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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Curiosity is essential to growth.A little curiosity moves us deeper into the lives of the people around us.A little curiosity leads to opportunities we never knew existed. A little curiosity helps us understand our own strange emotions.A little curiosity, if focused on Jesus, will make us more like him.Pastor and spiritual director Casey Tygrett loves to ask questions. "There's a difficult line to walk between what we need to know and what falls into the realm of mystery," he writes. "Walking that line often wears on our nerves and causes incredible tension, and so we settle for easy answers. We stop asking questions. We give up. We begin to lose the one thing that fiercely energizes the transformation of our souls—something beautiful, poetic, joyful, and happily disruptive: curiosity.?When we make curiosity a spiritual practice, we open up to new ways of knowing God and knowing ourselves as well. Come and discover the power of asking questions.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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becoming
curious
A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE OF ASKING QUESTIONS
Foreword by James Bryan Smith
To Holley and the B,because we always play as a team.
And to everyone else on the journey of becoming.Journey on.
Contents
foreword
JAMES BRYAN SMITH
As I write this foreword, our home is in the middle of a massive renovation. The entire main floor has been taken down to the studs and is slowly being rebuilt. We live in an older home, and that usually means you run into a lot of surprises. We certainly have. Those surprises usually involve more costs and delaying the project. It certainly has. One evening, just as the workers were about to leave, I peered through an opening cut in the floor. Beneath it was a crawl space. I saw a reflection. I got a flashlight and looked down. There was water. I dropped a rock down and heard a plop. The water was four inches deep, in a crawl space of around 150 square feet. I felt a pit in my stomach. The worker said to me, “This isn’t good.” The foreman came over and walked me through ways to solve the problem. They all cost more money and would delay the project.
After he left, I walked around the entire main floor and stopped to look at everything that had gone wrong. With each pace my frustration increased. Over and over I muttered, “Why did we do this project? We should have listed it.” An hour later my wife, Meghan, came home. She had been gone a few days. I took her to the crawl space, and showed her the water. She calmly said, “Well, we just have to get it fixed.” Then she looked up to see the progress that had been made. The “open concept” was finally opened, and she could see what it was going to look like. She smiled and said, “Isn’t this beautiful?” I said, “No, it’s awful, and this whole project has been a disaster.” She disagreed.
“Remember the day we walked into this home? We both turned to each other and said, ‘My soul feels right in this house. Let’s make it our home.’ We love this home. Let’s keep on loving it.”
The next day I began reading this book.
By the time I had finished, something inside of me had changed: my attitude. I walked down to the main floor and looked at the space with new eyes. I was not upset or frustrated. I looked at every nook and cranny with curiosity and wonder. I saw possibilities, not problems. I wondered about the history of the home. I knew it was built in 1940. I thought about what life was like for the builders and for the family that first inhabited it. America had not yet entered WWII. I wondered if they were nervous about the state of the world, if they or someone they knew fought in the war. Having thought about the past, I began to think about our future in this house.
I walked into each space with curiosity about the future. What conversations would be held here? I imagined the space filled with laughter, the smells of delicious food, and quiet evenings by the fireplace. I imagined one day meeting my children’s future spouses, and my future grandchildren coming into this space. I imagined them saying, “Wow, this is beautiful!” The place was transfigured. I was on sacred ground. I could feel it. I smiled.
I love it when I read those rare books that forever change you. For me, some of those books include C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy, St. Teresa’s Interior Castle, and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Love Alone Is Credible. The one in your hands is now added to the list. It disarmed me. It humbled me. It exposed the absurdity of need for control, and created a longing in me to become as a child on Christmas morning or at Disney World. It reminded me that Christianity is not about dogma or doctrine or rules. Christianity is based on a magnificent Story that we get to enter. It is about entering the true Magic Kingdom, an interactive life with the Author of the Story.
This book will teach you how to see the world with childlike wonder, give you boldness to ask God for what you want, confirm your identity in Christ, and help you see the why of your life, not just the what and the how. It will help you to see others in a new way, to embrace even your failures, to rewire the way you think about rituals, and to increase your ability to forgive and to raise questions. But what I most want to say to you is this: let this book help you to embrace the gift of curiosity.
