Bible?
Chapter 8: The beautiful questions of messy humans
This is week eight of nineteen.
Each week, one chapter of my book, Trusting How We See.
The letter kills joy.
Our spirit sets it dancing.
Which will you follow?
What if these texts were never meant to be perfect?
What if they were always what they are: the beautiful struggle of messy humans trying to make sense of what this all might mean?
People with limited understanding of the world they lived in, asking the same questions we’re asking now.
Is there something bigger than us?
Why are we afraid?
Why do we divide?
Are we alone?
We’ve been gifted these texts not as answers but as company. Every one of them: a human attempt to put words to the ineffable.
Some pages are warnings. What ego does when it projects itself onto the Unnamable. Others are wisdom that has held for thousands of years. Trust Life with your heart instead of trying to think your way through. That’s a reminder I need daily.
Somewhere along the way, texts written out of lament and wonder were mistaken for blueprints. Read literally, the texts can divide. Tools for determining who’s in and who’s out.
Read as poetry, stories, metaphor, they come alive. Reminding us that we all belong.
And suddenly a story we learned as children breaks us open decades later. Not because someone explained it better. Because we lived enough to finally hear what it was saying.
Wisdom lands differently depending on the soil. We can read something for decades without comprehending it until we live it directly.
And as we grow, we become the stories.