Roots

After a lovely and lengthy grad-student Bible study on the riches and implications of Romans 1:18-32, including a healthy conversation about the highly "controversial" verses 24-27, with people who range in spectrum from a traditionally conservative Ghanian (African) Christian couple to the "raging liberal feminist" Christian co-leader, who is paired with and joined by multiple levels of moderately between these two other members and other co-leader, I find myself leaving with a sort of simple conclusion. Healing and real wholeness in our lives, truly being restored from the exhaustively tainting sin-disease of our fallen world, comes only when we dig down to minister to the roots and not only bandage up (or approve or condemn) the literally superficial behaviors that are easily noted or dismissed but which are only symptomatic of the deeper, core issues we seek to have satisfied. Visually: the reminder came with the image of weeding the beach at Sandy Cove (Cedar Campus) where we learned that what looked like a simple task of yanking out the beach grass or the flowering flat-weed we could see would only end in temporary abatement of a more signficant problem. If we only pulled out the top, the weeds returned in fuller force. The "cure" was to take a shovel and dig--deeper than the bottom of the root system and pull out the whole network. The truest satisfaction of knowing the issue was solved came only with the harder work of addressing (attacking) the problem at its real source--the roots. I don't think this is my own personal pressing for depth ideology, since it's even demonstrated botanically, but I find in ministry and social work lately that my favorite "diagnostic" or "problem-solving" technique is asking the question: "What's underneath that for you?" and trying to call myself and others to move beyond the simple to the real core, so that indeed we might truly find the answers, healing and satisfaction we are seeking.