If you looked out the left side of the bay window in my living room right now, I could point to it and show you.
There, on the other side of the farmland, through the filbert orchard: the Applegate Trail.
Think Oregon Trail, but the southern route. Probably just as much dysentery, but with theoretically safer traveling conditions. These days it’s paved, and my family of six loads into our SUV to follow it to my folks’ house for dinner every Sunday night.
It’s called an emigrant trail. I remember a history professor telling me how there are still fewer churches in the Pacific Northwest than in other parts of the country because the settlers beat the church planters here. The church planters never caught up.
“The Unchurched Belt.” That’s what sociologists have dubbed the region where my husband and I are raising our four daughters. In contrast, of course, to “The Bible Belt,” the region of the country where our parents raised us.
I’m from Texas. He’s from Oklahoma. Yes, our move to Oregon came with some culture shock. But none greater than this: the realization that “for God so loved the world” is more expansive than I ever imagined.
Come, sit awhile. I’ll prop up a Bible on the arm of my couch. We can look out the window together and visit over a cup of tea. Or if coffee’s your cup of tea, I have that, too.
And can you help me out and comment when you discover something we have in common?
I don’t even care how seemingly small it is. I was telling a daughter today how one of the keys of friendship is finding and focusing on what you have in common. So I do hope you’ll help me do that.
Which brings us back to “God so loved the world.”
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When I was a kid, when a classmate would ask what I believed, I knew they didn’t want me to tell them about how “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” Because they most likely believed that, too.
Instead, they wanted to know what made me different. It was part of our culture.
I grew up in a place in which the most important identity markers I knew were labels like Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, and Catholic. In a town where almost everyone identified as a Christian, these labels bore witness to lines in the sand.
Even at a young age, I knew these differences could be grounds for intense situations.
Of course, my home was mere miles away from Cut-N-Shoot, a community that earned its name when the Baptists and Methodists prepared for a showdown by hiding knives and guns under the blankets in their buggies.
The location of the showdown, you wonder? The churchhouse that hosted their services. Separate services, of course: one for the Methodist congregation, and others for the not one, but two, Baptist congregations.
The issue at hand? Opening that space to the new Apostolic preacher in town.
No one was injured, but the incident left a legendary mark.
And this story is only a microcosm of the last 500 years of Christian history. But there’s always more to the story, isn’t there?
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When we tell a story — any story — we don’t recount every minute detail. Instead, we amplify the parts that are most significant to what we want to communicate.
Last night, a daughter crawled into my bed and asked if she could tell me about her day. It went about like this:
I didn’t sleep well, woke up worrying about friends, and then math was really hard.
That’s a whole story in one sentence. The point of the story? Her day stunk.
But she didn’t mention eating her favorite smoothie at lunch until much later. Because that didn’t fit with her point.
The Bible tells one big story, but we are masters at amplifying the parts that are most significant to what we want to communicate — what we sometimes even need to communicate. And honestly, it’s such a big story that it’s easy for us to latch onto a few favorite parts. But as we continue to repeat these retellings, the scenes we bring to the surface subtly begin to redefine the plotline. We may find ourselves inhabiting a story that highlights how particular plot points shine…and downplaying the plot of the bigger story.
We often don’t even realize we’re doing it. A problem emerges, and we look to the Bible for wisdom. Yet our cultural context colors what we look for and how we tell the story of what we find.
Then these stories get passed on. Sometimes for hundreds of years. And they compete with one another. Often, they collide.
Alas, I’ve become weary of keeping all of the stories straight.
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What would happen, I wonder, if we scrolled out to see ourselves in the bigger story?
This is, after all, what Jesus did. And it changed everything.
On one level, the story of the Hebrew Scriptures is ingeniously simple. On another, it’s stunningly intricate.
So let’s not lose sight of the set-up:
God brought beauty and goodness and life out of a dark, watery wild and gave a purpose to every part of this creation. God formed Humanity (literally “Adam”) from a patch of dirt and then blessed us with the vocation of reflecting God’s own goodness. Next, God rested Humanity in a garden temple where heaven overlapped with earth.
