Monday, January 20, 2014

Life in the Kingdom of God is like ordering and eating a hoagie

While my classmates were musing about how there seems to be a disconnection between what people who claim to be Christians say that they believe and what they actually practice in reality, I decided to raise my hand and weigh in with my two cents.

Instead of two cents, a comparison came out that, in the end, turned out to be a fairly accurate evaluation (in my opinion!) of the malaise, the non-active, life that some live.

It is like a hoagie.  Say you go to a restaurant and you are with your friend.  The friend asks what you will order and you say a hoagie.  The menu depicts a scrumptious heap of meat, onion, peppers, cheese, and tomatoes atop a thick roll.  It looks good.  The friend assumes that you had the hoagie before since your recommended it to him or her.  Both you and your friends get these scrumptious looking hoagies delivered right to you in moments.  Your friend waits for you to begin, but you are stunned.  You just recommended and ordered something you have no intention of eating. 

If a scrumptious hoagie is set in front of you, you eat it, right?  It could be said that those who claim to believe and yet have never really practiced walking with Jesus is the person who orders and perhaps recommends something (the belief without serious intention to follow) without having any real experiential knowledge of it.  A lot of people “order” or say that they “believe” in Jesus, but the truth of the matter is that a lot of those same people have not seriously intended to ingest His way so that it becomes their way.  Imagine the hoagie sitting there and after a while it no longer looks scrumptious.  Because hoagies are made and ordered so that they can be incorporated into your body…making the substance of the meat, veggies, and bread real to you.

What would it take to convince us that it is worth it?  Why isn't God’s reality and God’s goodness the most real reality of our lives? 

Do you and I see in Jesus (and God, the Father), One who is worth going after like a pearl merchant who had searched all of his life for that one pearl and finally, finding it, thought it nothing to sell all that he had in order to go and buy that one?


(read Jesus’ parable of the kingdom in Matthew 13)  

Sunday, January 19, 2014

The Kingdom of God is like kudzu


Jesus always spoke of stuff that was right at his fingertips and along my journey through the kudzu on the trail this last fall, I had the notion that if Jesus was taking the trail with me he might have been using the kudzu to teach me a lesson about living in the kingdom of God.

Those of you who do not live in the south may not realize that this thing called kudzu was introduced here about 50 years in order take care of some environmental problem.  Since then, it has covered every possible vacant spot and it continues to grow.  It grows by runners which means that it is all connected.  Think about it this way:  this deciduous monstrous plant has spread to cover multiple states (Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, ect...you get the idea) and now is thought by some experts to be the largest organism on our planet.

Here is my mock parable and thanks to Shiny Samuel there are a couple of pictures for you to enjoy.

The Kingdom and Kudzu


The kingdom of God is like kudzu
          strong
                   sturdy
                             steady
          beautiful
                   bold  
                             bursting with flowers
          treasured by some
                   total annoyance to others
                             taste and see, is it good?
          hides at times
                   huddling from view
                             how do we perceive it in winter time?
          inviting
                   inhaling
                             ingesting
          dancing
                   delighting
                             daily