In some respects, my absence of a post has been my post. I have begun the Paul's Letters, beginning with Corinthians and have not quite gotten myself around them. Oddly, though, so many events in personal life have connected me directly with what I am reading in Corinthians.

Ron McCoy and I had an email exchange that included a specific reference to love keeping no record of wrongs (13:5). Then a coworker leveled some fairly substantial written allegations against me, but somehow I knew that the right path was to NOT counter with my own written "record", but with an offer to actually work MORE CLOSELY with this person. My wife, who does not attend church anymore, gave me the valuable advice to read biographical material about Paul to aid in contextualizing my reading. This advice has helped me enormously and comes from someone whose participation is typically limited to, "Make sure the children get to church." A chance conversation with Carl at church pointed me towards the author John Dominic Crossan, a name I had long forgotten (over 20 years since college) but instantly remembered for his clarity of thought. Incidental weirdness: I went to the Broward County Library website for Crossan's In Search of Paul and the search engine loads as CARLWeb.

I guess where this is headed is that I always understood and intellectually believed the Bible to be a living document where your interpretations may change as live, read, and grow in your spirituality. But the Gospels provide a more easily accessible gratification. In other words, you read and come away with a comfortable initial baseline interpretation fairly readily. As a relatively new Christian, I can still at least begin to understand the big themes of baptism, grace, the cross, communion, service.

But as yet, I have no real insight that I feel comfortable offering. His work is so intertwoven with autobiography as well as the events and culture of the day, that I am hyper-sensitized to how much I don't know. I just know that Paul has now become undeniably part of my life, and if he could suffer as much as he did in his service, I can work a bit harder in getting to know his letters.

By the way, I can no longer limit myself to 15 minute a day, something else is going to have to give. Please don't let it be football.

To be continued...