Faith as a Trampling

As we all try to move toward a place of being more Christ-like and to follow in the path of Jesus we all wrestle with personal, spiritual and emotional issues. For some those issues place a barrier between themselves and others. I think of the metaphor that we frequently use in the church; that we are going to build a house or wall and that we have to have a strong foundation and piece by piece use our interpretation of scripture and our experiences as each brick that we lay as we build our faith. The problem may be that in our attempt to build the strong house and wall we have placed a wall between ourselves and those people that God is wanting to use to minister to us or those that God would have us minister to. There is also the problem that some people's walls make look different then ours because they have used different bricks of interpretation and experiences and in the event that something happens in our life that causes us to reexamine a brick that means that the whole wall of faith has to be dismantled.

What if instead of a wall of strong faith our metaphor changed. What if our faith was instead a trampling. I know that is a big change but hang with me for a moment. A trampling is a network of small fibers that make up the mesh fabric that we jump on; and for each of us those fabrics are different things relating to our current and past relationships with God and the Church, our interpretation of scripture, and our experiences. The mesh fabric is attached to the frame by springs that allow for movement; those springs can be what we feel are the "absolute truths" of the gospel, but we are aware that if a spring breaks down or if a spring needs reexamined, the removal of one spring doesn't distract from our faith, we can still jump. What if as we experience the joy of jumping in our faith/God we have the ability to invite people to jump with us, to invite people to experience the joy of God without having to first work on a wall.