Thursday, May 18, 2006


I'm just a man, I'm not a Tarzan for lions, Gorillas an Snakes
(from the song “Please Don’t Send me to Africa”)

Here's my two week update that has very little to do with my actual amazing Africa experience, and yet everything to do with it. I have 64 pages in my journal. Here is one of them.

My faith is an interesting thing, and it amuses me to observe it in action. Right now, it is telling me that God is flexible. Has that trait ever been ascribed to God before? I doubt it. But really, he is; he can speak the language of every people group, he can answer the questions of every world view, he can speak truth into the various circumstances of each individual heart. A God who could only bend very little wouldn't be able to do that.

The universe is a dance. I don't think that is an uncommon metaphor. If God is a principle player within that dance (surely he could be the stage manager, or choreographer; more likely he is the bug in the pants of the dancers who tickles them into movement in the first place), then he is the most flexible of dancers. A good dancer can powerfully contort themselves into any position with grace, yet they are still the same dancer with the same style, energy. (Forgive my spelling on the dance terms, its been years since I've had to take a ballet spelling test. Ask a dancer what the terms mean). God can arabesque and point enlightened deists to his powerful work even now in creation, so they can see his outstretched arm at one end of creation as the prime mover, and they can see his leg outstretched in the other direction, and realize that it is pointing and directing humanity's present and future. God can triple pirouette and pull into the spin and flow of his grace the Easter thinkers, drawn by the all-encompassing embrace of his rhythmic turn, so that they too begin to dance in his embrace. He can leap into the air and pull the exuberant African worshippers with him to a new dimension of earthly experience, as charisma takes them in a grand jeté toward the divine. His balance's can even steady the balance of my ever wavering and wandering faith.

Mary