Love You Back



Saturday morning, I could barely get out of bed. My lower back was in severe spasm. How bad did my back hurt? When I felt an urge to sneeze, I suppressed it. The thought of the sneeze reflex working its way through my back promised inestimable pain. Like being tasered.

Usually when my back goes out, I can trace a cause and effect. Lift the beer fridge by myself, my back hurts. This time, no such antecedent. As far as I know, this back problem came out of nowhere like a mauling bear. I still went to New York City anyway. My buddy was preaching yesterday to a crowd of Ghanaian immigrants and others in Yonkers, NY, and said that I looked like Frankenstein walking down the streets of Brooklyn all stiff and slow-moving 6'8" of me, with women and children screaming and running the other way.That got a good laugh, although I don't particularly relish being called a monster. I did start calling him Master afterwards.

Typically, I don't have these problems and the last time I did, it was because I slept on a hotel floor for three days out in Chicago this summer trying to escape my Dad's snoring and then laying on a couch sideways for most of the week afterwards while on vacation reading books. My back then was a hemorrhaging mess.

If I were to summarize the Gospel into one sentence, it would be this saying of Jesus: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.  Religion binds people to rules and rituals, just more burdens in an already heavy world. It cannot offer what it does not have. Grace, to ourselves, to others. Forgiveness, the giving away of our rights and reciprocity in reference to evil, trusting that God will right all wrongs.

Although Christianity is a religion, it is more than that. In research, religion would be called a necessary but not sufficient system for the soul of man to have love, meaning, and purpose. I am wondering if God is sending me a message that I need to lay my burdens down, to forgive others. Maybe my bad back is a prophet of sorts. Christ comes into our broken-back spirituality structure and system and binds us not to our burdens, but to Himself.  

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