Batter up! Here comes a "CURVE-BALL" by Peter Enns

Curve-ball subtitle: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or, How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God

"I spent much of my life unknowingly abdicating the task of taking full responsibility for my faith. In my younger years, I largely accepted and absorbed the narrative of faith that had been written for me, thinking it to be my own." PE

Okay, confession time.  I'm a big Pete Enns fan.  But up until now, all the books I've read of his have been responsible for rearranging my cranium.  This book, isn't as much about the brain as it is about life.  Pete includes his story in his other books, but this one seems more from the heart of who his is, rather than from the brain of what he thinks.

"Rather than telling you how you should respond to your curveballs, I’d like to relate a bit of how I have responded to mine. I’ve had many experiences, utterly unscripted, that I could not ignore over the years and that have put me in a place to see God differently. I cannot tell you what steps you should take to move forward, but I would like to encourage you to become more aware of that inner voice telling you that adjustments are needed and not to feel broken or unfaithful about making those adjustments. I guarantee you are walking a common path." PE

One of my biggest struggles in my life journey has been feeling like my path in life matters and that I have the okay to walk it, just because it is my path.  I am grateful for every voice that adds to a kind of encouraged permission that I am okay. 

"Have you ever believed something to be absolutely true only to find that the truth is more complicated?" PE

I think it might be obvious from my other writings that I have a problem with the word truth.  I've admitted that that word holds a lot of baggage.  Thank you Pete for at least giving "truth" a deserving adjective like "complicated".  I don't think I could have found a better one. 

"The more flexible we are when it comes to reading the Bible, the more prepared we will be to adjust to the curveballs of life. The more inflexible we are, the less prepared we will be to make those adjustments precisely at the time when they will be needed to keep our faith alive and thriving." PE

My deconstruction and deconversion from Christianity is all about the curveballs.  Had I just been given pitches that send that ball right to my bat, I wouldn't be where I am now. 

I am thankful that I don't have to dance around the doctrines anymore for my own understanding, but that being said... I still face it in my family's expressions of belief and faith.  I wish I could easily dismiss it, but this week has proven that I can't.  

"And today, perhaps more than ever, all of us could use a vision of God that we cannot control and a faith that invites us to embrace the not-knowing that mystery demands. At least I know I do." PE

Pete doesn't have the same baggage about the word "God" that I do, but at least his picture isn't shrouded in a cover of Christianese.  He seems to understand Paul Tillich's picture "The Ground of Being".  So we are not far apart in the picture we have.  He is after all the author of "The Sin of Certainty" .

The death of stars is the foundation of biological life on our planet. Truly, “we are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon.” To be alive on Earth means something else had to die, and that which died was transformed into something new to make us us—and not just us, but every living thing. PE

I wish everyone could see the beauty in this idea... we are stardust.  I admire the stars.   I don't know much about them, but they inspire me.  They draw me into the unknown as a place of beauty and magnificence.  I don't need to know the details to be inspired by the poetry and wonder of it all.  Also.. it makes being fifty something not feel so old.  

"Evolution is incurably forward oriented. And this should bring us hope." PE

Thank you Pete Enns for more permission to embrace things like evolution, the Creator in my space and time, the unknown,  the wonder of it all.  It has helped me hit some of those curveballs that still come my way.  

"What if we are meant to live free from fear concerning God? There are plenty of other legitimate fears and sufferings we deal with in the course of our lives. What if God isn’t one of them? What if part of the gift of life, and of the advanced consciousness we have, is to become more and more aware of the Source of All Being, the divine Presence all around us, the Creator who is present in every atom and subatomic particle in all of creation?" PE