Born Again....again

What do you do when you find yourself being "born again"....again? What do you do with that experience, when it challenges almost all of the strongly held views of your church, apostle, (yeah that's what he called himself), pastors, brothers, sisters, family and friends? What do you do when some of your most firmly held beliefs just melt away in the radiance of God's love. What do you do when all of this is happening within the walls of an ultra conservative legalistic fundamentalist pentecostal sect? What do you do when you've spent two decades climbing your sects religious ladder, only to get to the top of the wall and realise that you were on the wrong wall the whole time?

To quote Shane Claiborne (a disciple of Jesus I really admire) - "The more I get to know Jesus the more trouble he seems to get me into" Anyone who has ever started on the journey of getting to know Jesus, knows exactly what Shane is talking about. A few years back, when I started to take seriously the words and the life of the man who said- "Follow Me"- my troubles really began. Troubles that in hindsight I wouldn't swap for anything. Although at the time they came with a lot of pain and inner turmoil.The last few years have been a time of embracing those troubles, making sense of the last 26 years, and living in God's love and enjoying the love of family and true friends.


The title of this post is Born Again....again. You might wonder why....again? Well that's a long story. A story I hope to add to in future posts. You see I felt I was already born again. I had testified to that fact, in a highly scripted manner literally hundreds of times over the years.      " I'd like to praise the Lord that I've been baptised by full immersion in water and have received the Holy Spirit with the bible evidence of speaking with other tongues"- was pretty much the standard way I expressed my "born again" experience. As with many members of fundamentalist groups, to live out my born again-ness, basically all that was expected of me was to follow the sects rules and guidelines, both written and unwritten. To be fair certain changes were also expected to take place in the way I lived, but more often than not these changes were little more than superficial religious window dressing. The thing about window dressing is that all you ever produce is well dressed dummies.

The Raising of Lazarus

 For me being born again....again was not an instantaneous experience. I didn't throw myself on some church altar with tears and snot streaming down my face and then testify to some miraculous instantaneous change. In reality it wasn't so much a matter of being born again...again, as it was an awakening and liberation, of something that had been created within me many years earlier. A resurrection from a religious tomb through the immeasurable love of God. To best describe it I'll quote from an essay about famous artist Vincent Van Gogh.    "In Vincent's copy of The Raising of Lazarus by Rembrandt, the image of the sun replaces the figure of Christ. He copied this painting essentially to console himself during a time of intense discouragement due to his painful seizures. In Vincent's version, the sun is shining upon Lazarus as he awakens in his tomb- and Lazarus' face has the unmistakable resemblance to Vincent himself. The sun symbolizing the source of all Being, has the power to heal and resurrect, to germinate new life. In that force called Love, God is present."    To put it simply, LOVE set me free and Love brought to life what was so full of potential, yet had been imprisoned within a religious box for so long.

Martin Luther said in his Lectures on Romans that true spiritual progress was "always to begin again" He said we must daily "embrace the love and kindness of God......and daily exercise our faith therein; entertaining no doubt of God's love and kindness"  I like the way Martin Luther puts it-"always to begin again" - in the sense of becoming alive moment by moment or day by day to the agape/love of God.  Is life outside the box of institutional religion easy or perfect every day? No, but it is one thing that it could never fully be before- REAL. Anyway as time permits I intend to post about those times of awakening, life outside the box and the BETTER NEWS that has become the centre of my life these days.