The garden’s biggest perk? The tangible presence of God.
God gave Humanity the priestly task of subduing the earth and ruling over its life…but the Garden of Eden was the starting point. And the only way we could reflect God’s rule was by continually seeking God’s wisdom and ingesting His Life inside of ourselves (life-fruit, anyone?) In this way, we would partner with God in blessing all of earth with the life of heaven.
Let’s pause here for a second. Fast-forward to Daniel, Isaiah, and Revelation, and we get pictures of an end-of-the-story where the Garden of Eden (aka the Kingdom of Heaven) has indeed expanded to fill the entire earth.
This is the goal: God partnering with Humanity to cultivate earth by reflecting the wisdom of His goodness until “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
And God never abandons this goal. Rather, He keeps coming back to it.
Like a fugue, the Hebrew Scriptures begin with this simple melody: wildness, waters, partnership (covenant), garden, testing, exile. Then it repeats a variation of that same story in a different voice. In this way, the Bible invites us into a timeless epic and then retells it over and over again, creating an intricate fugue of meaning.
One story, many iterations. We’ll explore them all later.
Because this: this is the story Jesus immersed himself in.
Then Jesus brought it all together to finally subvert the story and bring us into the Place where we can permanently partner with God in blessing earth with the life of heaven.
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In stories, place often takes on the role of a character. We unavoidably interact with it as it shapes us through its own personality and culture. We act on it, as well. And when a place leaves the picture, the story changes scenes. While that original place continues to live on in the background, a new place takes its spot in the story.
For over twenty years now, I’ve made my bed here in the Pacific Northwest, the “Unchurched Belt”. It’s a place where “for God so loved the world” begs for the context of this much larger story — a story where we recognize that world refers not only to people, but to cosmos. All creation. And it’s a place where communities of Christians are intent on finding common ground to make this story an embodied reality. At least in our little circles of creation.
But stories, especially big ones, often employ multiple settings.
So a bag of sandy Cut-N-Shoot soil rests beneath my mattress.
It comes straight from Mann Road, a microcosm of the patch of dirt that gave birth to my great-great-grandpa’s leadership role in that would-be weapon-wielding skirmish. Yes, Cut-N-Shoot is in my blood. That soil is a reminder of the fierce independence of my Texas roots - of the first twenty years of my life. Of religious fervor tempered with the recognition that we can lay down our guns and knives.
That we can learn to let a new Place act on our current ones.
In the gospels, Jesus’ Body is depicted as the new garden temple — the new patch of living, breathing dirt where God’s presence joins heaven and earth. Jesus is the new Garden and the new Adam rolled into one.
Jesus’ Body is that new Place where we can permanently partner with God in blessing earth with the life of heaven.
And “in Christ” (a phrase Jesus’ disciples loved to include in their letters), we become part of this new Humanity. Our bodies become part of this new temple. In Christ, we get to resume the priestly task of subduing the earth and ruling over its life. In Christ, we get to reflect God’s wisdom and ingest Jesus’ Life inside of ourselves (bread and wine, anyone?). In Christ, we get to partner with God in blessing earth with the life of heaven. Until Jesus ultimately brings it all to completion.
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Meanwhile, I’ll keep this Bible propped up on the arm of my couch in my home in the Pacific Northwest. I’ll look out the window and wonder what it looks like for Jesus to be my true location. For him to be the Place that acts on my small life, my small town, my small circle of influence. For his story to completely inhabit mine. And not just mine but ours.
And so, this space is for us. As we sojourn in a creation that groans as it awaits complete renewal, we can keep looking out the window together and visit over our cups of tea. Even if yours is a coffee.
Maybe you first found this space because of my sporadic Rest Notes?
You can still expect to find them interspersed between chapters of storied reflections. In fact, I’ll be slowly tracing the story of rest through Scripture.
It’s a microcosm that helps us focus on the big one.