Casey Tygrett is a fine man, passionate pastor, and a very good writer. This book had the power to lift my spirit in the midst of discouraging circumstances. It reminded me that I need to let go of my expectations, my plans, and my desires in order to see the world afresh and aglow with the grandeur of God. So I commend the wise purchase of this book, and I leave you with a benediction written by Larry Hein:
May all your expectations be frustrated.
May all your plans be thwarted.
May all your desires be withered into nothingness.
That you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing, dance, and trust in the love of God who is Father, Son, and Spirit.
Amen.
introduction
THE GIFT
He has been waiting all year for this very moment.
The cold of the house is strong, the light-streaked wood floors creaking with every step as a little boy creeps toward the warm light of the family room.
Put this boy (or girl)—wrinkled pajamas and reddened cheeks—in your mind. Remember when you were there, aching for what you think you know, but don’t know. Remember all the assumptions, desires, hopes, and fears of all the years that would hopefully be met under the tree that day.
To be sure, Christmas morning comes differently to children.
Children come wide open and breathless, while adults are grasping for the coffee and cameras, handling all the details. Children dive foolishly into the packages as if no one is watching. Adults look for a trash bag, trying to bring order out of the chaos. Kids give little thought to what their flourish looks like to others, they only hope for what might be waiting.
They want to know. They want to tear through that paper and satisfy their curiosity.
What will it be like?
What will it feel like to hold it?
Will it be everything I hoped?
The child pulls back the papery veil and sees the gift, eyes twitching with the realization that what he had wondered and curiously considered for all the days prior was now, ironically, present. The gift had been chosen—carefully and specifically for him—the tags cut off, gift receipts stashed away in a drawer in the off chance that it wasn’t the right color or size. This gift, this day, there is no need for returns. The gift fits the anticipation and desire, and so the boy begins to glow.
Suddenly, the moment is alive with potential: What can I do with this now?
From Christmas to Crossroads
In every country, in every place, a gift says you are loved and valued. A gift reaffirms your place as worthy of grace, worthy of gratuity. You are worthy to be received and loved at the core of your being. This is true of God’s gifts to us as well.
The gifts of God seem relatively easy to find in the pages of Scripture: gifts like grace in spite of our performance (Romans 5:15), a life with the scent of eternity (Romans 6:23), skills and abilities that give divine texture to our world (1 Corinthians 2:12), and even our specific purpose for walking in the world (1 Timothy 4:14).
Finding the gifts is easy, but it’s the next question that matters most: What changes in my everyday life—in the very contours of my soul—when I hold these gifts, feeling them light yet strong in my hands?
In the pages of this book I have one particular gift from God I want to offer to you. It is wrapped and somewhat hidden, causing us to tilt our heads like a Labrador retriever when we gaze at it. It waits for our courage—our spiritual bravery—to take it by the sides and begin to tear the thin paper at the edges.
It is the spiritual practice of becoming curious.
Why the Gift of Curiosity?
There’s a difficult line to walk between what we need to know and what falls into the realm of mystery. Walking that line often wears on our nerves and causes incredible tension, and so we settle for easy answers. We stop asking questions. We give up. We begin to lose the one thing that fiercely energizes the transformation of our souls—something beautiful, poetic, joyful, and happily disruptive: curiosity.
Curiosity is essential to movement in our lives.
A little curiosity moves us deeper into the lives of our children and friends.
A little curiosity helps us understand strange emotions and where they are coming from.
A little curiosity helps us find opportunities and graces for life we never knew existed.
A little curiosity, especially when we’re chasing Jesus, will shape and form us into the person he calls us to be.
We have to learn to be curious again in our journey with Jesus.
For me, curiosity hasn’t always been a welcome companion. For a pastor and teacher, typically the emphasis is on expertise—the goal of belief and faith is knowledge and the dispersion of that knowledge to others. Pastors or teachers who receive glowing reviews usually do so because they always had the right word to say or knew what someone needed to hear. They had some kind of advanced understanding, and that understanding made them good, great, or amazing, depending on the situation.
When we combine seminaries that often take an academic approach to Scripture through Enlightenment educational theory with the somewhat militant approach evangelical Christianity has taken to apologetics, it’s not hard to see how curiosity gets moved to the margins.
Questions and curiosities, especially those we can’t nail down, are signs of weakness in a debate. God says it, we believe it, and that settles it—no questions asked.
I was mentored in this kind of faith: the path of answering people’s questions and being the “wise sage.” Then I started failing at sagehood, and it began to tear away at my soul.
