Undiscovered Countries

New things, places and people just about always get our attention.  Seeing something for the first time usually stimulates our interest some.

Monday, I'll start a new job.  It will be covered in "newness."  Hopefully, and I do think it's the case, most of the newness there will be fun.

A lot of times though, new things can be a bit jarring, particularly when they're outside our more familiar and comfortable frames of reference.  If we're used to forests, deserts can seem stark.  If we're used to crowds, being alone can be scary...or the other way round.  Big contrasts usually bring big challenges.

Unfortunately, a reflexive response to something new can often trigger a retreat into self.  A "retreat into self" is usually pretty camouflaged.  It can look like:  "That person just rubs me wrong" or "They've got an agenda" or any number of other such write offs.  This sort of saying allows us to draw a line someplace that we're comfortable with and then place the uncomfortable person or situation on the other side of the line.

Sometimes this sort of distancing is necessary because people and situations in this world can be quite badly broken.  Still though, it does mean we lessen ourselves and others when this happens.

I'm learning this however:  Drawing these sorts of lines is a broken response to a broken situation.  I'm learning this from Joel Osteen.

Joel Osteen is a TV evangelist.  He is the personification of just about everything I recoil against in the arena of commercial Christianity.  He smiles perpetually, he has a message that is along the lines of "do good in order to do well," and perhaps worst of all he has impeccably coiffed big hair.  And oh yeah, there's A LOT of money involved.

Until fairly recently, he represented an undiscovered country for me.  I saw him while channel surfing occasionally and in response would push the change button even faster than usual.  

For a number of apparently coincidental reasons, he started to blip up on my radar screen.  So, I watched Joel a couple times, listening quite intently as I think most of us do when we think we're going hear a train wreck.  Funny thing though:  Although I found him putting emphasis in places that I would not and still wearing hair that I wouldn't be caught dead under, I heard him talk about Jesus wanting to be involved personally in the lives of each individual.  In this time and culture, even in mainline protestantism, that's way too rare a message.  It is often watered down to the point of being drowned in a sea of theological correctness...Maybe it is his hair keeping him afloat but what I've heard him say stands out from the usual "just color inside the lines in order to get to heaven" theology that is the common fare.

I will not listen regularly.  I am blessed to have other voices that speak from a closer distance and that have a more direct apprehension of the idea that Jesus through the Spirit is God with us. 

However, the experience has taught me to be a good bit more reticent about putting people on the other side of an arbitrarily placed line I've drawn in sand and to not reflexively fear or disdain the as yet undiscovered parts of Christ's body.