whenever i think i have it all figured out he brings someone else to the party i thought i'd never see here...you think you know a guy and he turns out to be way more generous than you ever thought of being and way more forgiving, way more loving, and then i think back on my life and realize my own problems were just as bad in different ways from his perspective

paul said he was the chiefest of sinners but he wrote so elegantly i never thought it could have been more than hyperbole until he was over last weekend and showed me some of the scars he used to have...one of those guys who would have burned himself with cigarettes in a bar to win twenty bucks and prove he was a badass and to show you how committed he was...pharisees have a life outside the temple, it turns out

he told me once how hard it was to accept Jesus' teaching those fourteen years in the desert, making tents and talking and listening and wrestling, working out the prophets and changing the meaning of everything he'd ever been taught about the scriptures, how God wanted so much to just let it all go but needed to keep us going long enough to save some of us, how painful it was for him to watch us suffer through our sin and our blindness

he told me Jesus once slapped him so hard he thought he was going to cry, talking about Hosea and Gomer, teaching him about the divorce and how it affected God's relationship with israel, and paul didn't like it, didn't like the full meaning, wanted God to recant, after a fashion, and tell him it was an empty threat...paul loved his people and he really loved God but his whole framework of understanding had been based on selfishness, like mine, and he was tired of fighting against his old teachers and wanted to take some shortcuts...Jesus slapped him to make a point paul kept rejecting and it worked, and paul told me Jesus' compassion afterward convinced him how hard that had been for the Lord

we were drinking wine and talking about our trip to galilee to see the hill from the original sermon on the mount and Jesus had had a bunch of angels act like the people who had been there so we could see it exactly as it had been and i have to admit, i cried like a baby...when he speaks he speaks softly, almost whispering in your ear, and you can hear it all across the hillside, intimate and personal, like he's talking just to you, and i understood exactly what he meant this time around and how he had looked forward to this from the time he was eight, and forever before that, of course, because that's when he would begin that walk to the cross and all the really hard work, the "rolling up the sleeves" work the greek word tries to convey about salvation, would be started...i felt like i was breathing that same air from so long ago, another world, another life, when he first had his mortal body...

as we spoke of the trip i recalled a plant, a small green lichen on some of the rocks, and he said he knew i would see that even though i never paid any attention to plants, he had put some in a spot where we would be resting so i would recall some of my hiking in the mountians of colorado when i was a rebel, to remind me how he was calling out to me even then, to remind me how he loved me all my life and watched me make all those painful rebellious decisions and loved me anyway, how he waited patiently for me to turn and acknowledge him so he could bless me in earnest, he said he always liked that particular lichen because it would one day remind me and him of his love for me and my eventual love for him...

Jesus is really sentimental, and not just sometimes, he remembers everything and he's so thoughtful, he never mentions anything unless it edifies, builds up, he always covers over mistakes, he always wants to forgive, he loves to forgive, i discover in our luncheon, i never understood before