.: round one :.

This is an article that I found off of The Ooze website which feels a lot like a summary of the past 6 months for me (specifically with my beginnings at Regent College). I used this article the other night at The Pit (our underground group of undomesticated followers of Christ) for discussion – I present it now to you, the educated and the unqualified, for some open confession and conflict. Chew it up and spit it back onto a post of your own! I will simply say that Riley feels like he is well into a path that I find myself on in 2004. Enjoy!



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I AM NOT RIGHT

By Riley Whaling



A thought has been rolling around in my head for sometime, one that had not quite completed it’s logical thought train, until suddenly it pulled into the station and hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized that my relationship with God is not “Right”.



The idea of being absolutely right has for a long time been an ideology that I have fiercely held to. The thought that I was wrong or in the wrong place was one that I was unable to entertain. This past year has been a fascinating time of growth for me, one that has brought me to this start of a new outlook on my relationship with Christ. My relationship with God has been tainted, influenced, and affected by both my life experience and the culture I live in. When I first began to understand the complexity of culture and it’s deeply rooted effect on the people who lived within it, I was taken back. I suddenly realized that my way of doing things is not the only, and most certainly not the best way. From eating habits and marriage choices, the wide diversity of cultural facets was a wonderful and wildly fascinating new world of mind-expanding adventures. I imagined myself traveling and seeing the world, trying to grasp the perspective of those distant and mysterious people I have yet only to meet in periodicals and photo spreads from the deepest jungles. As I began to look deeper into other cultures, I found that parts of my faith were being challenged or outright ignored by these people.



At first, like any self-righteous, sinful human, I labeled them “apart from God” or “rejecters of the truth”. But then suddenly, in a moment of fearful self-exposure, I applied what I had seen within the differences of culture to my relationship with God. I looked and found so much of what I considered to be necessary in a relationship, was nothing more than consequences of deciphering God’s message to me through my cultural and life-experience filters. My relationship with God was slanted by the culture I lived in, and the manifestations of that relationship (the practice of my faith and relationship with God) was heavily influenced by my filters.



The cornerstones of the Christian faith (belief in God, belief in Christ as the savior, and the total dependency of human kind upon God for justification) are the only things I have deemed as absolutes. The rest of the practice of that faith is dependant upon each Christ follower's cultural environment and life experience. Thankfully, after much rolling around and straining and testing within my mind, this thought finally found it’s way to the level of expression, from the realm of unconscious lurking to the higher level of complete thought.



My completed thought is this:



My relationship with God is not absolutely right because there is no absolute right way to have a relationship with a living, dynamic and wildly creative God. My filters limit my perception of Him and His divine nature. This is coupled with the reality that He is outside of my existence (the 4 dimensions of height, length, width, and time), and thus beyond my comprehension. This also limits my perception. I can only hold to the absolutes and realize that my relationship with God will be unique and different from everyone around me. More importantly, every Christ follower is not required to practice their faith the way that I do.



( http://www.theooze.com/articles/article.cfm?id=848)