But what if there wasn’t a big fish who swallowed Jonah?
What about all that violence in the Old Testament?
Why is Jesus so different from Paul?
Is there space to believe, even with these questions?
If I couldn’t be “right” or at least have all these questions buttoned up, then what was the state of my soul? I began to discover that as we walk in skin we eventually find that the moment we believe we are standing firm, the wind begins to howl, threatening our equilibrium. Not the dark night of the soul, per se, but more like the falling dusk of uncertainty.
As I began to engage my own curiosity in following Jesus, I encountered questions in myself, my friends, and our community that I could not answer. Instead of rushing to end the suspense, I found instead that the deep yearning of my spirit was actually to leave them unanswered. It felt counterintuitive, counterproductive. There had to be a different way, but to chase it would be to go back on everything I had already learned.
A Question of Change
The other gift that came into my life around this time was the gift of change. Aging, growing in a bit of wisdom as I tried to cultivate space for the living and radical Jesus in my comings and goings, I saw my convictions begin to change. Slowly, I learned that for God to grant new mercies every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23) my soul had to take the shape of an explorer—a daily searcher coming to know old things in a new way.
It takes discipline to live like that, and a deep trust that Jesus guides and directs even when the wind of change is swirling in our spirits. As I lived, taught others, and engaged in spiritual conversations, I began to think, What if my best answer to someone’s question regarding God or faith is to ask another question, the one just below the surface?
I now imagine Jesus replying, “Yes, precisely.”
Becoming curious then is a process of change, of return—going back to the fundamentals of our own lives and existence. Seth Godin says that becoming curious is “more about a five-, ten- or fifteen-year process1 where you start finding your voice, and finally you begin to realize that the safest thing you can do feels risky and the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe.”
Curiosity is not for the faint-hearted; it is for the God-haunted and restless spirits dying for the water just below the surface of earthly certainty.
Is it possible that if we take this path, pursuing curiosity through Jesus, we may find that instead of walking a straight line this pilgrimage with God is actually a tight and imperceptible spiral that brings us back around to the beginning only to learn new things again?
Curious, isn’t it? That is my hope for this book. To ignite our minds with possibilities. What if Jesus actually wanted us to grow and deepen in our curiosity, more than our certainty or our knowledge of facts and data?
More than that, what if Jesus himself instigated the chase after questions like some sort of wise and loving prankster, planting little explosive ideas that when they combusted produced fruit and not fractures? What would it look like for us to create space—practice a spiritual discipline daily or weekly—where we gave ourselves permission to not know and to simply ask things of Jesus?
What to Expect
This book is meant to be a conversation, taking a look at the questions surrounding Jesus with an eye toward how they change us, shaping our souls for authentic living in a world where certainty comes and goes like the weather. As Michael Hidalgo says, “God is the same yesterday, today and forever but yesterday and today are not the same at all.” The world is constantly changing, and so the way we walk with Jesus in a changing world is open to change as well.
As I started writing this book I began the practice of keeping a questions journal. I have to confess that I didn’t keep up with the journal for a consecutive period of days; some days were more fruitful than others, however the purpose was to force myself to deal with the kind of questions that were pressing at that very moment. I am surprised even now to go back and read some of the entries.
During the time when I was writing that journal, our congregation experienced two devastating events: we lost a young, newlywed woman, and our friends’ daughter was rushed to the pediatric ICU in Orlando, Florida, for what would be the beginning of a seventy-day hospital experience. Peppered among the queries that arose during these two deeply challenging moments were garden-variety doubts and uncertainties about God and the darkness in my own mind about death, curiosity about writing and vocation, as well as musings about my relationships. In other words, when we open the door to questions and curiosity, things flow out that we don’t expect.
At the end of each chapter you’ll have a chance to engage the discipline of curiosity by using your own questions journal. The habit and practice of writing down your own curious questions as you read through the reflections on the questions of Jesus will stoke the fires of curiosity in your own life. I hope this practice will get us into the habit of asking good and beautiful questions rather than passively settling for someone else’s certainty or faking our own certainty when it becomes a thin paper sheath over our hearts and minds.
Before we go any further, there are three distinct gifts that I pray this book will give you as you read.
