Super Freak

Morning one and all,

I am such a fool sometimes, and I mean that in the biblical sense, I am such an unbeliever. I have learned oh so well to view the world as only physical that I forget that the world is spiritual and that we are not the only beings in existence. I forget as I get wrapped up in the day to day stuff of life that I am not all that matters, that humans are not all that matter, that we are not ONLY matter. I forget those things and when trouble comes I want to deal with it in physical terms. I want to get it out of my system so that life can be normal. But as Bruce Cockburn sang: the trouble with Normal is it always gets worse.

It’s easy to forget that normal is not the goal. Death is normal. Sin is normal. Disease is normal. The fall is normal. If we are in Christ Jesus then we shouldn’t be settling for the status quo. We’ve started watching a DVD put out by the Acton Institute on Wednesday nights titled: The Call of the Entrepreneur. I think it has begun to stir us to new ways of thinking: Non-normal ways of thinking in our day and age. We live in an age that wants to be taken care of; an age that has learned to consume and not produce. These things are normal in a fallen world.
There is a stirring in my heart to begin to be a producer. It is the original call of man – to take dominion over the earth, to be fruitful and multiply. Those things all imply producing or transforming what is into something else, something of more and greater value. They require creating wealth.

I’ve been going back to the parable of the Talents a lot lately because it is a clear picture of what our purpose should be in life – it’s not about getting saved and then riding the train to heaven – it is about taking what you have been given by the father, however meager that may seem to you, and increasing it by the grace of God. There is a stirring in my heart to see increase – not just in material things. I want to see that which God has placed in me result in an increase in work for others, a decrease in debt for others, an increase in stability for my community, and increased opportunity, an increase in dreams pursued and fulfilled not just mine but many others. That is what is meant by taking dominion.

Such thinking is anathema in many churches, in many slums across the world. We prefer a poverty mentality. We prefer to be slaves than to be free men. In the last few years I have found myself increasingly wanting to be free, to live. I have begun to see through the façade of culture just enough to remind myself that the smell of death surrounds us, and that is normal for a dead world. I’ve been a fool as I said earlier because I have let my self be duped into believing that everybody around me was alive. But that is not true most of the things and people that I encounter every single day are dead. They are without hope. They are without life. They hate life because true life is the keeping of the commandments. I still struggle with hating life especially when trouble knocks on my door.

I have begun to understand that for the most part the church is a ghetto. It is full of people who want to live normal lives with a T-shirt that says Jesus saves. But in the trenches they want to look like the dead, act like the dead, be famous like the dead, shop like the dead, eat like the dead. Etc. they want to be the un grateful dead. The truth is that the Christian Ghetto wants to be dead until they go to heaven where they think they will be transformed into living beings. They want to live in righteousness – someday but even then they want that righteousness to be normalized. Works with out faith, faith without works they're both dead.

My heart is calling me to be abnormal. Or for you Young Frankenstein fans, Abbey Normal. Yakatata Yakatata. I want to become a freak of nature and become un-natural. I guess to use the words of Rick James I want to be a Super Freak. I want to be godly in everything I do and say. I want to be a producer and not a consumer. I want to truly live instead of cozying up to death all the time. I want to but I can’t do it on my own.

It takes the grace of God to make us abnormal. May God have mercy on the living dead.

Grace and Peace,

Brad