent attempts to please Jesus to his vehement denial, Peter was a man for whom strong emotion was no stranger, but how to balance these polar opposite moments in his life?  Having looked to see a way in which I could play him, with my more reserved demeanour and shyness, it seemed to me that he was actually a man riddled with insecurity.  What follows is my interpretation.  It may not be correct, but I think it is still illuminating for our own lives as Christians.

Peter is taken from a humble life as a Galilean fisherman to become one of the principle players in the most important event of human history, and, somewhere along the journey, the impact of that must have hit him.  He did, after all, get given the revelation that Jesus was the Messiah, so he was in no doubt that he had entered an exalted circle.  His only reason for being there?  Why, that would be Jesus himself.  Jesus was Peter's passport to lead him out of obscurity and into history.

So Peter clings to Jesus.

He loves him, yes - that's clear from his actions - but there is also a sense in which his image of Jesus is what is holding him, allowing him to reconcile his new circumstances with his old - his privileged position with the unschooled man he knows himself to be.  Jesus is everything to him, but his idea of who Jesus is is not completely correct and wont be until after the resurrection - in fact he'll still have plenty to learn about who Jesus really is for the rest of his life, just like the rest of us.  Peter is holding onto an idea of the Messiah which does not match up to what Jesus ultimately goes on to do.  It is obvious from his rebukes to Jesus every time the master tells him that he must die.  It's obvious from the way he responds to the appearance of Moses and Elijah during the transfiguration.  Peter has glued his insecure identity to a distorted image.

So, when Jesus is arrested, Peter's world starts to crumble.  This bold, courageous man, is left alone and terrified.  He follows Jesus at a distance, because Jesus - or at least his idea of who Jesus is - is all he has to hold his identity in place, but faced with the very real threat of being implicated with him and suffering severe punishment for being one of his followers, he buckles.  His idea of who he is and who he was cannot cope with the pressure put upon it by circumstances that, as far as he is concerned, make no sense whatsoever.  His vision of reality is falling apart, and, passionately, he denies having any connection to his master, his friend - his idol.

As I said before, I am not bold and courageous in most things and I certainly lack Peter's walk-on-water faith, even at my best.  What I can relate to, however, (and many others would be with me) is insecurity.  I've been over this before - I wrote a whole post on it - but being able to see and understand the problem, and even seeing the solution in the form of God's good grace, does not make it simply vanish.  I am still an inherently insecure person the vast majority of the time, and so I can relate to this in Peter.  I can relate to his uncertainty about who he really is, why he is being used by God the way he is and how he should follow through when things get rough.

So, this is my hook for playing him: Peter the bold who crumbles when his Master is taken from him, because his identity was hanging on who he thought Jesus was, rather than who Jesus was revealing himself to be all the time.  My Peter is somewhat stripped down, thought that's not to say simplified, necessarily, but I've focussed on this aspect of his character over some of the more traditional elements.  There is still some bravado, some rushed, thoughtless action - I can't change the story, even if I wanted to - but my performance hangs on Peter's internal life, the emotional landscape he, perhaps, doesn't really understand, the thoughts he holds onto and those he cannot yet grasp.

I don't know how much of that will show on stage, but I hope it will inform all that does.  In the end it is the best that I can do.  I'm simply not a good enough actor to portray Peter any other way.  I can only do my best with the talents God has given me and hope that, by his Spirit it is enough.  I know, also, that I'm not at the centre of this play.   The Passion is not about Peter, but he is one of our roads in to understanding it and so I take the role very seriously, praying that God will use it to reveal something of Himself to the audience this weekend.

And that brings be to the other thing I want to examine, just very briefly. I mentioned praying for faith, and have pointed out on numerous occasions that I am not bold - I lack confidence in myself and can be very shy.  So why, you might ask, are you acting on stage at all?

It's a very good question.  I was plagued by stage fright when I was younger - I remember once imagining myself having heart attack on stage at a school prize giving event and seeing my (somewhat rotund, and rather posh) headmaster looming over me to say "Get off the stage, George, you're blocking the procedure" - and even this weekend past standing up in front of my church to give an announcement was utterly terrifying, but here's a funny thing.  The last time I was involved in the Aberdeen Passion I was not really nervous at all.  There are still a few more days until the first performance and I do have a very strong sense of just how much bigger my part is this time around than last, but even so I'm still not really nervous.

