LIfe is a Story - N. D. Wilson

I just wanted to share this passage from a book I'm "listening" to.  As anyone who knows me will attest, I do not like to read.  Words on pages are not something I do well with.  But spoken words, they resonate.  This book by N.D. Wilson has me in chapter 6 on the first day!  It's called "Death by Living".  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

LIFE IS A STORY!

Christianity is no good at all as an idea.

Stop thinking that assertive propositioning is the same thing as faith.  It’s a start, but it can also be a costume. Flesh it out. What is Christianity incarnate?

Merry Christmas! Join the wise men and find out.  Follow the shepherds, be blind by the road, or hungry in a crowd, or terrified in a boat, or lame at a pool, or dangling through the ceiling, or a whore with too much perfume, or a thief in a tree – or on a tree.  Or an adulteress facing execution, or a liar, or a sodomite, or a hypocrite, or all the above.  Be guilty.  Betray and despise all that is good and free and beautiful.  Walk past that slacked soldier with the sour sponge on a stick.  Stand with Mary at the foot of the cross.  And you will see that the cross is not an idea.

This world is all incarnation – words made flesh. Words.  God has seen, and God has said. His imagination is bone shaking and soul shivering, and He has never groped for words to capture and be those things. He imagined galaxies and clogged drains and sharks and harmonies and running and villains and foes and fungus and that heavy marriage of air and water whereby we can skip rocks, that can quench, freeze, and baptize.

He imagined and felt the ache of a mothers love and the immortal yearning caused by the passing of time and the speed of a falcon and the fear of a hare and minor chords and the smell of carpet glue.  And none of these were any good as ideas because they became words, sounds mouthed by the infinite, rhythms verbally fleshed out and shaped by the divine.  They were spoken, which is just another way of saying, life is a story. 

If you think it, live it.

If you don’t live it you don’t really think it.

You are not what you think or what you think you think.

You are not what you say you are.

You are what you do.

Christianity is no good as an idea.

-         -  N.D. Wilson “Death by Living: Life is Meant to be Spent”