Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Crawdad Christianity
When I was a little boy my parents moved us from a suburb of Chicago to Golconda, IL, we lived outside of the small town in the middle of a several hundred acre farm. We only lived there a couple years and returned back to the Chicago area, but one of my memories is a trip to the Dixon Springs State Park, where we ran through the woods, waded in the creek and looked for crawdads. One of the interesting things about crawdads is that they back into their future, going backwards as they attempt to go forward, a strange concept if you ask me. It seems to me that this is what many Christians do as well. As progressive as we want to be, as aggressive as we attempt to become, there is something it seems within us that wants to go forward while holding on to where we've been. It reminds me of the story of the Transfiguration, Jesus meets the past in preparation for the future, His meeting with Elijah and Moses spur the sleepy disciples to build churches and to memorialize the setting rather than learning from the opportunity and stepping into the future. Yesterday was a great day, it provided a foundation and some incredible opportunities, today is a great day, we live in the present, serving a right now God and living a now faith is life. Tomorrow will become today, if we are willing to step into it! Stepping into the future means that we take what yesterday provided, learning from it and building on it, and then we press into the future, enjoying the journey, appreciating what today holds...refusing to back into tomorrow without seeing where we're going. The life of faith is not blindness, it's seeing into the invisible and believing for the impossible!