I haven't posted on here in eons. Just not inspired, I guess.
First, a complaint. Why is it that if you follow a pastor long enough, they seem to fall off the rails eventually? It's like they start out fresh and full of godly ideas and ideals and build a community based on those things and soon enough, the community ends up reciprocating in such a way that the pastor ends up brainwashed and obsolete- like all the others before him who were the reason he felt charged to overthrow the pulpit in the first place.
I've posted several quotes and things from Matt Chandler's sermons here in the past, but I have to admit, I haven't listened to his sermons in a long time. It seems like the goal (or the method, I guess) has shifted from teaching to preaching and I don't tend to accept preaching nearly as readily. It's like he forgot that people need to know why they should want to believe these things and instead has moved towards an approach closer to the old, overused "because the Bible says so" doctrine. It's underwhelming, unmoving and frankly, inhuman.
When I hear stories of abuse in the non- Catholic church community and Matt Chandler retweets a reprehensible, appalling, morally corrupt defense of the abusers or when he pushes absolute propaganda against abortion rights, I can't help but feel like he's been blinded. Blinded and brainwashed.
I'm not saying a pastor has to be pro-choice, but if you're going to be anti-choice, at least focus on the root of the problem. At least. Don't demonize abortion. And if the reaction to that sentence is, "But it's murder," I've seen far more compassion towards convicted murderers than I have seen to the women and girls who are facing this truly cruel decision. And it is a cruel decision- it takes years to build towards the decision that abortion is the best option. Even if the decision seems hasty sometimes, it actually isn't. It's still made with the information with which the woman is equipped at the time the decision is made. If they believe they are unsupported and that a baby would be a truly crippling endeavor, even with adoption as a possibility, how did they get there? Odds are, they got there through events that were less of their own doing than that killer in prison for whom pastors show an abundance of compassion.
Of course I'm generalizing, but at the same time, the fact that there are endless possibilities and endless reasons means that pastors should show more restraint, more compassion, less judgment and they should definitely not alienate those in need by perpetuating propaganda, whether it's a fake abortion "documentary" or a sleazy victim-blaming statement in support of disgusting pastoral behavior.
Pastors are supposed to fight for the widows and children, aren't they? And it seems as they get bigger and their celebrity isolates them from the real people, the less they can empathize and connect with those who need it most. They start focusing on mass salvation rather than profound salvation.
And it makes me sad.
Anyway.
On an unrelated topic, the death of my dog on April 25th messed with my faith enormously. I couldn't understand why God would make her suffer the extra hours that she suffered. It still hurts my heart to think about it. But oddly enough, my non-Christian husband restored (most of) my faith. He does believe in God, which is important, as if I had married an atheist, odds are I would have lost my faith through all of this. Instead, he reminded me where God was in all this heartbreak and I am grateful that he did, even if I'm still pretty resentful and distant to God right now. He told me God gave him those few hours with her, the ones I wished He had taken away because he needed them. He needed those hours to say goodbye to her, so it wasn't that God wasn't listening but that God was doing the best He could for all of us, I guess.
But man, she got sick so suddenly. She was our healthiest dog and within a few weeks, she was gone. And at the same time, a dog who belongs a friend of mine had a massive tumor removed from her belly. At fourteen, it was unlikely that she would have escaped cancer and survived the surgery too. But she did. The massive tumor wasn't cancerous and now she's up and about again. And though my friend says she would have been able to handle it if her doggy had died, I remember reading her messages about it all and feeling scared for her. I remember feeling like there was no way this dog could die right now, that it would be too much on her plate with all that was going on with her father being ill, her own health scare and the sudden instability and anxiety in her life. And so, I prayed for her dog to be healed. I pleaded with God to give her this reprieve. And He did. And somehow, at the same time, took mine away.
I have to admit it does bother me that my prayers work for other people and not for me. I guess I take for granted the ones that do. We are provided for (somehow) and she didn't suffer long either. People I love make it to and from places safely and we're safe and loved. I do have a lot of blessings. But I can't help but feel like these major ones, the ones that break me to pieces fall on deaf ears. And then, at the same time, I would accept it if that was the case. I would accept all the heartbreak and all the grief and all the pain if it meant those I pray for wouldn't have to.
I would give anything to have my Jemma alive again, but I wouldn't ever wish that it was reversed and my friend's dog be taken instead of mine.
I just hope God has taken her swimming. When she was on the vet table and she was terrified, I told her we would go swimming tomorrow. I hope God kept my promise. Please, God, keep my promise to my baby girl.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
So a father shot up his daughter's laptop...
