Timed-release blessings

The e-mail mystified me. I didn’t recognize the writer’s name. Her message began, “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to speak with you at [my] church today. I was at the bookstore table and couldn’t get away to thank you for what the Lord taught this church through you.”

The church she named stands several states away from where I live. I had indeed spoken there. My topic? Confessions of a Religious Has-Been. This talk does not leave listeners feeling pleasantly warm and fuzzy. It challenges them to step into a freedom they haven’t known. To do so, church-goers in particular must confront the web of religious thinking entangling them.

As the topic suggests, I speak from experience. I dangled in a religious web. I pledged allegiance to things connected with God that are not God. Wanting to look like Jesus Christ, I conformed to the pattern of the Pharisees. Tragically, I invited others into similar entanglements.

Through a series of traumatic circumstances, I saw the prison that held me. I heard Christ’s call, “Come out!” “Be free!” (Isa. 49:9 NIV). Responding meant inviting an identity crisis. It meant leaving behind a deeply frustrated – but comfortably familiar – me. The moment I took the keys God was holding out, “He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me” (Psalm 18:19 NIV).

He did not bring me out from the church, which he has always defined, not in terms of buildings or programs, but in terms of the people he knows as his. He did not lead me out of Christianity. Oh no. Freeing me from what hindered, he catapulted me to a new place of intimacy with him and genuine community with others who love him.

So now, Martin Luther and I have something in common. October 31, 1517, Luther reportedly posted Ninety-five Theses on the doors of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. He titled his document, The Ninety-Five Theses on the Power of Indulgences. He could have called it, Confessions of a Religious Has-Been. Luther challenged the churched people of his day to see the web of religious thinking entangling them and to step into a freedom they hadn’t known.

I was born October 31. Now when I make my own confessions, some churched people act skeptical; some, shocked. Invited to romp in this spacious place, some take offense. Some panic. When prisons we do not see trap and define us, freedom repels and terrifies us.

What a blessing to receive an e-mail from someone who has embraced the freedom Christ offers and who wrote to assure me (my paraphrase), “Yes, yes, yes! You said exactly what we needed to hear!”

How mystifying, the little word “today.”

The Sent date on the message matched the date I sat reading the e-mail, yet I had spoken at that church seven months before. The woman’s description of my talk reflected what I’d said months earlier. Yet, she wrote, “I’m sorry I didn’t get to speak with you . . . today.”

In reply, I thanked her for writing, then expressed my confusion. She responded, “Did you just get this e-mail today???? I did, indeed, send this e-mail the very day you came to my church seven months ago.”

Some 490 years after Luther’s bold act, we marvel at the multiplied blessings God has released as a result. Some seven months after I poured out my soul in one gathering of frustrated but comfortable church-goers, I marveled at the unexpected blessing and strong encouragement God released to me.

© 2007 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.