A Brief Defense of Irreverence

I've sometimes earned the criticism and concern of my fellow Christians for my perceived irreverence-- my preference for the companionship of honest heathens over that of most professing believers, my inability to settle down into one church community, my propensity for asking difficult questions.

When I inevitably respond that I learned these naughty habits from Jesus, I'm often promptly reminded of the obvious fact that I'm not Jesus, that I'm vulnerable to drift and contamination, to walking away.

The last part, in my current mood, makes me giggle. This isn't conceit-- I'm so very aware that my love for Jesus is broken, selfish, and sometimes downright bratty. It's just that the things that alarm me about my walk and the things that alarm others are so rarely even remotely similar. My spiritual 'safety' hasn't made it on my list yet.

I'm not speaking with the pride of someone who imagines herself infallible, but the gleeful desperation of one who's drifted, been contaminated, walked away, more times than I can count, only to find myself re-quipping Brother Peter's timeless question... where else would I go?

My my memory is too sharp and my imagination too small to picture life outside of this divine moment, this eternal 'now' with God. Because now, in the embrace of my Creator, I lay my head on His chest, listen to His heartbeat, and sigh, 'how You love us...'. I stand on His feet as He dances me, a dance of extravagantly messy and dangerously sincere love for all people, of celebrating Home in every space and moment and community of worship, of clear and simple steps set to a beautiful symphony of uncertainty. This is how He dances me, covering over my lack of Grace with the abundance of His.

Is it any wonder that reverence to an irreverent God would look like this?

Writing My Representative

A few weeks ago, when I wrote a blog article on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, I ended by imploring my audience to 'join me' in contacting our congressional representatives to express our disapproval of the bill. This was, quite honestly, a pretty dishonest way to end the article.

I had no idea who my representative was, not to mention how to contact him/her. I've later reflected that it's a total crime that I graduated high school, let alone college, without this information. Shouldn't there have been a civic engagement class (or one-hour lecture, at least) somewhere in my sixteen years of education? But no. I was clueless.

And there may be a lot of structural reasons for my cluelessness, but remaining there even as I asked people to advocate 'with me' was a choice made out of laziness and lack of dedication to this issue. And that kind of hypocrisy can really weigh on a person.

So today, I overcame 21 years of ignorance with a 15-second google search. Don't you love the modern world? You don't know who your congressional representative is, so you type, “Who's my congressional representative?” into a little digital illusion of a box, and voila! A House.Gov zip code search page pops up, hooking up with the webpage of your man (or woman) just as fast as you can think about it.

As a resident of Riverside County, CA, my representative is Ken Calvert. He's a Republican with a giggle-ably outdated picture of himself across the banner of his website. From the mini-snippets I've read so far, I probably wouldn't agree with his stances on a lot of things, but he seems like a decent guy. I'm glad I looked him up.

In the spirit of honesty, though, I'm really not a phone person. I'm not super articulate 'on the fly'. So instead of calling him about the TPP, I wrote him a letter. I tried to talk about the issue just as one person talking to another-- letting all personality show through, from my kindergarten-teacher-looking handwriting and vintage daisy stationary to the vocabulary and conversational pace of my writing.

Just one person who cares talking to another person who cares. This is how I signed it:

From an average ordinary everyday supercitizen,

~Ely