Clog #1 - Real or Not Real?

(The next  several paragraphs are about the Hunger Games, if you just don’t want to deal with it, skip down to the part that says “DONE WITH THE HUNGER GAMES CHATTER.”)

It is my great delight to report that the Hunger Games jokes have continued and even intensified with this first week and a half at dear old Elim.

The theme this summer is “The Elimpics,” which has led the program team* to make these kinds of suggestions: “Well, the Hunger Games is the ultimate Olympics, so we could just do that instead – we wouldn’t have to plan anything, we could just throw all the campers in the sports field with some crap from the prop room and let them have at it.”

NOT THAT FUNNY… (but funny enough to dress up like Effie and to wish the odds in favor of the trainees and whisper “Nightlock, nightlock, nightlock” into the radio every once in a while…)

My bcf (best camp friend) Morgan actually likes the Hunger Games, which is strange, because she usually hates “teen novel sensation sweeping the nation” hubbub. She wants her radio handle to be “Katniss” and often retorts in conversation, “Well, that’s because I’M KATNISS!” This declaration is accompanied by the pantomime drawing of a bow and pretend arrows flying around the general vicinity.

My only issue with this is that Morgan is Team Gale. I mean, HOW COULD SHE?

Another programmer, Mark, dubbed himself “Peeta.” When we asked some trainees which Hunger Games character Mark would be, they said, “Cato,” and Mark promptly pitched a pretend fit and threw them out of the program office.

DONE WITH THE HUNGER GAMES CHATTER

The point of all of that is this – I am glad I’m at camp. I’m actually enjoying myself, which is unexpected… When I left for camp on the 30^th, I was crying. Today, I’m leaving at 2:15 to go back. I can’t wait (and not just because of the HG ridiculousness – if I included everything that happens at camp that makes me smile, this blog would be entirely unmanageable).

I am getting so much more than I deserve.

I am awash in grace.

The world is awash in grace.

The state of grace is the only real thing that there is – everything else is self-deception.

My angsty squirrel moments – my frequent fits about not being good enough to deserve grace – are only pride.

The camp show I’m putting on (and believe you me, I’m definitely putting it on), my show of concern, my pretense of intellect, my appearance of faith – even these are awash in grace.

I saw her this week. She came up for the returners’ session on Friday afternoon.

We hugged – she said, “I’m ok.” We smiled. There will probably be more talk about it – but there is GRACE. She is giving me grace. Maybe I'll be able to screw up the courage to accept it.

Jesus once said, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Looked up the verse on Google – there’s even grace for THAT).

The following thoughts are borrowed entirely from Brennan Manning’s Ragamuffin Gospel: Jesus was not talking about the innocence or purity of children. First century Palestine did not think of children that way. First century Palestine thought of children as worthless, as useless, as insignificant, as incapable.

Unless I come to terms with the reality of my insignificance and inability to deserve grace, I will remain in the same double-minded Christianity circus sideshow that I have been hiding out in for the past 5 years.  I will remain in the not real.

And I can choose to retreat to the not real whenever I feel like it – yet another shard of grace. I don’t have to choose it.

But.

“What is Good and New about the Good News is the wild claim that Jesus did not simply tell us that God loves even in our wickedness and folly and wants each of us to love each other in the same way and to love him too, but that if we will let him, God will actually bring about this unprecedented transformation in our hearts himself.

What is both Good and New about the Good News is the mad insistence that Jesus lives on among us not just as another haunting memory but as the outlandish, holy, and invisible power of God working not just through the sacraments (q.v.) but in countless hidden ways to make even slobs like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off by ourselves.

Thus the Gospel is not only Good and New but, if you take it seriously, a Holy Terror. Jesus never claimed that the process of being changed from a slob into a human being was going to be a Sunday school picnic. On the contrary. Childbirth may occasionally be painless, but rebirth never. Part of what it means to be a slob is to hang on for dear life to our slobbery.” – Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking.

So, if you’ve made it to the end of this, I’m going to ask you to do something that I feel awkward about. Pray for me and for you and for your family and for all the people you know. Pray that we will get it. Pray that we will understand just how insignificant we are. Just how incapable we are. Just how fantastic the grace is. That we don’t have to pretend to believe we are sinners while hiding behind self-righteousness (Manning again) but that we can actually believe that we are sinners and TAKE THE GRACE. Take it and RUN WITH IT. DROWN IN IT. SPEND IT, CONSUME IT, GET DRUNK ON IT, AND GO BACK FOR MORE.

Because our sin is real, but the grace is real-er.

*The program team consists of 8 individuals and 2 teams. 4 people on each team. Each team is in charge of the program for the grade school or middle school camps, of which there are three each, creatively named GS1, MS1,GS2, MS2, GS3, and MS3. On the grade school team: Zoe, Mark (Peeta), Brady, and me. On the middle school team: Morgan (Katniss), Kaitie, Ben, and Justin.

All of us are certifiably insane. I think we're kind of important (which is to say I think I'm kind of important), which God probably thinks is funny, because God keeps introducing me to people like Ashley Graummann, a trainee from last week who legitimately works for God and not for appearances.