So much going on in my head! (Yay, the temporary thought-drought is over!) And I don't have nearly enough time to write it all, as Stephen is coming home for lunch and I am due at the library in 1.5 hours and after he gets off work we get to go see Liz! Oh well! If I start it now, maybe I'll finish it later?? At any rate, I'm delighted that my brain is going fast-forward again. I love this.

Last night was week #2 at Christianity Explored and I realized I didn't recap any of that last week.

It is so. Interesting.

The most interesting part isn't even Heidi and Alex being there. They're pretty quiet, actually. But there are three nonChristians in the class (two of them married with a daughter) and THAT is the most fascinating part.

The married couple came to C.E. because they are sending their daughter to a Christian preschool and she keeps coming home from preschool talking about Jesus. :D

Um, COOL?!! :D

The other lady is there because she and a gal from our church teach together at the same school.

The other people in the class are me, Heidi, Alex, the two teachers of C.E. (David and Scott), and the schoolteacher who goes to our church (Michelle).

What has just floored me in this class so far is listening to the non-Christians (would it be more politically correct to call them "visitors"?) and realizing that they know nothing, but nothing, about the Bible. Old OR New Testament. It is most astonishing to see when you have grown up in the church and spent most of your life around people who also grew up in church.

The question of the night yesterday was, "Okay, who are these three groups of people? The Jews, the Romans, the Christians? How do they all connect? Who are the Jews anyway?"

It was just incredible. I forced myself to speak up because I felt like I might be able to offer some light to their confusion about who is who--especially about the Jews, since I have been living in Jewish history the entire year (I've been reading through the Old Testament since January--I'm working my way through the entire Bible chronologically). So anyway, the teachers let me talk, so I gave everyone a 2-minute crash course in the history of the Jews and God and how that relates to Jesus. I didn't get to include everything, but I didn't want to take up much time, and I was so nervous that I wouldn't have explained it all right.

But now they have a brief story of the how the Bible is a story of humans messing everything up, and God continually working toward repairing the broken relationship between humans and Himself, and how the Jews were part of His story. I even got to include how Jesus was the solution to it all, even though I didn't try to explain that fully, because I know we will get into it more later in the class. That's the whole point of the class.

They seemed very interested when I told them that Jesus is the answer to it all. It was obviously a very, very new way of thinking about Jesus.

IT WAS SO COOL.

So anyway. :D It's getting close to 2:30 now and I need to go soon... Let's see.

After I was finished with my crash course in the history of humanity, God, Jews, and Jesus, Scott seemed to be impressed and think I did a good job. He offered one point of clarity that I am still trying to figure out, which is covenant vs. dispensational understanding of the Bible.

I know those are really high-up terms and one day I'll be able to sufficiently explain the difference in here. It's something I'm just beginning to grasp myself. Basically, most churches teach a dispensational understanding of the Bible: God tried plan A, and it didn't work. God tried plan B, and it didn't work. God tried plan C, and it didn't work. So finally God tried plan D (Jesus), and it worked. That's a dispensational understanding. It's actually a fairly new concept, apparently. Stephen told me it wasn't popular until the mid-19th century, but it has grown very deeply into churches today and it's just now that people are starting to say, "Hang on, wait a second, that isn't the way Protestant Christianity started!"

Covenant understanding is, there was always just one plan. And the covenants with Abraham, Noah, Moses, and finally, the new covenant with Jesus, were all connected to each other in one big plan, and were never separate plans. I haven't quite figured out how that is possible, though. Working on it.

Okay....I think it's time for me to go now. There is so much going on in my head; I know I haven't written it all down, but this is enough for now. :)

Ta-ta!

-Stephanie

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