Rob Bell

Two weeks after my trip to Seattle and I'm still summing it up on the blog...

Anyway, Saturday evening was spent at the Moore Theatre listening to Rob Bell. He was the 'motivating factor' for our trip to Seattle. Rob Bell is a Christian pastor in Michigan, and quite the post-modern thinker (not like relativist-post-modern, but actual-post-modern). His tour was a reflection on his most recent book, Drops Like Stars, which explores suffering and trying times and how that meshes with our faith.

He stated from the outset that we were not going to look at the 'why' of suffering. That's been beaten to death, and you can ask why things happen 'till the cows come home, but no one will ever know all the time all the reasons why crap enters our lives. Instead, he decided to look at the 'what' and 'where' of suffering. As in, 'what now' and, more importantly, 'where in context'.

Rob challenged us to think about the idea that suffering is what shapes who we are more so than successes. One of the highlights I took from the evening was the idea of The Box. We all tend to live in a box. And when people do off-the-wall things or think in different ways, we say, "he's thinking outside the box" or "he's a bit outside the box". But when we experience suffering, it's like the box is suddenly gone and we have no frame of reference for the life we had been living up until that point. We are left fully reliant on God to help us reshape our everything.

Lucky for me, there is a YouTube video summing up this highlight. I don't know why it's sideways, and I apologize on behalf of the videographer, but I think what Rob says is quite valuable. He had a lot of good things to say and for us to think about that evening, but this really stood out from everything else.