When my first child was born, over nine years ago, I had a friend who was a “consultant” for scrapbooking enthusiasts. Good friend that I am, I dutifully hosted a party at my home, bought more supplies than I could ever possibly use, and set about documenting my daughter’s earliest days.

The only problem? I never completed her scrapbook–not even close. And the scrapbook I started for her brother three years later? An even more incomplete version of his then young life. Amusingly, I left a series of blank pages in his book, jumping rapidly from “Trip Home From the Hospital” to “Happy 1st birthday!” with the hope of returning soon thereafter….but that has yet to happen, and he’s now six. He regularly asks me to add more pictures, yet I haven’t managed to get this project back on any active “to do” list.

Somewhere in the midst of creating their scrapbooks, I discovered I’d rather blog or write in my journal. I am more a storyteller than a scrapbook-er and, as tempting as it is to quickly slice off a few extra pounds with the photo chopper, I find the nuanced, complex, interesting life we live as a family is more accurately captured in words.

You see, if I created a scrapbook page about our summer vacation, it would be all sand, surf, and sun. I’d likely leave out my fear when the kids first walked solo from the beach to the cabin where we stayed. I’d skip the “everyone on everyone else’s nerves” transition from Wednesday to Thursday, when we all believed Saturday’s leave-taking could not come quickly enough. I’d put photos of bright smiles and first ocean swims (but nothing about the pounding in my heart as my kids were knocked about by pounding waves), and a sentence or two of the joy we experienced in being together (but remain silent about the unrest I always seem to carry into this designed-for-rest time).

In short, it would be a sanitized, sanctified version of what had been a very real, in the flesh experience when we were actually living it. The scrapbook version isn’t untrue. It’s just, perhaps, air-brushed.

One of the greatest risks when we enter interfaith exchanges is that we bring our scrapbooks of faith rather than the real, messy experience of it. And then, with our scrapbooks open on our laps, we [unintentionally] compare the ideal of our own religious or philosophical beliefs with the actual of another. For some, this act is indeed intentional–maliciously so–but for many of us, it’s a place we slide into without even recognizing we’ve done so. In fact, I believe I slid right into it this past week in my “Life of the Prophet Muhammad” course….but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I am Christian. I grew up Christian and, while I think my version of the Christian faith has grown up along with me, I have a high-mindedness about “the way of Jesus.” In my estimation few of us actually live so as to earn the name “Christian,” little Christ, but I still cherish the ideals–the values to which I believe I am called when I carry this name with me. One of these values, for me, is peace-making. In story after story, Jesus overturned the cultural norm of returning like action with like action. With his words and his works, he placed a higher ethos upon our relationships with one another. Turn the other cheek. Seventy times seven. Love one another. No matter what is done to you, you are called to love. No matter what is done to me, I am called to love.

Carrying these ideals firmly in my mind, if not my living, it has been an interesting week in “Life of the Prophet Muhammad.” We have been exploring the Prophet’s (peace be upon him) skirmishes with the tribe to which he had initially belonged, but that was seeking his demise by this time in history. I don’t live in seventh century Arabia, I am not Muslim, and I cannot profess to any authoritative understanding of the tribal or religious culture of this particular time, place, and circumstance, yet I have been subtly and not so subtly voicing my dis-ease with the revelation granted to Muhammad (peace be upon him) that allowed for–in fact then mandated–a holy struggle, jihad. The very word is a fuse thanks to under-informed and imbalanced public use, and so I type it with caution and a bit of trepidation. You see, I’m not actually wanting to write about jihad. To attempt to do so would likely be an injustice to the dialogue of my class, as I would be taking an already difficult medium (a course conducted entirely on-line, without the visual benefit of one another’s questioning looks or eyes of compassion) and translating it to, well, another on-line dialogue space. It’s messy to even describe the attempt.

Instead, what I want to offer is a confession. I am not sorry for holding ideals about Jesus, and I’m certainly not sorry for attempting to live them in my own inadequate manner. Rather, I’m deeply sorry that, as the week moved along and our comment threads extended further and further down the page, I brushed aside my Muslim classmates attempts to ask we Christians to make an honest accounting of the violent past of Christians, even as we were lifting up our beloved Jesus. It was entirely too easy to say, “The Crusades are a point of shame, not pride,” or “just war theory” is a product of a body of Christian thinkers (and is, in fact, embraced by people of varied philosophical and religious identities), but it’s not necessarily “of Christ.”

I sat only with my Christian scrapbook open on my lap, even as I opened and read the blogs, journals, and intra-group exchanges of my new Muslim friends. It’s no wonder my own faith emerged with arms raised in victory in this supposedly peace-making exchange. I was intentionally leaving pages blank and pretending I had presented a complete version of my religion’s values as lived in the world.

I have made my confession to you, and to them, and so I will return to the exchange. I am a student of content and process both, and there is always more to learn about mercy, inclusion, and risking our ideals to share those of another. In my mind, one of Christianity’s finest contributions to the world of faith is its incarnational nature.

In the spirit of a faith that draws the divine into our full human complexity, I would be wise to leave the airbrushed, scrapbook version of my faith aside and attempt to live it, messily, contentedly “in the flesh.”