Thursday, February 5, 2009

Still More Alive - e*b week 4


For: The Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen's University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt

This week's discussion question was another struggle. Just the magnitude of the possibilities weighed on me. I had to write a Christian "worldview." Distill all this information into a concise explanation of who I believe God to be and who I am in His Kingdom.

Concise? How?

I kept wondering how I was going to be able to put all of my thoughts into cohesive sentences and paragraphs, how I would be able to narrow down the vastness of the subject into a few measly words???

I did my usual - check out what the others are posting, look at their format, how long, what style, etc. I figure that if I can see theirs, then I can get an idea of how to write mine to conform somewhat to the status quo or at least figure out what it is the teacher "wants."

[That last bit hearkens back to school days when the grades were given more on whether you could give the teachers what they wanted (i.e. the "right answer") instead of what your true thoughts might be.]

But I couldn't come up with an essay that pulled it all together. All that kept coming to me were bits and pieces...words and phrases...of what I had read over the past few weeks, thoughts about God and His Kingdom, heaven and earth, Jesus, me, being fully alive.

As I jotted them down, they began to take shape in the form of a poem or some sort of prose. Definitely not your 5 paragraph essay.

I thought that maybe I'd take these thoughts and from there get to an essay because, goodness, no one else had just a somewhat poetic list. (Except for one fellow student who started in beautiful poetry and ended in magnificent paragraphs.)

The more I tweaked and read through what I had written, though, a growing satisfaction began to fill my heart. I pushed through the inconvenient feelings that I might not get the answer "right" to the reality that whatever my answer, it needed to be mine, however it might look.

Just before the midnight deadline, I went to my facebook classroom to post my answer, and this lightness continued to expand inside of me. I hit the "post" button and took note that I had just become more fully human. I had decided to not try to get my answer to look like someone else's (the reality is they are all so very different in content and style; there really is no such thing as "status quo"). I had allowed myself to just be me.

I think I might just have experienced increasing freedom.

Whoohoo! The corks off!

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