Me and Jesus: Back to Square One!

I rarely write more than one post a month...err, well, okay, lately its been one a day. But, today, I've had some questions and thoughts on my mind that I thought I would just air out here. My wife needs a break!

Recently, I have found myself coming full circle; not becoming an evangelical fundamentalist again, God forbid! Ha! But, I am beginning to realize that much of what I've learned, read, and done over the years has made me a cynic and as such, it has essentially reduced what God that was left within to a mere intellectual pursuit. Now, I'm not happy with that, never have been, and never will be. The God I met as a child was a vibrant, living God who parted seas and made mountains quake. A God who could cause axe heads to float, valleys of dry bones to become armies of living breathing men. A God who healed, loved, and died for me (personally) and then rose from the dead. That was the God that I was introduced too.

Of course, then life happened. You leave the haven of study and you enter the ministry with all these grandiose ideas and before you know it, life is sucked out of you and you have to do something with all those things that you truly believed but didn't see when you needed it the most. Is it all myth? I mean, is the Jesus of the gospels the construction of 2000 years of church doctrine? Really, is the church that good? With its controversies, arguments, theological schools of thought. Could it really of created a Jesus as vibrant and living as the one we see today walking across the pages of the New Testament scriptures?

Are Jewish beliefs so intertwined with myth and such that their very reliability is tainted so badly that we can not know from one page to another if we're reading history or myth? I can't answer these questions today. All I can say is that for reasons outside my control, at forty-one years of age, I am not any more happy with a cynical faith than I was with a fundamentalist one. So, for me, I am starting over.

What does that mean? Does that mean that I lay aside all the critical thinking skills that I've developed over the years? No, not necessarily. What it does mean is that I have to find God/Jesus for me. Not Borg's, as much as I love him. Not, N. T. Wright's Jesus; no, time has come for me to go back to square one and find out who He is. And, personally, I am not afraid of what I might find. I know that He can speak for Himself. So, I've laid aside, for now, the books and the literature and all the things that I comforted myself with when I truly lost my faith. And I go back to where it all began, to an altar, where the only two things I knew were this: His name, and that He was. From there, who knows where we'll end up!