Our Tribe

Last night we met more of Our Tribe. This happens occasionally on the road--we unexpectedly run into someone who relates to, communicates with, experiences God the same way we do. Someone like Charlie, someone like Ruth.

Ruth and Charlie live in a converted hotel overlooking a found art collective, just down the block from the Woolworth's lunch counter that started a culture upheaval in 1960.

We shared a meal, and God stories. They are quirky and relaxed and favor four-letter words over Christianese. They are artists, too--theater people--and that's part of it, but not completely. Those things make us comfortable with one another, makes it easy. What makes it eternal, kindred, is the grace. Look tribe members in the eyes and you see that they know big grace. Like us, they have required mountains of grace, not just to get out of trouble, but to get out of bed.

So we sit in this house that regularly rotates eclectic art and eclectic people, talking community and church. We talk about prodigal times, and coming home. We swap stories about little graces, common grace and big giant life-support grace. Chalk up two more for the tribe.

The Buckle

Looking for God in the Bible Belt hardly resembles looking for Him elsewhere. Other trips have been filled with variety, sarcasm, surprise. Here, there's less shock with our project and more unity in the answers.

This falls nicely with the history and statistics--cliches become so for a reason. If we'd started here, all would be as we'd expected. But over the last four years, we've asked people over 31 states where we can find God. Over those four years, we've come to expect certain answers. "Not here." "God is a force, not a being." "She's in nature." "God doesn't exist."

Unorthodoxy had become so common that I almost overlooked orthodoxy this time. I thought the first couple of people we talked to were just warm-ups before we got to the "real" conversations with the interesting folks. We knew what the Christians would say--we'd previously recorded a few canned answers from isolated outposts of faith. So at first, I only half-listened. But interviewees and waiters and former strangers, one after another, are telling us where find their God. Yes, some canned answers, but something else, too...