A Normal Life

Irving Stone wrote a novel based on the life and struggles of Vincent Van Gogh. It's interesting to reflect on the fact that a man who's paintings hang on some of the most coveted wall space on planet earth only ever sold one of them during his lifetime (and not for very much). He was almost universally rejected as an artist. He died of a self inflicted gun shot wound in his mid thirties while broke, broken and ignored.

Van Gogh's life makes the process of creating look thankless, lonely and uncertain. Definitely not the glorious road some of us have painted in our minds. In the midst of that journey, one man says to Vincent, "Normal men don't create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that's why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time."

After the fact, we (the rest of the world) see revolutionaries in quite a different light than we do during the process of revolutiontion itself. They didn't do it for applause, and seldom (if ever) got it. They did it because something more important captured their imagination and they pursued it at whatever cost. That challenges me to consider the reasons why I do what I do. It challenges me to change the way I look at the potential Van Gogh's of our time.

An Honest Question

True, it carries an edge and a bit of baggage, but the for the sake of poking and prodding...

Here goes...

Are rows and rows of drab suits on Sunday morning all staring at one man talking really the spark that lights the fuse to redemption?

What's the rest of the story?

A Phrase I Cannot Accept

Since this is a forum and not a pulpit - and since I am a human being more than I am a pastor, I want to admit something potentially controversial about the whole realm of faith. And I want to do it because I also think it's healthy. I have such a hard time with the phrase "God told me so" that I think I'm at the place where I can no longer accept it carte blanche.

Does God speak to us? I'm sure He does. Does that extend into the realm of things where we would need to say, "God told me so" in order to get our ideas accepted? I'm not so sure. It's untestable. It's unprovable. It can't be questioned. I'm not sure any human being can be trusted to self-police such an important thing as that. It effectively puts you beyond the realm of question.

It's such a subtle, delicate thing to pick between the thoughts that come from us and the thoughts that might not. True, I believe I have been impacted. In Christianity, my faith comes in large part from the fact that I have stared deeply into this thing and found NOT what I WANTED to see, but something better than I could have wanted. I have seen more than what I could have put there. But still - it's such a subtle, delicate thing.

The force of our own voice, the complexity of layers in our own mind, can we really pick through these things well enough to be able to say to someone else: "God told me so. Don't ask questions. Don't wonder about it. He told me. It's all you need to know. Just trust ME."

To be able to say all that, one also has to be able to hold their entire human fallenness and subtlety in check, alone, unquestioned. And all THAT is akin to saying you can hold a hurricane in one hand and thread a needle with the other.

Why can't we share our impressions as impressions? The idea of a church of many includes a principle that together, we can all hear more of God than any one of us can alone. We may very well NEED each other to be able to pick through the maze of our own thinking. How do I know? I think God told me so.