Slipping The Leash

I feel a little like a hound that slipped it’s leash and I’m finding it hard to get back up on the porch. Having been raised in fairly fundamentalist churches, biblical inerrancy and all that, I find myself leaking out of that comfortable niche and wondering what’s happening in my walk with the Lord.

There are strains of public condemnation in today’s church that I find totally off putting, which is my code phrase  for “drives me bat crap crazy”.  How to put this…..Some parts of the bible make me cringe. Not many, at most a few hundred verses out of thirty thousand, but enough to make me , well, cringe.

And I find equally cringe worthy the way a lot of Christians use parts of the Bible. Parts of the Bible that by themselves don’t make me cringe. I no longer believe that the Bible was ever intended for use as a science text, in fact I get weirded out at the incredible contortions some go through to use the Bible to “scientifically” prove things that are just plain ignorant, like the age of the earth. Or how God chose to create stuff. Couldn’t an all powerful God create things any way He chose? Like by evolution? Can Christ worshipping gays really be an abomination? And don’t get me started on eminently learned scholars and theologians that can’t agree on the color of stop signs much less the meaning of scripture.

There was a time in my life that I used my credulous nature to separate myself from God. That didn’t work out too well. So about ten years ago I began doing something I should have done forty years ago, beginning my day with prayer and reading scripture, and curiously, that has been a huge part of my trip off the porch. But the fact that I’m off the porch doesn’t mean I’ve left the reservation. Today my questions don’t separate me from God, they’ve driven me to Jesus.