Elastigirl

Greg.

Your comment caught my attention.

As far as doing everything “by the book” — sometimes I think christians feel that to be fully living their life for God, as much as is possible, requires embracing every word in their own Bibles (certainly the New Testament) as binding on their lives. For example, churches conduct baby dedications simply because that’s what Mary and Joseph did with Jesus. Does this make it necessary for us? Part of what it means to be a christian? I really don’t think so.

The intense pursuit of God can become the obsessive pursuit of words. Words in “the book” and phrases are parsed to oblivion to the point of losing the point of the message or idea as a whole. Kind of like arguing with someone for so long you can’t even remember what the issue was in the first place. Certainly this is done with many aspects of the complementarian and egalitarian viewpoints.

While is is good to be able to argue one’s point of view if it is being challenged, I can’t help but feel this is all much ado about nothing. We’ve twisted our brains tighter and tighter, impossibly convoluting what is so incredibly obvious and plain: human relationships are most successful when we treat each other the way we want to be treated. Every definition of love and God’s love boils down to this.

I tend to think that we’d all do a much better job of serving the common good on a macro and micro level if we relaxed somewhat and just kept this golden rule principle in the forefront of our minds. We’d certainly have more time and energy for it.