[Vision2020] reflecting on what it's all about

[Bev Bafus]

Keely - I am so sorry, I feel your pain.  And especially that
of the children who lost their father...

But I rejoice with you on the faith of your friends.  How
refreshing!

I could never argue religion as eloquently as you, and I won't
even try.  I just know one thing... having escaped spiritual
abuse, I will never go back...  I trust in my Lord and Savior,
Jesus Christ who will never disappoint like men and women.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone... and at this
greatest of family seasons, please do one thing...

Hug all your loved ones and tell them you love them, because you
never know.....

Bev Bafus



-----Original Message-----
From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com
[mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com]On Behalf Of keely emerinemix
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2006 1:15 AM
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] reflecting on what it's all about



I'm writing this with a heavy heart and tears streaming down my cheeks, and
I know that I'll wake up tomorrow and wonder if I should be embarrassed or
apologetic -- I'll wonder if I messily poured my heart out in an entirely
inappropriate setting, just because of grief that right now floods my whole
being, or if I've written because my grief offers something that may
encourage or touch anyone reading it.  I don't know; I doubt that I really
will.  Still, please accept my apologies if what I write offends you, and
know that it wasn't my intention.  The morning may reveal that I've been
maudlin and sloppy, but not deliberately cloddish or grating.

All of us have seen the "Jesus -- The Reason For The Season!" signs,
buttons, and bumperstickers that pop up this time of the year, and while I
absolutely affirm the sentiment, I cringe at the form of expression it
takes.  The birth of Jesus, for the Christian, is what we celebrate on
December 25 with carols, gifts, food, worship, friends and family -- no "war
on Christmas" can change that, and it isn't lessened at all by acknowledging
and celebrating Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or just general feelings of goodwil this
time of year.  Still, I have a rough time with "WWJD?" bracelets, "Jesus is
the Reason" pins, and anything else mass-produced at profit, even by sincere
believers.   Like most profound, deeply held beliefs, the idea of Jesus
taking on human flesh as God Incarnate loses a little something when
expressed via a candy cane-festooned broach on the sweater of a Wal-Mart
clerk, and I doubt that I'm the only one whose belief in the sentiment
struggles to keep it elevated in the midst of holy kitsch.  But Christmas
and what it means does matter -- to me as a Christian, but also, I'm
convinced, to a sin-soaked world desperately in need of the love offered by
Jesus.  And this evening, why it matters, and why I care so deeply about the
Gospel and its presentation on the Palouse, was made clearer to me than I
can ever remember.

We got a call this evening from an old friend of ours, a former neighbor in
Snohomish who has been part of our lives for the entire 22 years of our
marriage, even longer for my husband, who was adopted by them, in a sense,
when he first began scratching out space for a greenhouse on five densely
forested acres there almost 30 years ago.  Don told us that his grandson,
Dana, had died suddenly and without apparent cause Dec. 14.  It hit us hard,
in the way that bad news drains the oxygen out of your body and leaves a
jarring, iron-like grip around your gut.  Dana was only 30.  He was part of
our lives since he and his sister were preschoolers, and in some ways Jeff
and I parented those two kids long before we had children of our own.  Dana
and Monique were part of the tapestry woven in our first decade together as
a married couple, and even when they grew up, we never lost touch.

Dana never knew his father.  His grandfather, our friend, is an alcoholic.
His mother veered from booze to boyfriends like a punching bag on a
too-loose spring, occasionally knocking over any semblance of structure the
children had managed to construct.  His beloved uncle was murdered when Dana
was only 12, and Dana himself was molested by another family acquaintance.
He ended up doing what everyone pretty much knew he would -- he turned to
violence, petty crime, and drugs, and his course in life seemed pretty much
set.  Dana Hendrix was, in the eyes of the world, the least of "the least of
these," and that was just the way it was.   God knows Dana got the message,
and often from "religious" people who knew better, knew more, and knew best.
  It was enough for them to "just know" about Dana, without the invariable
messiness of actually knowing him.

