Sweet and Sour

It's been a while since I've written. There is a reason for that.

In this blog, I share the things I say in the gathering. In the sense of the word as Paul uses it (speaking forth Christ), I prophesy, as do all the others in the open meeting. There happens to be two sides to a sword that comes out of the mouth.

(Rev. 10: 9-11) So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, “Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.” I took the little scroll from the angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, languages and kings."

Generally, when believers turn a nice phrase, it's a happy time for everybody. We communicate something and the proverbial light-bulb goes on over our heads. To speak forth something true, something noteworthy, is stimulating.

But the spiritual speaking-forth will have a purpose extending beyond the moment it is expressed. It works its way backward in time, to illuminate things which we have experienced, but more to the point, it lays ground for things in the future. Consider the last thing I posted before my long writing drought.

...And we look into these things because God is there in parable. 

God is in the turbulence, in the disturbance, at the boundary where a thing becomes no longer a thing. 

At the edge of the glacier of reputation crumbling into the sea of humiliation, the conflagration of religious and social standing, the erosion of certainty by the tide of the unknown, God is there in the turbulence.

First, I shared it with the brothers and sisters, then I shared it with whoever reads this blog. It meant something to me, and I think it resonated with a few others. At the time, it felt like singing a clear high note, or fretting a great guitar chord.

When I wrote it, I was thinking of things that I experienced in the past and things that others have gone through. But hard on the heels of this sharing, I was to receive a few choice pieces of news. I was brought to the boundary-of-disturbance right away. First I spoke it, then I wrote it, then I had to eat it.

And frankly, everything I said was no consolation in that disturbance of settling into a new normal. I still believe it's true, what I said, that God is residing in the disturbance. But observing the fire, the glacier, the waves, is not the same as being in the heat or under the ice or in the breakers.

Prophecy is not glorious, whether in the sense of Paul's open-meeting edification or the old-school style of a John or Jonah. Do I really want to publicly utter something pithy if it soon must come home to roost with me/you/us? Or maybe to turn that phrase around, if the Disturbance is on the way, should you and I be publicly and mysteriously notified? I guess so.