Another recommendation from a former Billings resident, I recently reconnected with the recommender last Friday while I was in Denver. We hadn’t seen each other since the summer of 2018, but we chatted about my upcoming move to Denver. She recommended several podcasts and authors that I’ve added to my future reading list. She also inspires me. This recommender is living with cystic fibrosis while still working, having a family, and being very involved in her church community.
Recommendation #27 from Mimi Salonen
Searching for Sunday by Rachel Held Evans
Rachel Held Evans is best-selling Christian author who has written on topics of faith, doubt, deconstruction, and reconstruction. She has also been featured on The Liturgists Podcast (recommendation #31) and speaks at schools and churches around the nation. Searching for Sunday is, “less about searching for a Sunday church and more about searching for Sunday resurrection. It’s about all the strange ways God brings dead things back to life again. It’s about giving up and starting over again.”
Written to share Rachel’s journey of faith and doubt, it is organized around the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches: Baptism, Confession, Holy Orders, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, and Marriage. Rachel wants to re-infuse joy, hope, and love back into the mixed-up messages that come pouring out of the Evangelical church.
The next 3 quotes from the book really spoke to me, because I feel like I am in the same place in my faith journey that theses quotes speak to. In the past 15 months, I’ve had to give up and start over numerous times – in the places I’ve been living, in my experiences, and in the friendships that I’ve gained and lost.
1 – “I am a Christian,” I said, “because Christianity names and addresses sin. It acknowledges the reality that the evil we observe in the world is also present within ourselves. It tells the truth about the human condition–that we’re not okay.”
2 – “God works through life, through people, and through physical, tangible, and material reality to communicate his healing presence in our lives,” explains Robert E Webber when describing the principles of sacrament. “God does not meet us outside of life in an esoteric manner. Rather, he meets us through life incidents, and particularly through the sacraments of the church. Sacrament, then, is a way of encountering the mystery.”
3 – “But if I’ve learned anything in this journey, both in writing this book and clumsily living its contents, it’s that Sunday morning sneaks up on us–like dawn, like resurrection, like the sun that rises a ribbon at a time. We expect a trumpet and triumphant entry, but as always, God surprises us by showing up in the ordinary things: in bread, in wine, in water, in words, in sickness, in healing, in death, in a manager of hay, in a mother’s womb, in an empty tomb. Church isn’t some community you join or some place you arrive. Church is what happens when someone taps you on the shoulder and whispers in your ear, Pay attention, this is holy ground; God is here.“
For me, God has been continually showing up in the music and words that I encounter. I’ve been sharing those songs here as a way for your to also connect with or experience God. Because these songs have helped me to know that God is here, God is with us. We all too often abandon God while thinking that he has abandoned us. By finding God in the ordinary, we keep God on our minds.
Today is April 23rd, so the song is the 23rd from my Fellowship playlist. Still On My Mind by CCIITTYY