a kingdom built of seeds

Nothing is concrete. I’m not one to build a home on a fundamentalist, literalist, or “rock solid” foundation; I am nomadic in what and where I plant myself. Not the “sinking sand” the Bible speaks of, just finding a place in the dirt to set up a tent, then moving on to the next location as change and transformation asks of me. It’s misleading to take Jesus’s words about building on the “solid rock” to mean we never change our beliefs and how we see and interact with and love God, others, the world, ourselves. A solid foundation does not equal entrenched, static, unchanging, tribal, closed-minded, narrow, exclusive. Leave the unchanging to God. Even so, it’s fascinating how Jesus subtly altered what he said and how he said it according to the audience and context. His message was not so linear as I once thought. Who knows where and how he’ll show up. And who can say where we’ll end up, and how.

I’m not out to tell anyone what to believe, to tell anyone that I’m right and they’re wrong. I feel my way through the world, and thus my beliefs are subject to change, my idea of “truth” open and fluid in its ambiguity.

I think following God or Jesus or Holy Spirit (or whatever you want to call it) is more nomadic than sedentary. A nomadism of the heart, of beliefs, of love. There’s an old, familiar, worn, overused language—whether Christian, religious, or spiritual—that makes us apathetic and sedentary. And there’s a new language each of us must discover in our spirituality, one that will give rise to the courage required to follow God into the nomadism of the heart—the ambiguous, indefinable, dark place of knowing we know little (or nothing), and in the midst of it, still knowing a place of rest, even when we’re without answers.