I have a sense of where to go with the Ruby story, but just do not have it in me tonight to whittle the next chapter out. Too tired.

I will just say Thank You to my folks for raising me around the Bible.

The world is weird. Progress says that all of our new technologies and new discoveries about the universe and life and how to be the human animal should make people better- more connected, more thoughtful of one another, more intuitive of how to care for one another. But that is not necessarily the case. People are still jerks on Twitter and Facebook and on TV and in scientific journals. And in real life.

The post-modernist, steeped in relativity realism, looks at the Bible like it is a medical journal from the 1880’s. It was intelligent for its day, but its day has passed. New information has come to light, man, and the stuff in that book of quackery was an adequate elixir for its time, whenever that was.

And some who follow the Book still do not understand what Jesus was about, addressed within its pages. They rant and rave over the injustices of life and shout for their just portions of what-they-deserve and have no clue what love looks like, what Jesus showed and practiced and did when he was here 2000 years ago, and life is still about them and the stature and size of their personal kingdoms. Christianity for them is just a platform for helping them get their way in life.

And there are the others who enjoy the modern mode of spiritual interpretation and take the Scriptures cafeteria style, picking what they want or feel comfortable with or have cognitive resonance with or see few negative social results from embracing, shaping God’s word and Spirit after the whimsies of their nature.

In today’s idea wars, the Bible provides a pretty good framework for viewing the universe and the world still, and for viewing- and valuing- people.

Love is love. It favors the forgiving and the forgiven. It strengthens its adherents who accept letting go and losing and sacrificing for the sake of bigger things, and the betterment of the other. It’s not wishy-washy, soft-serve spirituality, despite what worshipers may try and make of it. It is not fuzzy. It is demanding and constrained and exacts a price from its disciples: the cost of knowing love lies in the act of loving itself.

But that’s what you get when you take the Book as a whole, integrated guide.

I try to avoid labeling people, because you can’t really put people in a simple single box. There’s more to a person with schizophrenia than being a schizophrenic. There’s more to a goth girl than just her dark persona and clothes. A person is a complicated organism beneath the nice stereotype and short summary we might give them, rife with intentions, desires, impulses, motivations, agitations, empathies, sympathies, inspirations, and injuries.

But I guess I am willing to be called an idiot if I think the Bible is an exemplary guide for life. You can raise point with me about how it contradicts itself in this section and that section, or how the literal interpretation of a verse is impossible. I’ll probably say “That’s okay.”

It still tells me that this world runs on love alone, and that humans were made to know and to show this love, because it is the nature of the Creator, who shows- and who flows- with this love for his creation, and his creatures, and who put it in people. It is true that God may not be as anthropocentric as we like to entertain He is- but the Scriptures say He knows us, deeply and intimately, and he shows us love, and when you reject love and chase other stuff to make your hollow places hard, you will still remain hollow until you let love fill them up, which usually seems like a bad idea because when love touches our broken places on the inside, like peroxide on a gash, it stings quite a bit around the heart and soul until the lies and unforgiveness are burnt away.

My folks did a good job of getting us close to Gospel as we grew up. They didn’t pound into us the need to know credes or doctrines or sections of the Baptist Faith and Message. But that did keep us near the Bible, by sharing it with us at church, and by showing it to us in their lives- through respect, through saying “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you”, through the offering of their unconditional support and through the saying of prayers, reaching out to a Good and Kind Father above, a forgiving Messiah who destroyed sin and death in his own resurrection for the sake of you and I, children of the Creator who may or not give a squat what sin and salvation and love and forgiveness and the Four Spiritual Laws are all about.

They were not dogmatic or didactic, but my parents made sure we knew the Gospel was there- always. When we were ten, or twenty, or thirty, or forty-eight, or eighty-four. God loves his creation, and calls his children to himself.

Thank you for helping us to know that, Mom and Dad.

Despite the crap and the crud and the crazy and the craven and the corruption in this world, the Creator loves his creation deeply.