james dean and jersey wives.

Why am I not freaking out?

I'm asking myself that, my hand on some guy who has torn shoulder muscles, during a healing session at tonight's church service. This is classic, Ashley-joins-up-with-the-Pentecostals-and-oh-holy-crap-what-are-they-doing-now material. The visiting Sri Lankan pastor is about to claim healings in this place, and I am touching someone while praying, and there's this chick a couple of rows up who could probably single-handedly pray down healing for every patient in Cox South-just stand her in the lobby (and North, give her a megaphone)-and I'm not feeling shock.

He asks us to get up and put our hands on the closest in pain, and I do. I don't look around and try to figure out how to avoid it, or, as has been my custom, just sit in my chair doing my best James Dean impression. I get up, and I touch the kid. And, for a split second, folks, I actually considered praying out loud. I was in impressive proximity to blending in. I might have been mistaken for a real Pentecostal.

It was a night.

This is the second time recently that an international evangelist has come in to preach, and let me tell you -- John, Curt and Scotty sound like mice compared to these men from abroad. All of my talk about my own church's "praying for the hearing-impaired" and shouted sermons? Nothing. That's nothing. These other men could put the Housewives of New Jersey to shame. They hop, they pump their fists in the air, they shout, and stamp, and make a ruckus up there! I've never seen anything like it, save for television documentaries.

But.. I'll give them this. They have seen things. They have done things. They have lived things that are pure and raw God. Whatever I think of the hopping and the stamping, and however skeptical I feel about their stories of healings, and demons--they are on that edge I'm looking for.

When I came here, I thought the edge was poverty. I believed radically that the church's sacred mission was to redeem the world not through salvation from sin, but in setting a new social order of equality and kindness. I believed in a social gospel.

Then, a few months ago, I wrote this post about Samuel. It's about how the Israelites asked Samuel for a king, and in so doing, seemed to ignore or misunderstand the absolute sovereignty of God in meeting every need they'd ever had or would have. I ended by pointing out that though I often go the way of the Israelites, I'd do well to remember that stripped of every earthly pleasure, I'd still have the one thing I needed. The implications of my own words didn't come to me until a few weeks later.

When I first joined the church, I was outraged at what I saw as a wrong direction in almost the entirety of the church world because I didn't understand that though we ought to be in the business of taking care of physical needs, that's not our main business. And to claim that it is decentralizes Christ. More than that, it denigrates His sacrifice, it nullifies the Gospel. What does it mean for me to say that I could lose everything, and still have Everything in Christ, unless physical needs take a back seat to spiritual needs? Unless there's a reality so much greater than my physical existence? Unless Christ is not only my ultimate provider, but ultimately the only provision I (and you, and he and she) need?

How then should my purpose change?

And so, the edge that I once would gladly have jumped from seems to lead now only to a sort of virtuous death. The edge I seek is one that I don't have the courage to stand on.

But these hopping, stamping, shouting specimens of Godliness--they are standing on that edge. They are praying, and believing. And they know that their power is from Christ.

I still think they're kinda freakin' crazy. But I would gladly trade my James Dean faith for their Jersey Wives faith any. day. of. the. week.

Today is as good a day as any.