[Vision2020] [Spam] reflecting on what it's all about

[lfalen]

Thanks for your very moving rendition.
Roger
-----Original message-----
From: "keely emerinemix" kjajmix1 at msn.com
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 01:14:43 -0800
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Spam] [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
> =======================================================