I am EVE

2006-06-01T11:04:00.000-07:00

Too long has passed since I have been active on my blog and for that I apologize. However, I wanted to share some writing that has come out of my recent reflecting and soul searching, and I'd love to hear any comments that you all may have in response.

I am EVE. The things I want to know are strictly forbidden, and while I know that my curiosity is the very thing that unraveled the human race, the sullen despondency that replaces it does little to cure the moral rot that has been in motion for thousands of years. I think of the counselor's creed or the doctor's motto: "Above all do no harm," and I find it cripples me. If I am to do no harm then I must cease to exist - or at least refrain from action because my knowledge is too limited to know if, when, where, how, or whom I am harming with the unending chain of interconnected events that my smallest interactions may spark.
Many therapists believe that awareness in and of itself is curative, and perhaps it is a step on the path to healing. However, awareness does not change the course of events - it simply allows us to feel the weight of our responsibility in this ceaseless cycle of doom. There is nothing that any of us can do to save ourselves. Though we may insulate ourselves from the repercussions of decaying humanity, awareness of that fact burdens us with the heavier weight of knowing that we have allowed others to carry the burden of our selfish sin. In the long run our responsibility will be heavier than the weight of those who toiled unaware with the daily burden of our cast off consequences.
I turn to the scripture as I have learned to do because it speaks so definitively of mysteries that are too huge to fathom. "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the opressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?" (Isaiah 58: 7-8) Isaiah 58 is the chapter that I hope will sum up my life at the end of my days - and yet nowhere does it guarantee that I will do no harm. What it speaks of instead is action - the repercussions of which there is no guarantee other than God's promise: "if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail." (ch58v10-11)
In this blessed scripture, I am not responsible for how the mystery plays out or who is deserving of help and who has caused their own demise - all I must do is believe the Lord's promises and act accordingly: "Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry and He will say, 'Here I am.' If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness." (ch58v9)
How often have we learned as Christians to point the finger before stepping in to help. How much do we as counselors all advise each other to be mindful of our boundaries in order to avoid harm - and yet in this day of counseling and psychiatry we have more mental illness, emotional sickness, and moral poverty than ever before. How healing are our tacit boundaries? Have we done no harm, or have we simply done nothing at all?
All of this to say that we are rotting bodies with decaying morals, wayward hearts, unruly wills, and death in our future. When we share our bread with the hungry to the point of experiencing hunger pains ourselves, we will not be so pretty anymore. Then we may be tempted to call our efforts a failure and insulate for ourselves again a palace of wealth and peace, but it is when we are hungry that we should believe the Lord's promises to make us like watered gardens. And it is when we are hungry that we are reminded of our common humanity. It is also then that we are perhaps most cognisant of our own sin. While our full bellies easily condemn a brother of theft, our empty stomachs are busy contriving theivery.
Is the goal then to be continually hungry and breaking the law so as to avoid sitting in judgement? Certainly not! However, neither can we base our security in our posession of plenty to the point that we are afraid to confront our humanity in the face of want. In plenty and in want we are sinful. Yet we are afraid - I am afraid - of confronting myself in want, not so much because of the uncomfortability of being hungry, but because of the sin that will be exposed in my heart if I do not have the means to cover it nicely over.
Thus I am truly not suggesting that we ditch all boundaries or live permissively. I am simply asking that we live honestly in recognition of the sin that hides in all of our hearts. Sin that, though it remains hidden from our sight by the comforts of our insulation, is none-the-less apparent to God.
I, for one, want to be a woman of action. I want to be a woman of faith. I want to be a woman who is not held in fear of what sin may be exposed in my heart. I want instead to be a woman who believes that Christ has paid the price for my sin thereby setting me free to face the reality of my heart's condition from day to day, in plenty and in want. I want to be a woman who lives with the goal of feeding the hungry rather than the goal of never going hungry myself. I want to be a woman who does not hide myself from my own flesh, but lives instead with the conviction that there is a savior for my flesh. I want to quit pretending that I am better than I am, and instead live in the truth that I am loved despite how bad I am. Then I am free to love others as they are, and together we are free to know ourselves and watch as our Savior transforms our hearts. I am EVE. My sin has been exposed and I have been cast from the garden. Yet I have a Savior who is daily renewing His mercies, redeeming my life, and has paid for my sin in full. Therefore I will not fear.

Removed From Us

2006-03-23T18:03:00.000-08:00

So I'm blogging now....
Isn't it amazing how living and dying happens in such close proximity of each other. Take St. Louis - some areas of downtown - on one side of the road are million dollar mansions while the other side of the road sports busted out windows on old brick buildings. The question there is which side is living and which side is dying. Even closer proximity - a family who lives in the same house - the young watch the old get older and more set in their ways while the old watch the young try to stay young and search for new ways. The question I guess pretty much stays the same - who is living and who is dying? Closer still - inside ourselves - we struggle to live. We strive for meaning, purpose, sensation, health, anything to remind us that we are alive. Yet death is crouching, growing, pouncing, and very much alive in the fight. So many times I ask myself which part of me is living and which part of me is dying?
Then I remember that verse that says unless a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die it can bare no fruit. What to make of it I have no clue. Similarly, if anyone loves his life he shall loose it, but if he gives up his life he shall live.... Riddles, I tell you. The impulse to live is so strong. Even suicide I dare say - as distorted as it is - couches some desire to live, a desire to live life unfettered by the death that accompanies it. Deep thoughts. I am so glad to be free to think them and write them and speak them. Where they shall take me I do not know, but it makes me feel alive to think them. Some may say that the feeling of being alive that comes from deep and even dark thoughts is actually no life and I should forsake the thinking of them - allow them to fall to the ground and die - in order to have any true life, and they may be right. But I also think that wheat, weather or not it likes it, dies when it falls to the ground. So too may my thoughts die on the page that in their reading there may be some newness of life.

One more thing, I titled this spot Removed from Us, and I think it may need a bit of explaination. There are a million applications of the title and I may explore different of them from time to time, but for tonight - my first entry - I will tell you where it comes from. It is a beautiful passage in Isaiah in which we are assured that as high as the heavens are above the earth, and as far as the east is from the west - so far has God removed our sins from us! I dare you to read that passage without either weeping or rejoicing. Much love to You all -
Your Friend,
Amy-Ruth Gregory