Trees

Thanks to the lovely Cortney Korshak I have been introduced to the writings of Shane Claybore. This is the kind of guy I normally do not like. He's like Rob Bell on Pot. He probably travelles the world sampling delicious coffees from distant lands and strokes his gotee while writing about them in a beat up journal that he slips into a leather "man-purse," and if he doesn't have a Macbook I will become a vegitarian.*

But his words have shaken something in me that I find startling. I have been told by catchy book titles that my God is both too small and too safe. And I agree with the truth of these statements. And throughout the last four years my God (or more specifically my image thereof) has grown considerably in size and in scope.

But what I've realized that I have mostly learned about this growing God from people like me and with professors like me, and from churches like mine, and from books that people like me write and read. I just realized that my God is a white american evangelical God.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. But I've relized that my image of God has just grown into a larger version of itself. All the change in my perception of God has been quantitative and not qualitative. It's like I planted a tree in my back-yard and I'm just waiting for it to grow. First it was a little pine tree, and some day it will be a big pine tree, but it was always a pine tree.

Well I don't think I really have that good of a handle on it. I bet God is a tree, and I bet he has pine branches, but he's probably also a spruce, a maple, a palm, an oak, and he might even grow exotic fruit.** I want to understand more of God than just the bits of him I've gotten here at Taylor. I would NEVER speak out against Taylor but I'm growing in the realization that this is just one place, just one piece of the puzzle, just one branch, and I want to see more of the tree.

*Just kidding folks, I would never do that
**I had a mango the other day, it was delicious but stringy