Today's Mailbox

I got a lot of nice messages and letters yesterday and today acknowledging my year anniversary of telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth about myself (see www.bloginthenow.blogspot.com - 'One Year Later Part I')

Thanks so much for your letters, everyone, but I think this one is my favorite...

Bish, with this whole year anniversary business going on I found myself wanting to take a longer time to listen to you today. I'm off work, fighting a tiny autumn cold, and decided to just stay in, cuddle my dogs, and listen to you while drinking tea and eating apples. Sounds picturesque, doesn't it?

I find myself truly wanting to communicate what you already know... lol. You speak in this sermon about how immature people can be in their walk debating God in one, or three, or a thousand. And you mention that you are getting affirmation that you're just aware of it and in the flow of some of the oldest news in the world. It seems to me, as a person who has wandered from mainline Lutheranism through AOG and onwards through eastern religions and back through honest and sincere prayer and pursuit, that indeed you have a key that so many have lost. If people realized how ultimately simple the Truth actually is.... but, it's more expedient for powers and principalities to separate and encourage ego over agape.

At any rate, I wish I had met you when I was wandering through Carrollton at West Georgia a decade ago. People love to insult Christianity, not always without reason.. but you really do get it, and you distill truths for people to find and pursue God in easy, loving ways. If more people had access to teaching such as yours, they wouldn't need to wander to Buddhism and other traditions to find that Christianity holds the same intelligence and teachings on curbing ego and seeking transcendence through the Holy Spirit.

I've often said that Christians now have the hardest path of all. The original message of Christ has been so perverted that believers need to focus their work even harder than followers of other faiths. The eye of a needle is the best metaphor! I still believe this is true because of the pressure to place dogma and theology over mystic experience, actual experience of God in the Now moment. However, your teachings show me it's still possible.

Don't ever stop what you are doing. Like you have written, God always provides. People want to make it about your orientation. But you know it's so much more than that.

And yes, next time I get back to Charlotte to visit family, I'll have to take the 85 hop south and wander through.

Love to you and everyone involved in your ministry.

S.D.

Good Stuff

I saw you speak at Oasis yesterday and it was truly life changing. I think this is the first time that I felt directly engaged with the scripture as if it was relevant to me as a gay man.

So many people have made me feel like this couldn't be my faith if I lived my life honestly...but you asked as God asked, "who told you that?" and why?

I could be angry at those Christians who cast me aside with fundamental interpretations but I am mostly just simply grateful for the sermon you ministered today, it is like my heart is truly beating again for the first time as a Christian.

God spoke through you directly to me instead of at me or over me or around me...for once my faith and my sexual identity could be at peace and engaged together in thoughtful and joyful praise.

When you asked us to open the bible to Genesis, I rolled my eyes...because for the longest time reading the bible especially the Old Testament has been to me like like making the victim of a crime return to the crime scene.

Yet God worked through you to make Genesis one of my favorite books now. Now that the beginning of the book doesn't seem so bad after all, maybe I will read the whole thing through.

Thank you also for speaking to the fact that religion has historically acted as a boys only club. I completely agree, the outright disregard for feminism and women leadership in so many Christian circles has profoundly bothered me.

I am now living my life with extra thought about striving for the tree of life versus the tree of good and evil.

Thank you and god bless.

David Thomas Moran