substance

And I feel like I am insubstantial, like a ghost, something thin not in the sense of a thin body, but a thin reality. Indistinct. And I don't like when worship songs sing about Jesus having made us whole. I don't feel whole, I feel incomplete.

It's too bad that Christianity has ruined the word 'saved'. I don't like that it's come to only refer to what comes after death. But the truth is, that is the most abstract and distant meaning of the word to my life. It's much more immediate and real that Jesus saves me now, in many ways. At least salvation still has the potential to be a powerful word. Saved is a weak word, and I hate weak words. I hate the way I weaken my own words with qualifiers (I think, I feel, kinda, like, not really). Those qualifiers castrate sentences. (Most of the time, sometimes uncertainty and weakness can be powerful as well.) I very much agreed with Tim's pastor yesterday that salvation is a process.

When people attempt to systematize and categorize the processes of conversion and salvation, I become suspicious. Actually, I feel suspicious in general of a lot of theology now. There probably is a good basis for a lot of what I'm suspicious of, but it just hasn't been demonstrated to me yet. I don't like that. Even theological concepts like the trinity haven't been necessarily demonstrated to me yet.

I really like elephants. Perhaps this is my Thai-ness revealing itself, since the elephant image is so prevalent over there. But I'm not sure that I really like elephants themselves as much as images of elephants. I probably wouldn't get really excited about seeing a breathing elephant.