May 12th, 2015

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Pretending

Tuesday, May 12th, 2015

When I was a kid I used to pretend. I pretended I was the Lone Ranger. I pretended I was Mike Nelson from Sea Hunt. (Yeah, I know I’m showing my age). I pretended I was the hero of the baseball team: pitched no-hitters and hit home runs. As I got older the games continued. Star basketball player. Famous preacher. MacGyver in real life. For full disclosure: none…NONE…of those ever happened.

I also pretended to know it all. I’m not proud of that but in an effort to foster honesty, I had to put it out there. Stone #1 in the book 46 Stones deals with pretending to see completely and clearly. One of the “brands” of a legalist is the pretense of knowing everything, especially doctrinally. You know the old ditty: “Us four, no more, shut the door.” I was right and all others were wrong. It was ugly. Scary. Sad. Damning. It certainly is nothing to be proud of.

God has changed that about me. Grace has changed that. It is okay to have convictions, but even those can be handled with grace and love. The key for all of this is this:

God is not as small as my understanding of things. Nor of a church. Nor of a denomination. (pp.17-18)

My height of arrogance knew no bounds. I “peacocked” my beliefs. I boldly proclaimed my narrow, opinionated, legalistic views. I have often wished I could go back and apologize to the people from those churches which I hurt because of my arrogance. But I can’t turn back the hands of time. I can only influence the future. Any thoughts?

A few weeks ago I wrote this post. This is the first in a series of random installments about this book.

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