Presby-Musings

I was five years old when I learned a valuable lesson about confession and forgiveness--a lesson I have never forgotten to this day.  Can I tell you that at five years old, I was a straight up theologian?   Seriously.  By the time I was five I had heard scores of sermons, endured countless altar calls in the little Baptist church we attended, and because of this I knew one unalterable fact:  If I sincerely asked God to forgive me---no matter what I had done---God would forgive me.   So on that fateful day in the grocery store when I was--to coin a very Southern term--acting a fool, and my mom, who is the most patient human being on the planet told me I was getting a whooping when I got home... I decided that the only thing left to me was to bring it to God.  I found a spot by a stack of canned beans and started to pray.  The fact that I can recall that I was praying by a stack of canned beans is beyond me.  Of all of the details of th...

In his excellent book  Breathing Under Water,  author Richard Rohr   speaks of our need to ask God to help us overcome our shortcomings.    The asking often comes at the end of a hard realization of what we've become, and who we have hurt.   Far too many of us Christians think we can overcome our brokenness by sheer force of will, and then we will often grow angry at ourselves because of our inability to do so. Inevitably, our anger quickly turns to others who remind us of our own darkness.   Rohr writes, "If you go after [sinfulness] with an angry stick, you will soon be left with just an angry stick--and the same faults at a deeper level of disguise and denial."   I was listening to some music this morning, and one of the songs that came across my playlist was "Forgiven" by David Crowder.  If you have never heard of David Crowder, you should look him up.  And then you should buy some of his music---you'll thank me later....