If you want to appreciate something anew, take yourself back to when it wasn't the status quo. When the entire world hadn't heard about it. When there was no network, no written manual, no early adopters touting it on social media. Then ask yourself, "If it came to me now, would I have recognized its power to change my life? Would I have leapt without looking around to see who else was doing it?"
Not talking about my cellphone.
We just watched "Risen."
We just watched "Risen."
I grew up hearing about the persecutions, the lions in the arena, the trail of miracles witnessed firsthand by those who lived in those times. But Christianity was already an established, centuries-old tradition when I became a born-again Christian at 16 in a country predominantly Christian. Would I have chosen it for my personal belief system if it had been so new, so untested? With the dangers to life and limb looming over me? Knowing my skeptical and scaredy-cat nature, likely not. It would take a personal encounter like that of Saul on the road to Damascus (and like the fictional tribune in "Risen").
But still I choose it, every day. Because what I choose is not a religion or denomination or affiliation. I choose to keep a relationship with God, awaiting each new way the Divine chooses to reveal Spirit to my spirit. Sometimes it comes by way of a humbling moment, when the woman next to me in the theater, whom I had just judged as a bit of a glutton for the size of her popcorn bucket, pours popcorn into an extra cardboard tray and offers it to me.
