The Shining Path

Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.  Psalm 119:105  NIV

Light – How about some reflective history.  Let me, please, make a comment about what it’s like to write these (now) 8000+ word studies.

“Today’s Word” is not your standard approach to Scripture.  Yes, the theology is conservative and the belief in inspiration unassailable.  But I am convinced that the words are far richer, far deeper than we know.  I follow the directive of Oswald Chambers on December 15^th in his devotional My Utmost for His Highest.  He wrote, “Always make it a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what it accepts easily.  Our position is not ours until we make it ours by suffering. The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.”

I believe that when we ask the right questions, we find such radical, engaging images that our usual contentment with religious involvement is overthrown.  I believe we find a different kind of God, One Who is not so predictable, far more involved, much more compassionate, incredibly more scrupulous and ready to love us beyond all our failures.  So, when I write, I try to uncover what has been there all the time but was never clear.  I try to lift up the curtain just a bit to see behind the stage.  I try to show that every word matters, that God’s voice is found in prepositions and conjunctions and adjectives and in the tiny implications that we so easily overlook.

More than anything else, “Today’s Word” is about emotional thinking.  My life has been a story of disconnection between my feelings and my thoughts.  I want to correct that by feeling how God thinks.  I need His arms around me while I am groping for words and I need His words over me while I am fighting with trauma pain.

Yes, I have a tendency to relapse into academia.  That’s my training.  So, once in a while (but hopefully not overbearing) I take a look at the fascination of the syntax, the intricacies of spelling, the interesting little anomalies in the Bible.  Once in a while I get distracted by some radical idea (like “time,” or “repentance,” or “lovingkindness”) and spend a lot of writing energy exploring those rabbit trails.  But what I really want to pursue, when I have the emotional strength to do so, is the deeper plot, the theme that runs throughout Scripture but is never quite explicit.  I love the hints and nuances.  What is this fundamental theme?  Ah, “God cares.”  Pretty simple.  Very radical.  And since I battle with actually caring for myself in healthy ways, it’s often hard for me to believe (emotionally) that He could care about me.  But He does.  So, I have to keep coming back to all those stories in the Bible that manifest this ontological fact.

I hope you don’t mind.  No, that’s not entirely true.  Even if you do mind, I’m going this way.  I just hope you want to come along with me.

Topical Index:  light, care, Psalm 119:105