I read a lot of Scripture in all traditions. Did you know that the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible(1) has 81 books? 81! That’s 15 more than the book stuffed in the back of your pew at the Baptist Church. So, I’m reading along one day and come across this verse. I’ve probably read it hundreds of times, but, as is often the case with Scripture, these words stuck:
But for you who fear my name, the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in his wings. And you will go free, leaping with joy like calves let out to pasture
It stuck and has never left me that this is a picture of what it means to be a Christian. We imagine long sourpuss faces, but we are set right with the Father and the Son, and the Spirit takes up residence in our body, soul, self and fullness of G resides in the believer. This is the good news, and it makes us want to dance like calves(2) just let out of a stall into a pasture. I’ve seen this once at my uncle’s farm and laughed like a hyena!
This is a goal of mine: to show that salvation – a much-maligned word in modern Western Christendom – is a coming home, a freedom: it’s a calf being let loose from the pen and running through the field for the first time, kicking and mooing. Happy to feel the life within them.
I thought it was a fitting name for the site.
1. And, as I understand it, this is the oldest Bible we have or know of. Many of the books are…odd compared to the others that have been sifted and shined up for general reading for centuries now. If interested, Amazon sells the Complete 54 Books of the Apocrypha here. Barnes and Noble sells it here. Good stuff!
2. What I really like is how the calf’s excitement gets the other calves excited, too. Dancing is contagious!