Yesterday, at lunch, my friend David mentioned he’d spent some time in Colorado with the guys at Ransomed Heart. David used to work with them and went back to hang out with them for a weekend in the mountains. He mentioned that one of the guys reminded him that spirituality was not a context. I asked David what the guy meant, and Dave said what he meant was that you learn about God while learning to fly a plane or raising a child or planting crops in a field. It’s not a hard, fast rule to be sure, but the idea is that sitting around looking at your spiritual belly button isn’t going to provide an object lesson for your faith. The idea is that faith makes sense in the context of some other pursuit.
And that might be the reason I don’t migrate toward conversations specifically about faith.
I agree very much, as it seems like it is always through the experiences I am having that God uses to teach me a thing or two, or bring me to my knees. For example, raising kids, or being married. I am fairly certain I could do neither of these things on my own, and if I did, I know there would be enough mistakes that I would recognize only in retrospect, that doing what I thought was best at the time would eventually be my undoing.
If the past indicates the future, that is where I would stand.
