LET THERE BE (this little) LIGHT (of mine)

We're getting to that time of year when the morning sun is north enough on the horizon to shine directly into the east window of my office. Sunshine is a good thing. It provides light and heat. It helps our mood. And it's necessary to make the flowers grow. In college I arranged my summer schedule so that classes were early in the morning and work was at night. I spent every afternoon at the university's pool, greased up with Coppertone or Banana Boat. I got browner than a white girl ever should. Today the solar panels on my roof provide a third to half of all our energy our household consumes. Sunshine is good. So very good.

However, like most good things, even very good things, it is possible to get too much.

Between 8 a.m. and 10:30, I cannot read anything on my computer screen. It is one giant, shiny glare. This room, my refuge from the distractions of the world outside, takes on a temperature only experienced in Hades. And with my overhead fan running on high, all the papers on my desk have to be anchored down. Heaven forbid that I have to actually look through my notes, everything starts flying. Of course I could probably stick it all together with my own sweat. It's like a planned hot flash. I would strip down to my underwear, but the other window faces the street and I'm afraid of sending my neighbors into therapy.

So instead I completely close the blinds, trying to blot out the effects. It doesn't do much for the heat, but it does cut down on the light. Cut down, as in narrow. It now comes inside the room in a series of pencil thin strips, making my office look like a film noir set.

I guess this proves, in this time of national austerity, it's still possible to get too much of a good thing.

I mean like, fast food. Everybody likes it. Sure it's great to not cook all the time. And how convenient to simply drive through and have some stranger hand you dinner. But it costs a lot of money, wastes a lot in packaging and limits the family palate. Not to mention upping your salt and fat intake.

Or coffee. There is nothing that I like better. Most days I have my first cup before I even get out of bed. But if I'm still drinking it late into the morning, I start to get a little jittery.

One really good thing that I've had WAY too much of lately, is politics in my church.

I am a Baptist and I am very proud of that heritage. I am not a member of the Southern Baptist Convention, which I believe has misinterpreted Baptist history and practice. I'm an adherent of a much older tradition in our church as being the haven of free-thinkers. The "priesthood of the believer" and the concept of "working out your own salvation with fear and trembling" are tenets I am not willing to give up. I've written about this in more detail elsewhere, so I won't bore you here. But suffice to say, when Baptists and other members of "evangelical" churches were a poor, powerless backwater in national politics, we had to count on the separation of church and state to keep us from being swept up and disenfranchised by larger and more influential religious constituencies. These were ardent believers who were convinced that because our worship lacked creed and ritual it was not a religion.

Which is worse being "not a religion" or being "part of a cult"?

I am very disappointed in Pastor Jeffress up in Dallas, on a lot of levels. I am not aware of God giving him the power to decide who is a Christian and who is not. In fact, the Bible expressly forbids us from making those kind of judgements. But somehow the righteous can never seem to stop themselves from pointing fingers at somebody else.

Not that I am guiltless here. My sister has been an Episcopalian for decades and holds a high position in her church. She would love for me to be a part of it. But when I'm sitting in that pew and the processional comes in dressed in robes and swinging those smoky containers full of incense, I know, without question that this is not the worship for me. But who am I to say there is something wrong with it? Let me answer that question. I am only human, and humans are narrow, tribal and suspicious of everything that is foreign to them. We are not meant to be the arbiter of such decisions.

These days it looks like we evangelicals have the ear of government. Candidates are PTL-ing all over the place and hearing burning bushes under every tree. They try to one-up each other in the whose-a-better-Christian game.

UGH.

A lot of people think that the influence of religion in politics is not good. And other people, like me, think having politics show up in the middle of my worship service is a very, very bad.

We know from history that political power is transitory. Those who are up today will be down tomorrow. And having the sun beat down on us, day after day, glaring our screen, heating up the room and causing us to fan up the papers we need to be working on, is too much of a good thing.

Yesterday Bill constructed a new screen for my window. It's the same design he used for the ones on the front of the house, but on this particular one he used a special, heavy solar protective mesh. It works great. It allowed me to use this morning to write this blog.