Velvet Elvis – Timing is everything…

I don’t know if you’re like this, but I seem to need to a message delivered at just the right time in order to really respond to it. For example, I have owned the book Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell for almost a year. I’ve been meaning to read it, but just never got around to it somehow…until now. And now is exactly the right time. The message of the book (so far…I’m just about a third of the way through it) is just what I’ve been needing to hear.

I’ve talked a bit on the blog about how I’ve been kind of struggling in my relationship with/to God over the past…well, really, it’s been like a year and a half, at least. I have felt like no one understood how I was feeling or the questions I’ve had or the spiritual predicament I found myself in. Reading Velvet Elvis, I’ve discovered that I’m not the only one with questions about God and what a relationship with him should look like. I guess I knew that in my head before, but somehow the words of this book have provided a breakthrough (…I know, I hate that word too, but it’s the right one to describe what’s happened).

At some point we have to have faith. Faith that God is capable of guiding people. Faith that God has not left us alone. Faith that the same Spirit who guided Paul and Peter and those people [who put what we call the Bible together] is still with us today. Guiding us, showing us, enlightening us.

[Truth can only be discovered] if communities are willing to wrestle. The ultimate display of our respect for the sacred words of God is that we are willing to wade in and struggle with the text – the good parts, the hard-to-understand parts, the parts we wish weren’t there.

The rabbis even say a specific blessing when they don’t understand a portion of the text. When it eludes them, when it makes no sense, they say a word of thanks to God because of the blessing that will be theirs someday. [They] have a metaphor for this wrestling with the text: the story of Jacob…He struggles, and it is exhausting and tiring, and in the end his hip is injured. It hurts. And he walks away limping.

Because when you wrestle with the text, you walk away limping…[The] ones limping have had an experience with the living God.

I have no words to describe the walls around my heart that started to crumble when I read this passage. The wrestling, the limping…it’s me exactly. What an inspiration to know and remember others have been exactly where I am. And what a comfort to understand that the questions and the wondering and the struggling are okay. I haven’t given up. I haven’t walked away from the fight. And now, though I may walk with a “limp” for the rest of my life because of this time in the ring, I can at least limp with pride, knowing I stuck it out and that my faith is stronger for it.

Peace. Out.