Monday, August 4, 2008

a good word

Yesterday, my sister, Jenny, and I took the three boys to see my brother, Chris.
He was in town staying with my cousins, Beth and Tim and their kiddos.
That warrants an out of town trip since Uncle Chris lives in Missouri.
On the way Jenny and I spoke of all things important like summer and
homemade jam and cousins and money and sales at Macy's
and church planting and weight loss and exercise and
"For goodness sakes, there is no screaming in the car on the way to Napa."
Okay, that part was just me, not so much Jenny.
As was the "No, we are not listening to Radio Disney right now" and
"I'm sorry that your hands are chocolatey, Addison,
but you have to use your words instead of shrieking like a banshee" and
"We still have an hour to go. When you ask me how long it takes to
get there every 10 minutes, time will continue to go by very slowly."
But on the way, Jenny got out The Message
(a modern paraphrase of the Bible by theology professor/pastor Eugene Peterson)
and read to us out of Paul's 2nd Letter to the Corinthians.
And the phraseology of The Message? It gets to the heart of things.
We had just been discussing some hard parts about living,
because, tsgs, there are hard parts about living
and Jenny read this from 2 Corintians 4:
Since God has so generoulsy let us in on what he is doing,
we're not about to throw up our hands and walk off the job
just because we run into occasional hard times.

(I kid you not, people, I had JUST been telling Jenny, I was ready to walk off the job, so to speak, because life gets crazy and DOES NOT TURN OUT the way I tell it to.....)
We refuse to wear masks and play games.
We don't maneuver and manipulate behind the scenes.
And we don't twist God's Word to suit ourselves.
Rather, we keep everything we do and say out in the open,
the whole truth on display,
so that those who want to can see and judge for themselves
in the presence of God.

We had to read it twice because it was so very good
and called us up short about things like trying to control the outcome of things
and sticking with what God has called us to and keep our lives open and truthful.
I thought you might want to ponder it, too.
Check out 2 Corinthians 4 in The Message. It only gets better as you read on.
It's a good word.


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2 comments:

Kelly @ Love Well said...

Just about any word from The Message is a Good Word to me.

Because I was a PK who grew up going to church three days a week and attending Christian school all my life, I sometimes feel like I can recite the NIV (badly) from memory. I always know where the main passages are going, which makes it really difficult for me to not feel bored.

But The Message?!? Ahhhh. It speaks to me. I can read for hours and never feel like I'm reading the same old, same old.

Jodie | Velour said...

I could totally echo Kelly here - except the part about being a PK. I wasn't. I love the Message Bible - and you're right - that is a good word. :)