Some of it is probably just because of how well and often we've rehearsed.  I cannot doubt that I know my lines and what I need to do with them.  Some of it is likely because of the great team of people I have the privilege of working with - the Passion family as we call it, because, in so many ways, that is what we have become and I treasure the time we get to spend together working on these productions.  But, there is more to it - of that I'm sure.

If there is a miracle hidden within my testimony, it is this: God has transformed me from a timid, socially awkward youth into a timid, socially awkward man - who can do whatever He asks of me, even in front of an audience, when He wills it to be so.  Praise the Lord, because without him I'd be hiding in cupboard somewhere right now!

Imagine

Another week, another blog and, once again, I think I find myself with nothing new to say, when a post begins to form in my mind. This time it's on the back of having just finished three books: A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology by Alister E. McGrath, A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis and then back to McGrath with Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth. Three very different books, all of which left me with plenty to think about and which (along with my previous read on meditation) have had me wondering about the role of imagination in the Christian faith. I hope to explore that question a bit later on.

But first: the books! McGrath's Fine-Tuned Universe is a book about looking at Natural Theology (traditionally what we can learn about God from what He has revealed of Himself through nature) in a new way. McGrath calls for an approach where we no longer seek to prove God's existence using Natural Theology, but whereby we recognise the way in which Nature reflects or 'resonates' with a Christian, Trinitarian worldview. We don't look to nature to prove God, whom we believe in through Scripture and personal experience, but we see that Christianity may offer the best explanation for what is observed in Nature. He examines the theological implications of this and then looks at some relatively recent developments in cosmology, physics and evolutionary biology which, he argues, can be seen in this light.

As a whole it is an approach which really appeals to me, indeed, though I might never have verbalised it as such, or been able to explain it very clearly, it is much the way I have always approached nature, but McGrath solidifies it, grounds it in science and uses Augustine's doctrine of creation as a way of suggesting how our growing understanding of the life, the cosmos and the emergent, stratified nature of reality can be reflected theologically.

It is fascinating stuff. I did have a couple of problems with the book, however. The first was that it spey inconclusive. McGrath intended it to be the start (or very nearly the start) of a theological and scientific conversation, so it sort of leaves all its ideas hanging, waiting to see who picks them up. Another issue is that it doesn't have a huge amount of scriptural grounding. This is common in Natural Theology in general and whilst it's clear the 'Trinitarian worldview' McGrath is talking about is scripturally based, he doesn't actually demonstrate this very often. It also results in the single most frustrating aspect of the book, which is his exploration of Augustine's doctrine of creation, which Augustine based, not only on Genesis, but also on a verse in Ecclesiasticus, one of the apocryphal texts not recognised as authoritative by the majority of the (protestant) church. Whilst the Apocrypha is another issue entirely from the one the book was about, McGrath fails to mention this as an issue at all, which seems a little incomplete.

Aside from these (mostly) niggles, however, it is an excellent book and one well worth reading of you have an interest in the places where theology and science meet and wish to expand your imaginative understanding of the Universe. More on that in a bit...

A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis is a very different kind of book. It is a short diary by the great writer and Christian apologist, written in the days, weeks, months after the death of his wife from cancer. It is astonishingly honest, angry and moving, yet also clear, with a precision of thought and analysis rarely seen in such moments. Through it Lewis appears to understand more about his grief, his humanity, and, above all else, God.  It's a book which, as soon as you start reading it, you realise must be important in some way and, indeed, I would recommend that everyone does.  It is phenomenally well-written, brutally honest and yet so well-thought out by the end.  I don't think I can review it further without repeating myself again.

Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth, is a very different book from A Fine-Tuned Universe and yet McGrath's particular style and some familiar arguments manage to rise to the surface as you read it.  Much like the former book, it feels rather inconclusive, but what you do get is a very good overview of some of the major heresies of the classical 'patristic' era and some sound criticism of a number of theories on how heresy orginates and whether what we know as Christian orthodoxy has any right to be so. In doing so it challenges some traditional Christian views, such as the idea that heresy always originates outside the church, but at the same time post-modern approaches are also shown to be indefensible. Heresy is not a liberating alternative to a repressive orthodoxy, but the spiritual equivalent of an evolutionary dead end in the exploration of the best way to express Christian belief.

One finishes the book with a profound sense that Christian orthodoxy is to be defended (if continually developed), not only because it is the best model of life and faith for the Christian, but because it is also the most intellectually coherent, satisfying and exciting vision of Christianity. McGrath finishes with a call for theologians and practising Christians alike to exercise their intellects and imagination in presenting this truth to the world, which has been led to believe quite the opposite for a number of social, cultural and historical reasons.

