Metanoia
Left the house a little before 10:00 this morning and what a gorgeous day. The sky was mostly sunny and the air just felt so good outside. It was the perfect shade of warm.
On the way to the beach I was finishing up a podcast/sermon of Chuck Smith Jr. from a talk he did a couple weeks ago. Listening to voices like Chuck or Ed Piorek is like applying a healing balm on an old festering wound. These are guys who are icons in my personal history of growing up in Southern California evangelicalism. Over the decades their message has grown more accessible to people like myself who found the evangelical box to be more limiting than freeing. A message that cuts to the heart of what I think Jesus was here to communicate and not hung up on beliefs and doctrinal knit picks that make me want to have nothing to do with Jesus. When I listen to Chuck or Ed or read authors like Henri Nouwen or Thomas Merton, I feel like I am getting a taste of Jesus that I don’t have to turn off parts of my heart and brain in order to digest. It’s a Jesus that’s big and expansive and real and relevant and not a caricature.
Anyways Chuck is talking about Jesus’ message in Luke 10 of gathering in the harvest and that it is not about street evangelism or tent revivals where you entice people with heaven and scare people with hell - mansplaining the nature of the universe. Listening to this just sounds so refreshing. He mentions how the Greek word for “repentance,” metanoia (μετανοέω), is not defined as feeling bad about things that you have done but rather it is about changing one’s mind. It’s not really about behavior. It’s changing the lens through which we see and experience the world we live in. I just love all of this. It actually makes sense to me and opens up a reality that I want to walk towards. So I finish this just as I am parking and it puts my mind and heart into a really great state of being.
I walk down the stairs and I can see a set of waves slowly rolling in on a smooth ocean surface. It’s pretty much a perfect day.
There is a small group of women walking behind me and I hear them saying “What do you want to bet that ocean is absolutely freezing?” I think they were from Washington state. I turn around and tell them it is actually in the 70s and very nice which I can tell they find to be agreeable.
And as it so happens when I get to the beach, this water is crazy incredible. Maybe the warmest day of the summer? I mean it was so so nice.
The visibility was pretty cloudy so I could not see much but the entire swim was very enjoyable.
It’s Thursday so the beach has a pretty peaceful vibe going for it. I pause a couple times just to take in the view.
As I finish I see a nice set of waves breaking. This is all definitely not giving me the hankering to go back to work. However it has been a pretty fantastic break from the grind.
