Right away, here is a disclaimer.  This question is not original to me.  As a matter of fact, I doubt a whole lot of what I write in this blog will be original. When it’s possible, I will provide a source, but I also come at life knowing I’m a composite jumble of many things going back to God-only-knows when. So not much you will read here is entirely new.

But if you ever do surmise some source of what I give you here, maybe this will help. I prefer not to use overused terms. Such wording carries connotation that is loaded. At the least, that’s not fair to what I want to say, and it’s not fair to you either.  Why read what has already been said before?  

It’ll waste your time and bring up a resistance that’s only going to muddle our connection. I aim to express ideas, questions, beliefs and challenges in fresh expressions.  For some, this may be intriguing; for others, it may be offensive. 

Either way, I want to take us to the edge and not adopt perspectives that haven’t been honestly explored.

Easy answers are not my goal, so you won’t get from me a saccharine-sweet line. We’ve all experienced too much to swallow them and be satisfied. I’ve lived long enough to know trials and challenges will sink your soul if that’s all you’ve got in your grasp.  

On the other hand, the hard questions can be the ones that take a person to new heights of perspective while providing foundations that are as old as excavated rocks. Tough, scary questions are the ones with most value in a fully examined life.

Even so, I do not discard automatically what is ancient, old, been-round-the-block before. If something has lasted this long, it had merit at some time. Our lives might not be such as people knew in the past, but likely we still breathe no differently. Humanity pursues what gives life, and if it worked before, it sustained, maybe even enriched, existence. Possibly if re-explained, it deserves acceptance.

Enough with the philosophical for now.  

I am the granddaughter of Italian immigrants and Georgia sharecroppers. 

I always lived in Delaware, the Mid-Atlantic region, until a few years ago when my husband (46 years!)  Iand I when decided to split residences between Wilmington, Delaware and Jacksonville, Florida so as to be near both their children. I studied literature in college, but only really learned to write when teaching high school composition.  While I always have loved school, I did not learn how to learn efficiently (and get good grades) until I started my first master’s degree.  In other words, direct instruction works which probably is why my writing has a didactic slant.

Life took on a surprising direction when I had a spiritual calling to enter ministry with a focus on mental health counseling as an ordained deacon in The Methodist Church. That second master’s degree and seminary training were enthralling, but in hindsight, an extension in what I had known before. 

My clients invited me into the stories of their lives, not unlike the great literature I love, and I was privileged to walk with them as they negotiated their paths.  I’ll never know people more courageous and heroic than those who work through the counseling process.

Seminary likewise was familiar but also stretched my mind in places I’d never have known without its challenges. 

I attended a small Christian school through grade eight for not quite the right reasons. My family lived in the innercity during school desegregation, and so to keep me out of that conflict, my parents sent me to a not-very-expensive private school close to our home. I wasn’t the typical student there; my father owned a bar, and my mother took me to Sunday School and when old enough just dropped me off on my own.  

To the school’s credit, they loved me and taught me well.  I learned enough of the usual academics, but I really excelled at Bible study, putting those kids whose dads were preachers and missionaries to shame. Yes, I took on for myself a belief in Jesus as the Son of God there.  Even so, high school and college found me falling away maybe not in belief so much as in practice.  That story though has more for another day.

Ordination in a mainline denomination really didn’t fit with this background. I never before had been a member of a church, can’t remember taking communion until I was in my twenties, and I wasn’t baptized until my son was born. But God-knows-why, it happened. Still, I come to doctrine, dogma, and the biblical text with an outsider sense of what insiders know. And I am so grateful, for this gives me that edge to which I write and engage.  

Who do you say that I am? Jesus asked this question after he brought a message that twisted the world on its theological axis. (Matthew 16:15) 

Here, we can search that question. You are invited to bring your questions, comments, doubts and determinations to this discussion. At the end of the proverbial day, maybe we will have an answer of some sort for him and each other.