McGrath's approach to theology is one of intellectual excitement, rather than spiritual development, but from reading his works (and listening to him) I'm reasonably sure of his saving faith in Jesus Christ. His very academic approach is a function of both his personality (which is similar to my own in at least this respect) and the context within which he works, but his appeal to the Christian imagination at the end is one which I think we all need to engage with, which brings me to the meat of this post...

Imagination.  The one thing all three books above have in common, aside from the fact that I chose to read them (and simply because they were there, on my bookshelf, rather than because of any other particular agenda), is that they each make appeals to the human imagination in the way they look at our Faith and the world around us.  McGrath calls for the use of the Christian imagination in how we look at and respond to the natural world and the sciences which explore it, as well as in how we look at our theological orthodoxy and relate it to the world.  Lewis demonstrates the power the imagination has to deceive us in our understanding of both God and those we love, but equally that it can be transformed by our faith to help us know God and others more clearly.

I have touched on this topic before, of course, in my defence of fiction and it's ability to be used as an explanatory, analogical, allegorical and inspiring tool for exploring the ideas of life and faith, but that's not all the imagination is used for and so this is a look at the Christian imagination as whole and why we should spend more time developing it within our fellowships.

Imagination is frowned upon by a number of Christians and this is seen to be something mirrored outside of the Church as well.  Imagination is something children have, an element of play.  It is not something which a mature adult should spend much time worrying about.  I commented on this attitude before, citing C. S. Lewis' response to such thinking.  This time I shall quote him more fully:

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

But as I said, there is more the the human imagination that its power to create and be absorbed in complete fictions.  The imagination is also a very necessary part of our rationality.  We do not simply use our imaginations to think of things that are not, we also need to use it to explore ideas that are, but which we cannot perceive with our usual range of physical senses.  The best example of this can be seen in the modern sciences, which are often exploring elements of the natural world which can be observed and recorded using various pieces of technology - things which most assuredly do exist - and yet things which the human eye cannot see, the ear cannot hear, the fingers cannot touch and manipulate, and so on.  Scientists, however some might baulk at such a suggestion (though I'm sure most would not) must use their imaginations if they are to understand such phenomena better, determining how they work and how they relate to other such phenomena.

Equally, Philosophy and Theology have engaged with the human imagination for thousands of years, exploring concepts which are real, but not tangible, which can be conceived of, but not seen.  The idea that the imagination is a fanciful, even shameful thing, seems to be a more recent one, tied together with the increase in fantasy fiction since the nineteenth century and, before that, to the puritan reaction against fiction full stop.

So what does it mean for Christians to use their imaginations?  I cannot claim to have a comprehensive doctrine to hand, nor can I cite much in the way of Scripture to help develop one.  All I can say is that Christians need to use their imaginations to see the connections between what they believe and the reality they see, as well as to expand those notions to see how they relate to what others believe and how best to share that testimony with them.  This can, of course, involve our creative gifts, given to us by God to exercise for his glory, but it can just as easily be used in how we explain our faith at a purely theological, spiritual or experiential level.

Romans 12 verse 2 says this:

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.  Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will his - his good, perfect and pleasing will.

Paul is talking about a spiritual transformation which enables us to see the world in a profoundly Christian way, but just because it is a spiritual process does not mean it does not have physical applications. Seeing the world itself is one such application, how we think about the world and how we process our understanding of it are similarly physio-chemical processes in the brain.  The spiritual and the physical are not - as the Greek metaphysical worldview taught - completely separate realms, but interacting realities.  Our spiritual transformation affects us physically.  What Paul is speaking about, then, involves a transformation of our thinking minds - our rationality and our imaginations.  McGrath mentions this several times when proposing his new approach to Natural theology, suggesting that the Christian vision of reality is a transformed one and one which allows us to see the world in a certain way.  That doesn't just extend to the natural sciences, but to all areas of life and ultimately even to how we view our faith itself.

So, I'm not suggesting we need to invent theologies or visions of God to pass on to others, but we must use all of our minds as much as all of our hearts, strength and souls when we love God and the transformed Christian imagination is very much a part of that process.  We should not stifle it, but within the guidance of scripture and the Spirit, let it help us explore and express our beliefs and the wonderful deeds and personality of our gracious God.

Until next time, then, go well!