The Judges
Neglected.
For it is unsettling.
Disturbing.
It details atrocities,
ㅤraising doubts.
It challenges our faith.
It makes us question…
Your wisdom.
Your character.
Your love.
We feel a need to explain.
To justify.
But…
It simply recounts the story.
The story of our interactions with,
ㅤour broken response to,
You.
It records the unedited truth.
The reality of our failures and their consequences.
And this leads to questions.
Seemingly unanswerable.
Beyond our understanding.
Yet we seek,
ㅤattempt,
To understand.
We struggle,
ㅤwe wrestle,
With this picture of imperfection.
We analyze,
ㅤreasoning our way through our story,
Hoping logic will clean up that history.
Wrap it up in a tidy package,
ㅤready to consume.
We find blessing…
ㅤthe tangible experience of the goodness,
ㅤthe good intentions,
Of our God.
We discover cursing…
The fallout,
ㅤthe natural consequences of our response,
ㅤof our lack of response,
To his love.
The period,
ㅤthe era,
ㅤof the Judges,
Is filled with both.
We embrace the blessings.
We desire,
ㅤwe struggle,
To ignore the curses.
The epic failures.
Failures of beginning,
ㅤbut not finishing.
Of learning,
ㅤbut not passing on that hard-earned knowledge to those who follow.
An unending cycle is demonstrated.
A crisis occurs,
ㅤand eventually we concede our inability to save ourselves.
Repenting,
ㅤwe are consoled.
Joyfully,
ㅤwe reconnect with God.
And then…
Deja Vu.
We fall away,
ㅤand discover ourselves in a new crisis.
Surprised each time,
ㅤwe,
ㅤlike a chosen people relying on the faith of others instead of our own,
We repeat the cycle.
Become comfortable with it.
In it.
And our faith experience never grows.
We remain lost.
With no foundation in our own existence in,
ㅤour personal experience with,
God.
Until…
Complete,
ㅤtotal,
Disillusionment…
Finally,
ㅤin our hopelessness,
We seek to look at,
ㅤto learn from,
Our experiences.
From the congruent experiences of those we find ourselves among.
In our common desperation,
ㅤwe seek…
Not to define.
Not to constrain.
But to know,
ㅤto understand,
A loving God.
The loving God.
With hearts broken,
ㅤwe are ready.
Ready to break the cycle.
Ready to be known.
Ready to know…
God
Psalming as Performance Art - written in real time, as I sat in church listening to a sermon preached by Pastor Phil on 6/10/18: Re-cycling Judges, Introduction
