echoes of redemption

What do you see?

What story does her face tell?

Do you believe there is a God who has a plan for her life?

Here’s her caption from the NYT Photo Blog: Indian sex workers held candles as they celebrated International Sex Workers Rights Day organized by the Dubar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta. The International Sex Worker Rights Day began in 2001 when more than 25,000 sex workers gathered in India for a sex worker festival.

Now what do you see?

If you want to run something successfully you have to put the best time into the best people – everyone knows that.

If you have 99 people who are pouring into what you’re doing and one person who walks away, you let the one walk and work with the 99.

Unless you’re trying to live like Jesus.

Because for some reason Jesus was obsessed with the one. Really you could say it goes deeper than that: Jesus was obsessed with helping the lost become found.

He developed this concept with three consecutive stories: a lost sheep (one of 99), a lost coin (one of ten) and a lost person (one of two). For the religious elite, these stories ranged from baffling to infuriating – because in each story the things that were found were left by the master in order to find the things which were lost. For the master to do something favored those who were out over those who were in was ridiculous in their minds.

But that’s the beauty of God.

And it only gets more beautiful when we find that we are the ones who have fallen away.

That he would drop everything he is doing and come after us.

Pursue us – even in our wandering.

To know that he chases after the one.

I like to follow people who ask questions. Especially questions about faith. Especially questions which they don’t know the answers to. But there is a blend of theology that doesn’t allow questions – and it’s abusive.

Anyone not questioning their faith is not authentic – or their god is too small.

Either way, I’m not interested in following them.

The God I follow is immense and multi-faceted. His totality is unknowable – so no branch of human thought will ever completely understand him.  No one theology will be able to explain him.

Which is why he’s so amazing to follow.

And why we should still have questions.

Maybe the people that try to make those of us feel guilty when we doubt, question and wonder are just trying to control and manipulate us to think like they do – and maybe their view of God is monochromatic and incomplete.

So keep questioning. Let doubt spark curiosity. Embrace the wonder of God.