247--Variance

The fruit of the spirit is Love. See, I can prove I went to Sabbath School yesterday. Love your enemies, that's from Wednesday's lesson. Love your enemies? That ain't natural. It's not logical. But that's Love. You can argue against faith, or even hope, but the greatest of these is Love. Love supersedes logic, and against such there is no argument.

Had a great time at Sunset Christian Fellowship yesterday. They loved my pink fingernails and all. I always know I'm gonna enjoy a church where there's a food break.

Jim took me to Albany Vineyard today. Something powerful happened during the music time and I can't articulate it yet. It's still swirling in my spirit. I kept getting a twitch or spasm and I said to God, "what's that about?" To which He replied, "I'm just touching you, this is nothing. Wait 'til I start pouring." Then I had a vision of me flailing about like a man grabbing the live end of an electric cable. That's the part I could understand and articulate. There was some other stuff where I knew knowledge was being downloaded into me, but I had no words or pictures for it, and still don't.

Some thoughts from yesterday:

What's the law for? It's a mirror, not a miracle. The miracle is Grace. It's Grace that changes us. The Law doesn't make us better--it just shows us accurately where we are. Which makes me think of the inventory we just did at work. What's on the books levels a certain expectation on us, and any variance is sin.

I think we do dis-service by not talking about sin, as though the variance is unimportant or will self-correct. More than once in the last couple of years, I was clearly instructed to say something to someone about a variance, and I was afraid because of what they might think of me.

I'm not going to just tiptoe around some vague variance. There's a lot of sex outside of marriage and we all know that. But those of us who are professing faith in Christ, are claiming to live by a standard, and it's not our variance alone that's costing us the respect of the world around us. It's that we ignore it and pretend everything matches. That duplicity of speaking one standard and living another, that's costing us more.

I'm not speaking from a righteous place. Everyone knows I struggled and lost in this arena. Maybe that's my curse. Or is it my blessing? Because of failure, I know through clear variance against the Law that I cannot fix this. I know that only Grace can change this. And it starts with admitting the variance. Until I do that, I'm pretending everything is as it should be and I can handle this on my own. I'm pretending I'm God.

Sorry to disappoint. I am not God.

Sorry to disappoint further. You're not God, either.

Pick A Chapter, Job 40, selected by Aliena Fleary

Goodnight, Beautiful...

Goodnight, Strender