Details...

I have a child buying her first house.  Aside from feeling really old to have a child buying a house, it is entertaining to watch her struggle with the minutiae involved in securing a loan.  First they tell her one thing, then another...and every change holds the potential to slow the process or push back the closing.

Welcome to the real world, huh...

I remember as a young teen beginning to understand that the world was difficult.  It happened first at church for me.  When I was 12 we got a new "preacher."  He was pretty entertaining, but he began to preach a message opposite everything I had heard.  "Once saved, always saved" became "Yes but, if you aren't doing these things or believing these things, then you weren't really saved the first time."  "For God so loved the world" became "God loves those who love HIM (only a male God, of course), and everyone else will suffer eternal judgment and punishment."  "Trusting in God's grace" became "working to earn God's love."  I just didn't buy it...at all.  That just wasn't the God I saw in scripture... then or now.  And that doesn't even get to the hours and hours we spent examining the end times in the Revelation of John.  Didn't buy that one either.  (Though when the church remodeled the sanctuary and huge holes were carved out of the ceiling for lighting, the joke that the church was creating holes to heaven to give themselves a head start when the rapture came...that was funny.)

I love Christmas...and Easter...and Pentecost...and birthdays.  But we don't get to a birthday without living in the messy minutiae of the other 364 days in the year.  So even more, I love Advent, Lent, Ordinary Time. That is where God meets me in the difficulty.  And that's when I need the promise of God's coming...new life...resurrection.

God in the real world...that's the God I need.