The Gift of Permission
Imagine that you’ve just started a new job. You don’t know much about your boss other than what your coworkers have said in passing, but you do know you want to keep this job as long as possible. Sometime in the first few weeks, you figure out that your boss made a huge mistake that could reflect badly on you. What do you do? Do you go to your boss and bring this up? How will the boss react? What will be the consequences? Should you unpack those boxes of supplies or keep them handy in case you’re shown the door?
Too often this is our picture of God. Therefore, to ask questions or to pose challenges seems out of line, disobedient, or disrespectful. And we’re afraid to get a comeback from God much like Job did: “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?” (Job 40:2).
If God doesn’t want our challenges or questions, then we’ll need to stop reading (and I’ll stop writing) right now. We can also cut most of the psalms out of our Bibles. After that, the challenge becomes: Where else do we take these concerns, questions, uncertainties, and cloudiness? Is it possible that the curiosities the Bible poses are invitations to bring our own curiosities to the text?
If we see anything in Jesus, it is both the permission and the invitation to bring our questions and uncertainties to him—to sit with them together, to meditate and examine in the presence of One who loves us and holds us up. The hope is that questions from the mouth of Jesus himself will give you the permission to ask what has been haunting you, occupying your thoughts and feelings.
The Gift of Tension
Jesus told his disciples, “[your Father in heaven] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45 NRSV). You could have heard the crickets chirping for miles after Jesus said this.
How could God give rain—the thing that makes crops grow and gives life to a people who are living off the land—to those who are not righteous? How could he give the beautiful sun to those who are evil? These are beautiful, curious questions. For a time and space like today where we are overwhelmed by sound bites and talking heads, we need these kinds of questions because they introduce the gift of tension.
Tension means2, “being held in a state between two or more forces which are acting in opposition to each other.” Tension is when a good God gives bad, evil, unrighteous farmers the rain and sun they need. Tension makes us think. Tension makes us ask questions. Tension erases the boundaries between us and them, because with God everyone is part of the “us.”
Tension is a huge part of curiosity because asking a question throws open a multitude of possibilities, both known and unknown. As we’ll see later, this is precisely the kind of tension involved in discovering the kingdom Jesus so often proclaimed. We instead confess that someone else might have the answer, or at least we’re willing to put our long-held assumption under the microscope and curiously examine it to see what God may have to say.
Frankly, we don’t like tension. We like uncertainty even less, and as a matter of fact we see uncertainty as a hidden sin, a dark and sinister root that will destroy us. We ignore that Jesus consistently and compassionately cultivates tension. He asks questions and then doesn’t answer them, feeding uncertainty. Perhaps Jesus isn’t as scared of the sinister root as we are. Maybe he knows something we don’t.
The point is that the reflections and questions in this book may cause you to feel tension. They may question texts that you have long since made up your mind about. Please sit for a moment, prayerfully and quietly, with that tension. Don’t abandon it right off the bat. Tension can be good. Besides, tension is the smoke from curiosity’s fire; where you find one, there is always the other.
The Gift of Rest
As a pastor and follower of Jesus, I find that the further I go the more questions I have. With seminary degrees and solid Bible study tools, I still find myself wrestling with the questions and actions of the mysterious Messiah of the Bible. Perhaps you are there too. Perhaps you’ve felt exhausted by the curiosity, exhausted by trying to lift “clear texts” out of Scripture and apply them to the present shifting moments without the least bit of tension or challenge.
Perhaps you’re feeling led to a worship style, community, or doctrinal position that was at one point out of the question and even evil to you. I understand, I’ve been there. And, frankly, as I write this sentence I am there.
I believe Jesus’ response to us is “rest.” Take the comforting words of Jesus to “find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29) and realize that the same Jesus who calls to comfort also catalyzes our curiosity with his very words and actions.
So let your curiosity be a good thing, a blessing, even if it doesn’t feel good to you at the moment. Be content in it, knowing that these trials are the things that shape us more than anything else in the world (see Romans 5:3-5).
If we rest with the curious rabbi Jesus, who asked more questions than he answered, I believe we will walk forward in wisdom when our fellow travelers have lost their way.
And now, the first question: Are you curious?
Then let’s begin.
CHAPTER ONE
why curiosity matters
When trees are waving wildly in the wind, one group of people thinks that it is the wind that moves the trees; the other group thinks that the motion of the trees creates the wind.
Why are we often uneasy with curiosity?
What is so troubling about our curiosities, our questions? What about our wondering, pondering, and investigating? Aren’t they very normal pieces of our everyday life?
