Nothing New Under the Sun

Yesterday I wrote out some questions, questions of God and the church. Questions that may make me seem jaded and doubting and distant from God. As I wrote and dissected the pattern of my thoughts, I walked down a trail of reason that left me feeling fulfilled actually, validated almost, like I had found some secret treasure and was on the right path.

A few hours later I read a chapter from Rob Bell’s book, “Velvet Elvis,” and was bombarded by the same type of general thought and questions and reasoning as I had discovered previously in my personal time, that very day.

This has happened time and time again and it bothers me. It happened countless times while reading Blue Like Jazz, as well as Sex, Sushi and Salvation. It happened while watching The Changing Faces of Worship.

I’m not saying I have any brilliant thoughts or even profound new ideas but am frustrated when I realize that it seems I am two years behind the fore-runner ideas and patterns in post-millennium, ground breaking Christian thought.

Then I started thinking about Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, how it must have seemed pointless to write and create for a while after their brilliance was spread all over the world. But people did, eventually. They had fresh and changed views on faith and God and life and love and fantasy and worlds. People started to process again and eventually new-ish threads of faith and outlook and styles and vision were birthed and created.

And I thought about Augustine’s Confessions. Way back in 397, a great man created Emo. It’s been evolving ever since, the outpouring of flesh and spirit, and the confessions of struggling humanity. We know it now as a genre of music put to guitars and keys but back then, it was revolutionary. (actually, it took a while for it to be considered a classic, obviously, but still…you get the point)

I don’t even know what I’m rambling on about now but I guess I was just taken aback by how real and clear the “nothing new under the sun” verse spoke to me last night.

*big sigh*

I told my husband these things in bed, right before we went to sleep. My last sentence was, “I don’t want to do the ordinary or the two years behind the super revolutionary and have un-original thought. I want to be radical and ground-breaking. I don’t want to do good, I want to be good.”

I awoke much later to a very real dream, of my life. Something uneventful; just me being me. I wish I had been flying but instead I was talking. So ordinary.