I had the opportunity to housesit/dogsit in this mansion last week. It was a blast. We felt like we were living out “Entourage”. I had made it big and became a baller and I brought all my friends along for the ride.

Michelle and KL

Opie, one of the original residents of the house

The most exciting game of Chutes and Ladders I’ve ever played…

When I was young I had a file cabinet full of all the answers, built over years of religious education, church, and “living out the faith”. I had folders for various questions. “Who was God?” “Sin.” “Atonement” “Who were the nonChristians?” “What do we do with these said nonChristians?” In any situation that arose, I could just consult my file cabinet of Christian life and it would tell me what to do. It also had a folder for “The Call”. It contained files on what God had planned for my life, what my purpose was on this earth, who I was supposed to be based on many of the other folders and things people had seen in me.

There was also a folder named “The Wisdom of God”. The title for this folder was a little deceiving in that it was mostly things that we didn’t understand. My religious teachers instructed me to fill it with items such as conflicting passages of the Gospels and other minor differences that while we couldn’t explain, didn’t seem to matter much. It was mostly a formality anyway, as far as we were concerned we really had the wisdom of God under control and figured out. It was just one file.

As I got older, I came across a few things that didn’t fit in any of my folders. Now back then, they didn’t like young upstarts trying to add new folders. If there had been, perhaps I wouldn’t have had such a problem with this file folder in later years. But instead of trying to understand the new information, I just filed them away in the “The Wisdom of God” folder before any of my friends could see that I had them, like they were dirty magazines or something. I put them way in the back of the file cabinet.

I went to college to study religion. You would have thought that i would have all the answers by then but the “Wisdom of God” folder was getting a little fat. Perhaps in the back of my mind I was hoping we would be able to discuss some of the files in this growing folder. But we didn’t. Mostly we discussed the standard folders, made up fake arguements and proved them wrong and ourselves right. I added new files to the folders I created as a kid. The cabinet started to get a little full with all the new information so in order to make room, I took the “Wisdom of God” folder and put it in a new cabinet, far away from the other cabinet. It was necessary. If all these smart religious teachers didn’t see the need to talk about “The Wisdom of God”, why should I?

to be continued…