Friday Night Thoughts

There has been something of a theme the past couple of days for me.

Every monday and wednesday, during my 40 minute journey to school, I listen to the podcast of my church. Monday, Andy was talking through this series dubbed, "The Sinai Code." He started to walk us through the ten commandments.

It got me thinking about the premise of the Ten Commandments. You see, a lot of people I've talked with sort of despise those ten things. It doesn't really stem from an issue with rules like "do not murder" because, well, murder is just universally bad. Rather, the issue comes from the simple fact that the Ten Commandments, in one way or another, have equated to the icon of Christian rules and regulations. In other words, because the Ten Commandments exist, Christianity must be a big list of "do this" and "don't do that."

Little did I know that I would soon be thinking about "Christian Rules" for the rest of the week.

Tuesday I was with a group that gets together to try and understand how to read the bible better. Before long we were sharing about what we thought about the Old Testament. I shared how the Old Testament was never relevant to me until this past year. I had the misconception that the O.T. was nothing more than Leviticus repeated over and over again with the occasional interesting story sprinkled here and there. Oh and if you don't know what Leviticus is it's a book of the bible that will make you question why anyone would want to be a Christian in the first place. It's also fabulous bedtime reading.

Anywho, after I finished talking, Lisa, a woman sitting with me in the group, responded immediately by saying "I love leviticus. I think it's very rich once you understand more about God." I never thought I would hear the words love and leviticus in the same sentence in my entire life and yet I just did. I sat befuddled and decided to just be quaint the rest of the night.

Then the book I'm reading talked about "Christian boundary markers." Clearly a message was trying to be sent to me.

So, after being able to soak it in for the past few days, I've made many observations. Among them, I have found the following to be the most noteworthy:

- The Christian Faith isn't about do this and don't do that. Rather, the focus of the Faith has always been [and will always be] about a relationship between us and God.

- If Christianity were about following rules, then logically speaking, someone could be good enough to enter heaven. But that's not the case. If you search the entire bible, you will never find the word heaven written in the same context of any "rule" written in the bible.

- On the other hand, "rules" do serve a purpose in a Saint's life. They're not boundaries in the same way barbed wire serve as restrictions to a prisoner. Instead, they moreso resemble a path in a grassy field or jungle. You don't have to follow that path by any means...but often times you realize that when you travel on the journey of life, that path only helps to provide guidance to your destination.

- Once you make the correlation between the two, you can say things like "I love leviticus." Or you can be like David and write brilliant poetry like Psalm 19.