Dirty, shabbily dressed Urchin that I am

I've just completed reading the fourth chapter of Brennan Manning's book Ragamuffin Gospel. The fourth chapter, Cormorants & Kittiwakes, found me crying simple tears from page 102-105. I think this was the culmination of the three previous chapters crescendoing into the fourth. Though I have a great desire to finish the book, I have to stop and digest what I have read. Like eating a muti-course meal, I must stop and allow the fullness to dissipate.

As I've said before, at 30 years of age, I set out on a quest to determine what it is that I believe. Not what have I been taught by my parents, grand parents, teachers, professors, denominational dogma, but what is the real truth without these filters.

Reading Manning before going to bed last night left me remembering a childhood of fear. Fearing a great God who was coming like a thief in the night to rapture only the purest of the pure away. Leaving the rest of us to suffer the intolerable pain and scourge of the "end times".

I thought of the agony of laying in bed in the same room with my brother. Recalling the scripture that says two will be in bed, one will be taken the other left. Knowing that I would be the one left because I was the older more sinful of the two. How grateful I was when I got my own room!

If that sounds silly to you, it only gets worse. In my child mind, I thought that the animals would be taken in the rapture. I could not imagine God leaving them to suffer with the humans. Many times through the day I would run to the cages of our birds, or call for our dogs, to make sure they were still there and the rapture had not occurred yet. Imagine the horror I felt when finally someone told me..."the animals aren't going in the rapture, just the humans." I had no way of knowing if I had been left or not?!?

I am able to laugh heartily now about my childhood OCD. But was I alone, or were there others in my generation who suffered the same fate? How have they been affected by learning of the god of wrath rather than the God of grace. Are there yet others today being taught this horrible gospel? The unfortunate answer is yes.

The last eleven years have served to displace and dislodge the god of wrath from my mind, and install the God of Grace into my heart. The incredible freedom that has come from understanding God as loving and gracious has been amazing. Realizing it is not what goes in that defiles, but what comes out. Christ came for me and all the other theives, liars, whores, and "dirty shabbily clothed urchins".

As I read Chapter 4 this morning, I was sitting on my back porch with a cup of coffee in the 40 degree air, living in and loving the "now". Loving the cold, loving the creation and creator. The culmination of time, place, words, thoughts, & feelings made the moment extremely real.

I love the conversation between William Wilberforce, a disciple of John Newton, and his house man in the movie Amazing Grace.

Wilberforce caught outside his home sitting in the grass tells his house man, "I have 10,000 engagements of state today but I would prefer to spend the day out here getting a wet ass studying dandelions and marveling at bloody spider webs.

His assistant replies, "You've found God sir."

Wilborforce answers, "I think he found me...do you have any idea how inconvenient that is? How idiotic it will sound? I have a political career glittering ahead of me and in my heart I want spiders webs."

The assistant sits on the grass beside him and says, "It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself...Frances Bacon..." Then in reply to Wilberforce's wondering look... "I don't just dust your books sir."

That's how I feel, I have 10,000 things to do today, but I just really want to sit in my backyard and read more of the grace and goodness of God for terribly sinful people like me. So that I can share that grace with my fellow dirty, ragged dressed children.