“We always attended church, I never ceased to be a believer and threw myself into Choir, teaching scripture and Sunday school, feeling that by being super ‘holy’ and giving myself to good works that God would forgive me for what I was.”

And

“Within me I had evolved an androgynous alter ego with whom I struggled to keep myself sane. No this isn’t the gospel of the demoniac and no pigs are going to fly off the cliff, though there were many times when I wanted too. Dialoguing with this androgynous one I managed to live in two worlds, the inner world where the struggle for selfhood continued and the outer one in which most of the time, at first anyway, I was able to forget what was going on with the evil thing I was.”

I invite you to read words I found exceptionally powerful. They are, in Andrew Blair’s words simply … “my Journey of Faith is a tapestry in the making as all such stories are.”

And yet this journey describes something I have known most of my “faith life”: “that God would forgive me for what I was.”

I see and read the words of so many who live a life of faith with this massive burden on their backs.  That I am not good enough for God and must somehow try to bridge that gap even if I can’t.  That I was born a sinner, I am destined always to be a sinner and that without “grace freely given” I am screwed.

Which is odd way to live being “saved” and “chosen” and “loved without condition for all eternity”.

And yet it is how I was taught to live and taught to live saved.  It was how I was brought up with God all perfect (and powerful) and me just a piece of dirty insignificant gum on the sole of his Heavenly Shoe!  And Andrew writes from the heart about my struggle – about your struggle – about all of our struggles…

Not with “God” – but with what God is not.  The God I was taught.

And the God I have discovered despite that teaching.  A God of love without condition.  A God who is all perfect and is all powerful.  But which makes all the subsequent “bogeyman teaching” plain wrong.

Andrew is me and you and all of us.

And that why his words have such power for me– oh, did I mention that Andrew’s story is Andrew’s story and no one else’s.

Just like all of our own stories.

Thank you –

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Paul
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