bible kid

westwinds is a magnet for biblical weirdness...

i guess there's always one church in every town that invites gossip, suspicion, and intrigue. back home it was victory christian center. we - myself included - used to scoff and sneer at all the goofy and presumably unbiblical things they did in service of relevance or whatever. i stopped. most others continued. maybe i'm reaping what i've previously sewn.

anyway - in jackson, the church-of-ill repute is westwinds.

which means that we typically get 1-2 crazy comments a month from someone holier than us, more learned than us, or most fervent than us.

today, though, i had a funny one...(funny = weird, as opposed to funny = ha ha)

this young guy came up to me, rather bashful and sheepish i might add, and told me that he'd had a dream about westwinds. he'd never attended before, but in his dream he saw the word "westwinds" next to romans 3.13.

trying to be obedient to god, he visited the winds three weeks ago. because ben, and not the main teaching pastor, was speaking he decided to come back once i'd returned from vacation.

so today he sought me out and delivered a fairly harsh scripture.

3.13
"Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit."
"The poison of vipers is on their lips."

thing is, he said that he himself didn't think it really fit. he felt like the winds was dead-on scripturally and he really enjoyed fusion (and, particularly, the teaching).

weird, right?

now, i'd stake my actual, physical life and all that i know and love on the fact that - more than any other church i know - westwinds cares deeply about adherence to the scriptures and faithfulness to Jesus Christ and the biblical text.

but, to be safe, i asked this young guy if he'd pray with me. together, in the lobby after the 9am fusion, we asked the spirit to reveal to us any way in which this scripture might be intended for me personally or westwinds as a whole. we asked god to reveal our blindspots, to confirm that this passage was for us (if indeed it was for us), and to humble us as his servants so we might do a better job of making him proud.

again, i really think that something somewhere got screwed up with this guy's dream.

i think.

but i also think that most people god wants to correct and blind to their own need for correction.

my spirit bears no witness to him bringing this scripture, but - holy spirit - if i'm wrong i really, really want you to help me see it.

i think that's the only true and godly response i can have in this scenario.

in the meantime, however, i have to keep living and leading as if my perceptions and spiritual intuition are spot on. the world needs more churches like westwinds. westwinds needs to become more and more hospitable to the spirit, and we need to do a better job of mobilizing our own community for mission.

so we'll keep following jesus the best way we know how until he checks us.

capice?