2.23.2006

good quote from a good book

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"Close your eyes, friend, and imagine. You're high up in the air, in an aisle seat, looking past your neighbor and out the window. Down below you is a mass of cloud cover looking like fresh snow, marbled, marked with divots and craggy monuments of white. Imagine that your understanding of reality is defined by this view: what you see out the window and what's proximate to you there in the plane's cabin. The airplane and its passengers are what you might call a small, unique closed system moving inside what appears to be a vast space with a visible boundary of white mass below. Many well-meaning Christians, gathered together in various sects, present Christianity in just this way. They invite you to view reality from a very small window, and they are quite certain they're providing you with an absolutely objective view of reality. If you join them, you are expected to see as the sect sees. Failure to embrace their view of reality is sometimes commensurate with failure to be a follower of Jesus. And when people say you're not, and you are, it is very hurtful--and very troubling. For sects such as these, 'anything other than absolute, unqualified, mathematically certifiable authenticity betrayed a soul adrift.'
Let's imagine some more. Get out of your seat, reach into the compartment above, and carry the yellow package to the rest room.

It's a parachute.

Strap it on.

Now go to the big door with the red sign, open it, and jump.




When you pass through the white stuff, pull the cord. As you pass through the clouds, down below, previously hidden from your view, is a world of wonder and wickedness, joy and pain, sex, truth, and lies. It's a place full of story where words are as plentiful as stars in the sky. And there's land and promise. Land where God walked. Land belonging to Him, promise belonging to Him. It's a place where men and women, boys and girls, either serve themselves or serve the God of the land and sky and all that ever was and is. This land and sea, this earth and water, is the jazz of God and humanity: order and improvisation, beauty and ashes, boundary and freedom, choice and counterchoice, mistakes and all. It is a place of storytelling and storied living."


6 comments:

Just a girl.... said...

I might be gone for a while. If you don't see me, it's because I'm extra busy reading all these books you've been recommending. This is another amazing find!

Roman said...

Considering that the last book you suggested, Barbarian Way, was friggin awesome, I suppose I can trust you twice

Just finished reading CS Lewis' "Til We Have Faces" which is his version of a greek myth (not a CHRISTIAN version, just HIS version). It was beautiful.

Danielle said...

I've seen this book around. I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the recommendation - cool.

Anonymous said...

I dont wanna read about this stuff Jimmy. Wheres the blue cue blog? huh? Or the Monkey bar blog?? wheres that one....Or how bout the "Chris can't remember a thing about friday" blog?

jimmy said...

What happens at the Blue Cue... ends up on my website.


Just kidding. No one needs to know what happened at the Blue Cue.

nikki said...

oh yeah, well sucks for you then . . . because it's on mine!!!!! hehehehehee . . .