My friend Jessica is a gift beyond what I could have imagined. We have a shocking amount in common, not in surface interests, but in deeper personality quirks. Like our mild love of chaos, and ambivalence that muddies our parenting consistently, and an easy acceptance of our own unpopularity. We struggle with so many of the same things, even dark moods, yet I have learned so much from her simply because she’s so rooted in the Bible. It’s given me incredible hope in overcoming my own weaknesses just to know her. The surprising thing is that she’s the pastor’s wife, and God is using her redeemed imperfections to help me learn to trust human leadership again.
God is healing my heart in huge ways through a simple friendship with Jessica and Scott. They completely counter every awful stereotype and resistance I have built up to pastors over the past several years. They’ve breached the walls in my heart with ease, just by being the gentle, earthy people that they are. I can’t tell you how thankful I am for this breakthrough.
Chris took us to Campus Church, because we wanted to make university connections, and find a local community when we thought we’d be without a car. I never would have guessed I could become such an excited college student myself again! I feel 20 years younger! The church community we’ve found here is solidly grounded in the Bible, and more gentle than any I’ve encountered. Their attitude towards the Word of God is so inviting, because they are such gentle, child-like students themselves.
The truth is, I’ve had a lot of questions, not just with the church, but with the Bible, brewing for some time. But I haven’t been in a place where I could trust anyone in authority, except Jesus himself, for years. Many things in the Old Testament just don’t sound like the Jesus I know. Many church leaders in America haven’t either. And many people in the church seem to have such easy answers to every question, when it doesn’t feel so easy to me. So I’ve been really wrestling with realities of corruption and beginning to wonder how much men have corrupted the Bible, if they’re corrupting the church before my eyes.
I’ve never walked away from the Bible, or really mistrusted it. Jesus’ words in the Gospels have been my greatest comfort through a very dark season. I felt like I could trust them because of what they say. There is no gain to be made by anyone seeking power in the Gospels themselves. Jesus’ words often condemned those who were abusing power. His love for the outcast and oppressed is so genuine and fierce. So, for me, there is no one more trustworthy than Jesus, because of the life he lived, and offered. Jesus clearly laid down his glory and power and calls anyone who would follow him to do the same. So in all my doubting my heart has still been crying, “where else would I go? You have the Words of eternal life.”
Scott gave a talk last week about how we got our Bibles. Literally, what old manuscripts we have from different centuries, and how people are still working hard at translating and studying them. He showed us some of the things scholars debate over, and how challenging translation into other languages can be. It really helped me to face the reality of how messy and human the whole process has been for centuries.
Interestingly, Scott threw in some comparisons with the Islamic beliefs about the Quran. They believe the Quran was dictated by an angel and is literary perfection itself. There is no study of textual history, because they believe no errors or variants exist. And translations to other languages are not considered the Quran. This struck me as quite a contrast, a different attitude towards our holy books.
But then Scott shared a very helpful insight that I want to share word for word:
“Jesus Christ, the divine Word of the Father, became fully human, showing that our humanity is not a barrier to God’s self-revelation.”
This is so exciting to me, that God delights in working through fallible humans, through our passion and sweat and tears, in spite of our sinfulness. Just as He delighted to come into this fallen, messy world as a man Himself. Our humanity is not a barrier to God’s self-revelation, it is how He delights to work. This gives me great confidence in God’s ability to speak through the Bible as His written Word, once more.
It also helps explain why I have been so thankful for The Message paraphrase of the Bible through this hard season of raising babies and feeling so distanced from church. I think it helped bring it alive for me that I could see this man, Eugene Peterson, who was alive at the same time as me. I could get to know him a bit through his writing. As a writer I could sense the effort and joy and love he put into the process of making the Bible more accessible to people like me, who were sleep deprived, or discouraged for whatever reason. It’s true that it is someone else’s interpretation, a cross between the Bible and a sermon. But I have been thankful for the humanness and interpretation through the hard season I’m coming out of. And I am thankful that I’m at a place now where my brain is firing a bit more and I want to engage with other, more challenging translations.
My friend Mackenzie has been sending out a schedule to read through the Bible in a year, so I’ve been immersed in the Old Testament since we got here. When I was wrestling with Leviticus Jessica gently helped me take a step back and look at both the mystery of all that we don’t understand about the culture of this era, as well as the big picture context of the whole Bible. She lent me a book, Gospel and Kingdom, by Graeme Goldsworthy that’s been very helpful with big picture context. It spells out how each part of the Bible reveals its part of the story of salvation, which is, essentially, God bringing about His Kingdom through the Gospel.
One thing I am realizing is that, though I claimed to trust Jesus completely, I was devaluing Jesus’ own words about the importance of the Old Testament. In distancing myself from it, I became nothing more than a critic. In reality, I was worshiping my own ideas about Jesus, that were growing narrow and distorted, as so often happens when we are isolated. Now I am thankful to be reading it afresh, hungry to accept God on His terms, not mine. And thankful to be in this humble community.
My women’s bible study back in Eau Claire knows how deeply I’ve been longing to find a community that is really serious about the Bible. I am rather amused by how thoroughly God has answered this prayer beyond my wildest dreams, both in Australia and here. It’s been more challenging than I bargained for, to be sure. But slowly God is changing me from a hardened critic back into a child-like student, through the love of real people.