But Dana came to see that Jesus Christ knew him, loved him, died for him,
and had a plan for him.  He began to go to church; then, he grabbed ahold of
God and never let ago.  He fell -- many, many times -- and then he got back
up, because his heart had new life that nothing could extinguish.  He   got
clean, studied the Bible, married and fathered five children.  He worked
hard, played hard, and laughed like a chorus of angels.  He knew he had been
ransomed, redeemed, renewed -- he knew nothing about presbyteries and
Calvinism, nothing about postmillennialism and the Reformation, nothing
about egalitarianism or patriarchy, and he didn't know that he didn't know.
Because what he DID know had lifted him, filled him, and carried him; Dana
knew that his Redeemer lives, and loves, and when he couldn't find life and
love in the church, he blessed them anyway, and kept his hand in his
Savior's.

I believe he's home now, and I know Jeff and I will see him again.  But
tonight the grief is overwhelming, for his grandparents, his mother, and his
wife and kids.  I can hardly type this for the tears in my eyes, and every
memory of Dana is for now a suckerpunch to my heart.  I don't want to
preach; I'm not trying to use Dana's death as an opportunity for strategic
evangelism.  I'm not that clever and not that dishonest.  But Dana Hendrix
was someone you would have wanted to know.  Just like Riqui, my friend who
killed himself last year at age 18; the mania and the depression held on
longer than his faith did.  But Riqui's life was changed by the baby in the
manger -- the presumed bastard son of a poverty-stricken carpenter and his
wife under occupation and real, grinding persecution.  Riqui's family
attended the church I led in Duvall in the late '90s, and I saw what grief
and horror, faith and steadfast love, did to his parents.  And then I saw
grace poured out and demonstrated beyond measure in a community of people
who possessed nothing and gave more than I ever did, because Riqui's faith
when he was well had touched so many people and did even more when he became
ill.  Just like Lucy, who died in January of  cancer.  She was a good
person, a saint unlike anyone I've ever met.  She worshipped Christ  with
her eyes and her touch when the cancer ravaged her brain, paralyzing her and
robbing her of speech.  I'll see her again, just as I'll see Riqui and Dana.
  And when my precious friend Shannon dies -- and it will likely not be too
long from now -- what will be true about her life won't be the homelessness,
the rape, the meth addiction, the violence endured and the fury lived out.
It won't be the beatings, the abuse, the poverty or the cancer that appears
to have hopscotched throughout her body in the last year.  The "last thing,"
the true thing, about Shannon will be that her life, considered worthless by
virtually everyone in it, was remade in the image of, and by the grace of,
her Lord and Savior, who loves me enough to let me be part of her
exceedingly messy, extraordinarily beautiful, life.

I write a lot about "religion" on Vision 2020, and I'm the first and loudest
to howl when mine is misrepresented.  I get it right a lot and then blow it,
and I sometimes wonder which is which.  I imagine I'm not alone in that.
But I guess I'm trying to suggest here, grieving over three friends lost and
one just hanging on, is that despite what many of us have seen on Vision
2020 regarding the Gospel, the "religion" of Christianity, or the meaning of
this guy Jesus, there are Spirit-wonders all around us, and often in the
most unlovely places and people.  My life has been transformed by Jesus
Christ; I have the painful privilege of grieving the loss of three people,
soon -- perhaps -- four, who weren't content to simply be loved and blessed
by Him, but who lived radically messy, untidy, unpredictable, utterly
unconventional and entirely gracious and grace-giving lives because of the
One whose birth we celebrate now.

And I guess that's why I felt like I needed to write -- because this stuff,
the breathing of Spirit and life and agape love into the forsaken and
forlorn, is what I celebrate, and it's slander and perversion is what I will
fight against, as kindly as possible, until I join Dana, Riqui, and Lucy in
Heaven.

May you all be richly blessed -- with relationship, with forgiveness and
reconciliation, with joy, with Godly sorrow, and with the privilege of
seeing what a poor substitute religion, Christendom, and even the
institutional church is for a life filled with Spirit, nurtured in love, fed
on truth, and guided by the Shepherd.

keely

_________________________________________________________________
Get FREE Web site and company branded e-mail from Microsoft Office Live
http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/mcrssaub0050001411mrt/direct/01/

=======================================================
 List services made available by First Step Internet,
 serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
               http://www.fsr.net
          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
=======================================================