Status Updates From Field Notes for the Wildern...

“More & more, I crave being part of a congregation, a group with whom I can gather to reflect & contemplate, to hear how others have solved this puzzling problem of existence. Most of all, I want them to hold me to account, to keep on track, to urge me towards doing good. Holding spiritual beliefs on my own is lonely. I want to be part of a group that makes me return to ideas that bewilder & challenge me.” K. May

I think I’m going to read some of this as part of my quiet time every morning, rather than plowing through like a book.

We often have a real yearning to idealize the early Church, but most of Paul’s letters (and so much of our NT) exists because of all the ways the church was not living up to its ideals. The one consistent thing in the Church through the ages is messy people. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Church nowadays continues to balance precariously between our ideals and our realities.

Repentance isn’t just cognitive or emotional, done right it is an embodied atonement. “Repentance is not a one-time event involving expressions of apology and forgiveness. It is the gateway to moral repair and to new life, that is, the gateway to conversion.” (Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes)
Repentance is answering the call to reconciliation (reparation) and transformation.

Repentance is actually a beautiful, life-giving reorientation toward God’s good path of flourishing with ourselves, our neighbors, and our world. Metanoia is the changing of a mind that leads to the changing of a life. This generous view of repentance reminds us that sin, at the core, is a turning away from Love. Repentance is turning back toward that path of Love- continual reorientation to Love.