Deluge

It's raining here today, just like it did yesterday afternoon. Started around 2pm, now ninety minutes and probably an inch and half later and it's just now letting up a little bit. That's a good thing for the most part, since we (a) need the rain, and (b) it cools things way down in the sultry humid sweaty nasty Midlands of SC. We're going to "chill out" at friends' tonight, letting the kids bring some DVDs and the Gameboy, letting us just sit around and enjoy one more weekend evening before school starts back and the end of summer leads into the busyness of this fall.

I wrote in my wirebound notebook this morning that I'm seeing things from a different perspective right now. It's overwhelming that there's so much to do, and it's overwhelming that there's no real overwhelming pressure from anyone other than myself. I want to do a good job, want to design and implement and deliver on what's expected - and I'm the one who's pressuring myself to do just that. I'm hoping it's a form of ownership for the project, not a delusional need to please. Naah - can't be that.

I'm reading VELVET JESUS by Rob Bell - man, I wasn't ready to get blindsided like that. In chapter two ("movement two", if I'm following correctly), Bell is writing on interpretation and the need for community to look at what's written in the Bible and determine how that's to be lived out in real life. I've wrestled with some of this already, so I was reading and not really paying attention when he got to the point of wifely-submission-to-husbands. "What about the verse that talks about women having authority over their husbands?" (p. 043) - what? I never knew there was a verse that said that, so I looked it up per the reference, and there it is: "The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does" (1 Cor. 7:14, nas). It's not that I thought we didn't already have a healthy idea of what the passages in Ephesians 5-6 meant in terms of mutual submission in relationships and in the marriage relationship in particular, just that I'd never put the one passage side by side with the other, including the same author and the same Holy Spirit doing the inspiration of these seemingly paradoxical paragraphs. I think the "broadside" was just that here's another example of "black and white" being alot more grey than we're usually comfortable with. It's only together, in marriage and together as a group of like-minded and challenged-to-grow Christians, can we hope to make sense of what God's given to us in His Word.

Looks like the rain has slowed to a slight drizzle, and the temperature is in the low 70s rather than the upper 90s as it has been this past week. For now, the deluge might be this post, more than the rain that's still streaming down the gutters out on the street.

[photos from WISTV.com]