Every day we are alive, every breathing moment, we are asking questions. Some of these daily questions are settled to a certain extent, answered, and we move on. Sometimes we leave them and move on out of frustration. Then, the day ends and we revisit the questions again. Afresh. Anew.
What will happen today?
What will come of this conversation, this meeting, this unending series of challenges?
Why am I wrestling again with the same challenges and destructive habits?
Am I really loved and accepted by those around me?
What can I do to make up for wounding that person in my life?
While working on this book I was also exchanging emails with a friend who had many questions about this journey of faith. She had questions about the Bible, about how all of the things that Christian traditions claim could possibly be true, and about the very interesting relationship between the God of the Old Testament and the Jesus of the New.
They do seem strikingly different, don’t they?
When I mentioned that I was writing a book about spiritual formation and curiosity, she asked that I remember that curiosity is also a way of dealing with doubt.
Yes. However, I wonder if sometimes doubt—doubt that troubles the faithful and even disconnects people from a journey of faith—is simply curiosity cast as a villain? Where else do we find the language to process doubt, mystery, struggle, and even uncertainty if we have no space for curiosity?
Doubt can be wonder, exploration, or the engagement of a God-wired brain in its highest gear. How can something we’re wired to do become antithetical to being faithful rather than the sweetness and energy of faith itself? Why do Christian communities attach fault or failure to strong currents of curiosity?
The reality is that curiosity does not have a favorable track record in the history of Christian tradition. The church throughout history has responded to curiosity in ways that make us cringe today.
Galileo curiously questioned the earth’s position in the galaxy, and his answer was threats of execution.
Martin Luther wondered what repentance really meant—whether it was the prescription for a set of rituals or a movement of mind and heart—and he was put on trial.
Jesus asked . . .
What did Jesus ask?
I believe this question is the key to curiosity having a chance to shape and form us in our journey with Jesus. If spiritual formation is going to have any impact on how we live our daily lives, it has to reveal Jesus as one who gives space to the curious questions of we pilgrims.
The whole discussion starts with an announcement: Jesus’ first great announcement, to be specific.
The Big Picture
First words are important.
The first thing you say when you go on a date can make or break the future of the relationship.
My wife will tell you that our first date was, to be mild, underwhelming. We went to a mediocre restaurant, she had to pay because I had no financial resources at the time, and the meal included chicken fingers. Yes, fried chicken fingers.
Not exactly The Notebook.
Thankfully she stuck with me, but if she’d had higher expectations for that night or if she had only a mild interest in being with me, we likely would have gone our separate ways. First things are fragile, and first words can be dangerous.
Jesus’ first impression was unique because it came in the form of a bold and ambitious announcement: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 3:2).
For much of my life, and perhaps yours, the word repent has come across with a pointed finger and a disgusted scowl, as if Jesus has “had it up to here” with me. I can’t hear the word repent without thinking of fire-and-brimstone preachers from my past using it like a verbal meat cleaver to separate sinners from their wayward paths.
If we ask a few questions and listen to what’s behind the word repent, a few things start to appear. For example, the audience for Jesus’ teaching on repentance was largely Jewish, people who already were technically God’s people.
How do you repent when you’re already part of the fabric of God’s great tapestry? This is why it was so troubling for me to hear the command “repent” as a teenager in the middle of the sweltering heat of a summer revival service. I was certain I had covered that ground already.
The people Jesus spoke to weren’t surprised either. Prophets had been saying for years that the people of God must turn from worshiping wood-and-stone gods and instead would trust him to make good on his promise.
Jesus was doing something different though.
The Invitation
A few months ago I was on an airplane, and since everything I had brought to occupy myself on the flight required an electronic device, I had some time on my hands as we went nose-first into the clouds.
I pulled out the in-flight magazine and noticed an ad that said, “Fly [airline].”
Maybe I’m the only one who reads things this way, but I noticed that it was phrased as a command. English-language experts will say this sentence is in the imperative voice. That’s the command voice. That’s the “parent” voice, if we’re talking to our children.
Look both ways.
Eat your veggies.
Get out of the cookie dough.
When Jesus says “repent,” it sounds a lot like “parent” voice. If you look at the original Greek word, bingo, it appears Jesus is going into Dad mode.
Imperative.
Repent.
I’m not asking, I’m telling you.
