and Jesus was His name-o.

Jesus. Coffee. Statistics.

In that order.

I had something of a tumultuous night last night, spiritually-speaking. A hard prayer meeting, followed by a good discussion, and a lot of keyed-up sleeplessness. By the morning, I had decided to take a hiatus from church, and spent the ride into work negotiating the settlement (Sunday mornings and Life Group are out, but you can still have Saturday bible study, and your Tuesday afternoon study sessions in the Atrium, etc.).

And then, enter the true, if blasphemous, trinity. Sitting in a stats class with a mug of steaming, fragrant joy, it all came down to...

Jesus. I'm angry. Not angry with God. But with His Church, a lot of His people, myself, and some things I'm not even sure of. I hadn't realized until this morning that I am. As my professor warbled on about leptokurtic distributions, I was thinking about last night and suddenly felt the full force of this anger. I thought, "I need to love," but then, "I can't, I can't. Love is humility. And if I give up being right, I won't have anything. It'll hurt too much to be both alone, and nothing." Mary, Joseph, and the Camel. That is explosive.

And complicated. There are dual processes going on here.

When I think about what makes me angry about the church, I am struck by the ways in which I think that I'm right to their wrong. And I might be right (I might also be wrong)--that's the first process. It's one of debate, discussion, open critique, reading, and thinking. The stakes can be high. If the megachurch movement is in fact a deviation from Christ's intentions, then the money spent there is a serious problem. The reality is that the Christian lobby in this country has the funds and manpower to all but eradicate homelessness. But we don't. If I'm right about the disparity between Christ's intention, and our direction, the stakes are not small, and there's much to be angry about.

But turn the corner with me. The absolute value of "being right" is not the only issue. Regardless of whether my arguments are sound, there's that little tug that comes from the thought of laying them down. An emotional nagging. I bristle at what I'm being told from the pulpit, and so I coach myself, "Ok, Ash, you disagree, but you need to love. Put the anger to the side right now." In that act of self-denial, though, is a twinge of pain, of hurt. What is it? I'm not entirely sure. I think it's that I identify my worth so closely with my ideas, that to deny my self even momentarily, in order to fully love this man, despite what I believe are false words, feels like a decimation of my very being. To love someone "other" so fully feels impossible to do, feels like an extension outside of my own being that I couldn't possibly sustain.

If I'm denying myself to love him, who will love and care for me?

Bingo.