Friday, August 18, 2006

Waiting for a call...

So I'm sitting here at my desk, with music playing again. Johnny Cash this time. There's something haunting in his song "Help Me." Something beautiful and soul grabbing that makes you pause for just a moment to realize all the times you've prayed this very same prayer.

I'm waiting for a phone call. It should come in about an hour or so. That's right around midnight for those of you keeping track. It will tell me whether I'm going to the mountains tomorrow for the day, or whether I'm going to hang out in the city and veg in my basement watching some more of "The West Wing." If I'm going to the mountains, then the phone call will also tell me that Megs is coming to crash on my floor for the night.

In the meantime, I have a quote from Rob Bell's "Velvet Elvis" to share with you. I read this book in several chunks, with long pauses in between, so my grasp of Bell's entire message is somewhat lacking, but I did like the book. And I was flipping through a bit of it tonight, reading the parts I marked on my way through, and this bit caught my eye:

Our words aren't absolutes. Only God is absolute, and God has no intention of sharing this absoluteness with anything, especially words people have come up with to talk about him. This is something people have struggled with since the beginning: how to talk about God when God is bigger than our words, our brains, our worldviews, and our imaginations. (Velvet Elvis, p. 23)

I like this. Such a succint way of reminding us what is really the thing with substance. We lose that understanding in the middle of this debate on modernism vs. postmodernism, and the existence of absolute truth. We need, on both sides of the debate to be reminded that the thing we are debating, the thing at the center, God, is the only absolute, and our words to describe his absoluteness can tend to simply add confusion to the mix.