March 21, 2002

• Tim is back.  Poor guy, between Monday morning and yesterday afternoon, he had only 5 hours of sleep and three of them were on the return flight.  I'm just thankful he was able to drive home from the airport without incident.  But, life has returned to normal around the Verrette house.  My brief rebellion against my routine is over.  This morning I'm back to "short-order" cook.  The kids are full of ham and cheese omelet and preparing to start their lessons. 

  
  

  (They did indeed get popcorn for dinner on Monday evening, with a side of apple slices and cheese cubes.  Hey, corn is a vegetable, right?) 

  
  

  The weather here has been atrocious this week.  We've had slow earth-saturating rain for days on end.  Whenever we have more than two days of rain in a row, we begin to have erratic phone service.  I can place calls, sometimes.  People frequently are unable to call me, though.  And we have horrible static on the line.  Static enough to cause the modem to disconnect without warning.  <Heavy Sigh>

  
  

  The sky is clear today, and I'm online while I have the chance.  So why did I want to move out to the middle of nowhere?  Because I have to admit, it was MY idea that we'd buy a farm in the country.  Why would anyone want to move to a place with no cable modem, no pizza delivery, and only one Chinese restaurant in the whole four county region?

  
  

  I grew up in a small southern town in a moderately sized Baptist church.  When I left home for college, I left behind my "Christian" roots and immersed myself in all kinds of philosophy and exploration of beliefs about the nature of reality.  I took a hard look at the Chirstians I knew and I judged that they didn't really believe what they preached.  They certainly didn't live like they believed.  The problem could either be with every single individual Christian that I knew, or the problem could lie with the religion they professed.  At that time, I decided that the problem was with their religion.  And you know what?  I still believe that.

  
  

  I'm not a big supporter of religion.  Religion means rules, institutions, hierarchy, tradition, superstition and dogma.  I wanted no part of that.  On the other hand, I kept having these experiences with something that I can only describe as transcendence.  Everytime I thought that I knew what I believed, I experienced a reality that pushed the envelope just a little further and a little further.  Now, I could either judge myself to be psychotic, or I had to enlarge my worldview to encompass the possibility of an infinite beyond.  You have no dobt noticed that I've started using weird sounding phrases.  I'm avoiding the use of the word God, because I'm talking about a Godness that was so far beyond my conception of God that I could not relate my experience to my previous understanding.

  
  

  I'll skip over the months and years of this process and get right to the bottom line.  I found that the whole God thing isn't about religion, it's about relationship, and it's very difficult to communicate relationship.  Although I can talk about my husband all day long, I can never communicate the nuances of that experiential relationship.  But, when I talk about my husband I have an advantage in that people at least realize that they can see him, touch him, hear his voice.  (I stopped short of smelling him because I don't want to imply something that might get me in trouble later.   ) 

  
  

  I see, touch, hear, taste and smell transcendence.  I know it experientially.  But, I'm frustrated in my attempts of communicate my experience.  It is as though some people have eyes that see and others simply have eyes that perceive light within a specific measurable bandwidth.  The only thing I can do is live my life in the fullness of relationship at let people draw what conclusions they may from what they see.  As I do that, I find myself in places I never expected to be, doing things I never expected to do, because the reality of transcendence shapes and informs my decisions.

  
  

  Transcendence informs me that there is no difference between myself and my neighbor.  I cannot be free of the limitations of self unless I am ready to embrace the other.  To be a little less abstract, my relationship with God tells me that I need to live debt free and unencumbered so that I'm free to give my time, my skills, my hugs, and my money to purposes that have nothing to do with my own pleasure and security. 

  
  

  With our income, if we are to have freedom to act with justice and compassion, we could either buy a small house on a postage stamp lot in a neighborhood with "character."  Or we could have a 6 1/2 acre place on the end of a gravel road with a 2,000 square foot house.  As sacrificial living goes, putting up with irregular phone service and an hour drive to nice restaurants is not impressive compared with the great sacrifices of the saints through the ages, but it's where my relationship has led me.

  • 9:25 am
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