So back to the in-flight magazine: Should I have felt like the airline was giving me a command from on high? Honestly, I was already on that particular airline’s plane, so I didn’t need to be ordered around. Who did they think they were? But the thought occurred to me: Why don’t I feel like someone’s ordering me around when I read this?
The reason is that sometimes the imperative is a command, and sometimes it’s an invitation.
It takes some curiosity to unravel whether we’re hearing a direct command or an invitation because the line between the two isn’t always stark and clean. But what if there is something deep and good in finding that difference?
Or, if we really want to stir things up, what if all of Jesus’ imperatives are invitations? If people are already seeking God, walking with him in whatever way they may find, then what happens when they hear “repent” as an invitation and not a command?
What if “repent” is actually the embossed invitation to a grand meal spread on a majestic table?
What if “repent” is the key to us walking backwards into our own story of trial, faith, and doubt, and seeing it all differently for the first time?
What if “repent” is not about the threat of hell or damnation, but instead it is the call to be formed differently?
What if “repent” means we see every teaching and action of Jesus as an invitation, and learn to ask question upon question about what that looks like in our story today?
What if “repent” is learning how to see the damp cloak of doubt as curiosity in disguise?
To repent means “a change of mind.” The word both in Hebrew and in Greek affects thought and action—they are “head and hand” words. Literally, they mean to “turn one’s head” and “return” to where you’ve come from. Repentance then is both a once and a daily move of our whole soul toward God. It is a learning, unlearning, and relearning kind of journey.
If we read Jesus’ great announcement in this light, it sounds like this: “Come and think about things differently, because God’s plan and desires are coming to life right now.”
What can ordinary people do with that?
Converting Again and Again
The work and movement of God in ordinary people, the way we follow Jesus every moment of every day, is the great project of creating space for God to get his way in us. It surprises us and reimagines the way we see everything: from church to politics to sex to our social media presence.
That’s why he began with repent. Rethink. Reimagine. Relearn.
In Jesus’ time this relearning process was a necessity. Jesus’ walking in the world was a way of reimagining everything. The Jewish religious leaders and their people had expectations based on the wise texts of their ancestors who had also walked with God.
There would be a kingdom. A King. A new temple would be built, and a people would be brought back together under the Jewish law, the rich and holy instructions of God.
There would be peace, yes, far-reaching peace. The vicious Romans who occupied the land would be, ahem, moved off, and there would finally be safety and prosperity.
The vision of this kind of kingdom is what most of us live with every day, with or without Jesus. We transpose this vision onto what we believe about God, or we may take the mantle of “king” on ourselves and then forge our way toward peace, safety, and security on our own “lands.” We are built for a kingdom, one way or the other.
We build our territory, our castle, and our treasure, and eventually we find out that being king is both exhausting and beyond our pay grade.
There are too many questions for us to answer, so we get lost in the details. Or we settle for the easy and pragmatic answers and attempt to take the world by force.
In either case, we are far from what Jesus had in mind for the kingdom. He was a king, yes, but one with a very different vision of the kingdom. Could he in fact be the King if he had a different way of fulfilling the kingdom?
Could it be a kingdom of generosity instead of accumulation?
Could it be a kingdom made up of both those we’d put on the guest list and those we’d refuse to associate with?
Could it be a kingdom that both lives within national borders and has a worldwide influence?
Repenting Through Questions
To live in that kingdom would require something to shift in people. It would require our hearts, minds, and hands to be shaped for different work even within the glorious and grotesque circumstances we live in.
The kingdom requires new, curious questions.
We can’t simply think the same and act differently. No, Jesus’ invitation to repent is essential to shaping our lives for a way of living an old-kingdom promise with a new-world script.
What if Jesus’ vision of the kingdom had to be run through the strainer created by years of our wandering and self-reliance? What if the way the kingdom of God explodes into our lives actually respects the little details of what has happened in our lives up to this point? He may choose to redeem them, to remove them, to take them like a potter pulls misshapen clay off of the wheel and begin to reshape them into something new.
In either story, ours or the people of Israel’s, there is a need to ask some new questions and cultivate a new vision based on what is happening now and what glorious possibilities may come in the future.
Jesus, and now his Spirit that lives within us (John 14:17, 25), longs to shape us for a world within a world, and it is one that requires rediscovering our curiosity.
Why do I believe this?
