"Koino-nicotine"

New friend Dave Stone is an interesting guy, he's the only person I know who ever attempted a Christian Keg Party (not a roaring success but you gotta love the creativity).
After church on Sunday we were talking about the real source of Christian unity and we realised that the Church has something to learn from smokers. (yup, I said it)
Too often church people find their unity in shared morality, shared politics, even shared activities. None of those things are necessarily bad, they're just not the things that are supposed to bring us together.
Remember the story Jesus told about the Pharisee and the tax collector at prayer (Luke 18 for those keeping score)...
Christian unity is properly based on one thing; we are messed up people who know that we need Jesus desperately in this life and for whatever happens when this life is over.
Finding our commonality in all that other stuff doesn't make us Christian, it makes us religious, political, and demographically consistent. We're the Pharisees

Smokers understand this way better than we do. We all see them, the social lepers huddling in uncomfortable herds outside the buildings where respectable people mingle. They try to ignore the scornful glances as they publically prove that there is something unhealthy in their lives. There's an almost admirable honesty in it really.

Every once in a while I experience something like that among God's people. We actually look each other in the eye and admit that we're screwups and we can't get it right. In those all too rare moments something like the presence of God breaks through.

We're told all the time that what people are looking for is community. How sad is it that they're more likely to find it in a haze of tobacco smoke than in a worship service...

Why and How

There seem to be a lot of situations in which I'm discovering that I've mistaken the "How" of faith matters for the "Why".
For example; for a lot of years I thought the point of the Creation narrative in Genesis 1,2 was for me to be able to prove that the evolution my science teachers, friends, and family talked about was untrue. I don't see it like that anymore. In fact, I'm honestly not sure how old the world is or what mechanism God used to bring it into existence. What I am confident of is that some of the things I was taught in church were wrong (definitely in tone, probably in content.) The purpose of the Creation story is to remind us that all of the universe was made on purpose and for a purpose. It's not primarily about the how, it's the why.
Similarly, I thought for a long time that Jesus came to Earth to enable my personal salvation and to start his church. I'm pretty sure I had that wrong too. Jesus came to establish his kingdom. The church (and even me) are the tools he is employing to that purpose. The why and the how.
I've got this feeling I'm just scratching the surface of what all this is going to mean...

Labour day, Baseboards, and Talking To God

I spent a lot of the long weekend installing new baseboards and quarter round in my house. It's a funny thing. If you walked into my living room you probably wouldn't notice that it was done, but somehow it makes a real difference in the atmosphere of the room. It just brightens the space and makes it feel more complete with the new white baseboards rather than the old plain wood ones. It's a subtle difference in terms of observations but in terms less visceral it's dramatic.
So what? Well, in my typical spiritual ruminations I was comparing baseboards to prayer. I think a lot of prayer is essentially invisible. And I certainly can't prove that it makes a significant difference if someone wants observational proof. Yet somehow praying is dramatic in my life. Not so much for the objective answers, but for the less measurable but more significant way my life beomes brighter and more complete (not better necessarily, at least in the way most of us consider better).
Now, here's another thought. I never would have chosen to do the baseboards without Kristen's prodding. I wouldn't have thought it would make a real difference in the space or be worth the time and money involved. I was wrong (nothing newsworthy about that, Kristen is almost always right about household aesthetics). Often I need someone to draw me into prayer because I don't believe or can't remember that it really makes any difference.