The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
February 17, 2008
Vol. 11 no. 07

Everything But...
           Most of us dread starting over. If we have to trash all of the work we have done and start all over again, it seems we have wasted our time. That really is never the case. We carry with us what we have learned positively and negatively from whatever we have done and experienced.
           The Christian faith persists in insisting upon a second birth, a being born again experience as the starting point for the genuine Christian life. It would be nice to clarify just exactly what that means, for there has always been a debate about the definition of being ‘born again.’ The most popular version is a dramatic once-in-a-lifetime event - an out of the blue lightning-bolt strikes and immediately one sees the world in an entirely different way. Paul struck down on the Damascus Road is the model. There are a lot fewer lightning bolts than have been presumed. Most people do it Abram’s way rather than Paul’s.
           Like most of us, Abram did not dodge a bolt, but had an itching in his brain he could not scratch. This mysterious God that nobody had really worshipped in a formal way was insisting that Abram abandon everything and everybody he had known and go somewhere he did not yet know. No word of a struggle, Abram simply did it and started his life all over again and headed north. Later he would turn southwest and ended up in the strange land of Canaan. He took the big fork in the road and it made all the difference, not only for him, but for a large part of the world since then. No lights, very little drama, just an itch, a word.
           Let’s call it ‘beginning again from the beginning.’ Knowing what you already know, you re-lay the foundations of your life with perhaps a bit more thought and compassion than the first time. Born again, for sure.