join the conversation

re-engaging WHOLENESS - the big story

January 11, 2010

Posted in: RESTORATION

Last night we stepped back into our journey through the Big Story. Our purpose has been to venture into the waters of the Bible as Story. For months now we’ve been challenging the idea that the all to prevalent “version” of the God Story is told as a kind of cliff-notes summation of the Story. If we are to bottom line the importance—it would often be FALL - you are jacked, broken, no good; followed by REDEMPTION - get unjacked and receive the promise of eternal life with God. This is the story so many have heard, told, and understood God to be authoring.

But it’s simply the anemic version of the story. It’s limited. Therefore, it feeds an entirely anemic picture of God, creation, and life as we know it.

This blog will be a location to continue to build on our view of full Story—and let’s be honest, any way that we write it will still be a limited version.  So humility must be put on.  We are on a journey—and we’ll rework this as long as we are breathing, I pray.

Also, God and His Story is too wonderful for full explaination on the digital pages of this or any blog—too wide sweeping for any category that you or I feel comfortable with—and to real-world experiential to be bound by language and thought. But we’ll try to do our best. And we’ll use many great minds, many controversial explainations, many people far ahead of us to quote and build upon. We’ll be processing the story in the midst of silence/surrendering/centering prayer, ancient readings, imaginative/ignatian meditations, and many other practices that tenderize our heart/mind/soul/body to be AWARE of God.  We’ll allow HOSPITALITY and SOLIDARITY to/among the poor, the creative, the hurting, and those living with a deep sense of “there must be more” to also shape our AWARENESS of God.  We’ll be living out our context—our “wiki-stories” (Scot McKnight describes) as God’s Story in us. The context in which we work out our understanding of The Big Story is unique–and if we cannot work it out in our day-to-day ordinary (yet soaked with sacredness) lives—then we won’t truly see His Story as ongoing.  It will be merely bound by pages–and we’re back to a far too limited version.

But, before moving ahead—last night, we broached some questions—they became telling of our location in the journey, as a community, to our willingness to be open to a larger story, one that begins and ends with greater implication than FALL/REDEMPTION. The Story we are wrestling with includes CREATION / FALL / REDEMPTION / RESTORATION. These are the questions we engaged:

* Which story looks like the one God is telling?
FALL - REDEMPTION
 or CREATION - FALL - REDEMPTION - RESTORATION

* What Lens are you looking at life through (F/R or C/F/R/R)?

* What can you imagine the difference to look like in seeing our world through 
 F/R or through a lens of CFRR?

* Is the “choice” over the two stories mere semantics?

* Where does your faith (following Jesus) matter most—now, or one day?

* Which “version” of following Jesus do you think our world is most hungry 
 for—-the now or the one day?

* Where does your faith (following Jesus) matter most—now, or one day?

* How do we live as a community reflecting the 
 Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration story?

* What would it mean for us to see the Plaza District—vulnerable families, the questioning/expressing artists, the displaced and “under-celebrated”, those longing to make a difference in the world – through a lens of CFRR?  And what does it mean for us to live, rethink, reform our language and lives to a CFRR kind of perspective?