Convicted

Recently I FB'd* about being convicted but in denial. "Convicted", in evangelical-speak**, means "to feel guilty about something. You feel an uneasiness or restlessness in your heart.... It is your conscience,speaking to you, in the unsaved. It is the Holy Spirit speaking to you, in the saved." (Robyn, on ChristiaNet, 10-29-08) Well said, Robyn, whoever you are: uneasiness or restlessness in the heart. Spiritual dis-ease, a symptom of the Holy Spirit having slapped you upside the head of your soul. The lingering ache of a Simpsonian "d'oh".

I wax digression.

Remember when Wonderful Husband decided the economic world as we knew it was coming to an end and we should have a garden and chickens? I blogged at the time that he had unwittingly opened the Pandora's Box of my simple-living Scott-and-Helen-Nearing romantic fantasy of Right Living. Since then,

• I've been accumulating books and blogs like Marion Nestle's What to Eat, and Walter Brueggemann's Prayers for a Privileged People, and Mother Earth News/Grit, and Colin Beavan's No Impact Man. Joel Salatin's You Can Farm came this week. They should all come in plain brown paper wrappers, unmarked, silently hand-delivered by someone wearing a hat and mask.
• I got the church hooked up with a bulk food distributing company specializing in natural and organic stuff; that catalog is sitting on my church desk, sheathed in its Priority Mail envelope.
  
• On Craigslist I found a guy a mile or so from me who keeps bees and produces honey; I've bookmarked the listing but have not transcribed his number onto paper or into my phone.
  
• This week our church received a CIPL "oscar" for greening, and I signed us up to screen the movie No Impact Man during the Copenhagen climate change talks.
• Canning this weekend (Note to family: you now know what you're getting for Xmas).
• A friend is coming for drinks today and I'm trying to figure out where to get locally made vodka and olives.
  

I feel like a spy in the house of Wendell Berry, deep in the Small Is Beautiful closet, hanging on the hook of Luke 18:22-23. Sartre was wrong: hell isn't other people. Hell is living in denial of the Holy Spirit's head-smack.

*To FB is to write on your Facebook status update. When did we decide a website could become an acronymic verb? I guess when "google" entered the OED.
**Liberal Christians don't talk this way.