And this passage from Matt Chandler came to mind (see full text here, which was about Colossians 3 and for this part in particular, he was talking about Ephesians 6:4) :
Just to be straight, as fathers we do not negatively motivate our children. Your daddy might have done that to you, but a godly man does not negatively motivate his child. He doesn’t poke and jab and exhaust their son’s or daughter’s spirit. They don’t provoke them to anger. I think a house should just be filled with grace, mercy and fun, but at the end of the day, you have to figure out a way to nurture, disciple and shape your children that does not exasperate them. Now, at some level, children are going to rebel against rules and they’re not going to like the rules. We have already covered that they’re morons. So they’re just not going to get it. I don’t think this is saying, “Don’t make your children angry,” because there are times your children are going to be angry. The text is saying, “Don’t try to make them angry.” Don’t take things personally to the point where you aggressively attack your children and try to lay burdens on them that they’re going to be unable to walk in and unable to submit to. In the end, you simply create children who become frustrated with the authority over them in a way that honestly isn’t biblical.The first time I heard that sermon, it touched me deeply because I believe it to be so, so true given my past experiences. And right now, from this vantage point, I can't help but feel so grateful that my future husband will raise his daughters in an encouraging and incredibly unconditionally loving way. Thank God for that.
And I’ll say this just because we do a lot of work with twenty-somethings here that are banged up. Specifically you fathers, watch your mouth. And I’m not talking about cussing. Watch your mouth towards your sons, and definitely watch your mouth towards your daughters. I cannot unpack for you how powerful your mouth is when it comes to your children. It can absolutely instill in your daughters self-confidence and safety in a man who will treat her, encourage her and lover her well. Or you can teach her that she’s worthless and that what she needs is to be demeaned her entire life. That will start with daddy. You can make your son feel safe in how God created him to be. So maybe your son loves soccer, maybe he loves ballet. Your goal regardless, is to nurture and to love and to encourage them with your mouth. You need to speak life and blessing into your children and not use your tongue to wound or assault your children. It has lasting effects. In my sit-downs with twenty-somethings, they can still tell me of instances and times where a father or mother was quick with their tongue and that was a shaping, molding moment.
Thank God for that.
Monday, December 19, 2011
On aging gracefully...
When a really, really old devout Christian dies, it seems there's this aura of, "See? God gave her a long, amazing life because she was so strong in her faith," and when a young atheist dies in a brutal way, the aura is the opposite. If he had just believed, he wouldn't have died so miserably, so soon.
But what of the young child with incurable brain cancer who believes that Jesus is her savior?
What do we say about her?
She doesn't believe enough? Or her belief isn't real? Is it not deep enough? Or is this just part of the plan?
Maybe it's the remnants of my agnosticism, but I do believe the world is a warped, broken place with so much damage that we've created added onto the chaotic innate power the world has already.
So we develop cancers. And we die young. Or our genes and development and lifestyle mesh just so and we live for eons.
But in all this, two things are true: God is present and nature is unforgiving.
How do the two line up? We just don't know. You know what I mean? If you give somebody a charmed life full of happiness and without suffering, the first bit of suffering they incur, however minute, will be catastrophic. We're seeing the world, as cruel and heartless as it is, from the perspective of that person, our suffering now placed on the scale of the infinite. We can't know what it means or why we have to endure it.
But what we can know is that through this suffering, we grow, we become humble and we empathize. We also learn to love more wholeheartedly and unabashedly. And in those things, we become relevant to the rest of humanity in that we are probably more likely to show people humility, grace, forgiveness, love and compassion that they might know a world where these things exist and in that way, there is always a potential for believing that there is a God from whose essence these things emerge.
But what of the young child with incurable brain cancer who believes that Jesus is her savior?
What do we say about her?
She doesn't believe enough? Or her belief isn't real? Is it not deep enough? Or is this just part of the plan?
Maybe it's the remnants of my agnosticism, but I do believe the world is a warped, broken place with so much damage that we've created added onto the chaotic innate power the world has already.
So we develop cancers. And we die young. Or our genes and development and lifestyle mesh just so and we live for eons.
But in all this, two things are true: God is present and nature is unforgiving.
How do the two line up? We just don't know. You know what I mean? If you give somebody a charmed life full of happiness and without suffering, the first bit of suffering they incur, however minute, will be catastrophic. We're seeing the world, as cruel and heartless as it is, from the perspective of that person, our suffering now placed on the scale of the infinite. We can't know what it means or why we have to endure it.
But what we can know is that through this suffering, we grow, we become humble and we empathize. We also learn to love more wholeheartedly and unabashedly. And in those things, we become relevant to the rest of humanity in that we are probably more likely to show people humility, grace, forgiveness, love and compassion that they might know a world where these things exist and in that way, there is always a potential for believing that there is a God from whose essence these things emerge.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Unengage.
It came up in conversation today that my faith is on the back burner. The person implied I was "invested" in the wrong things, and also inferred that choosing to stay in this house, the one my dad built for me in a mad hurry after I left my abusive ex, rather than moving into the newly opened up apartment on the floor below the pastor and his wife in the city meant I was choosing other things over God.
Why is my faith on the back burner? It's not because I'm invested in other things. It's only partly because of my disease, which causes me to spend my time between sleeping, moping, being angry at being mopey and overextending myself only to wind up with even less energy the next day. Only partly because even if I would love to blame my disease for my lack of reading of the Bible these days (I honestly don't have enough focus to wrap my head around it right now, nor the memory to retain it), for my lack of church attendance (I really am too tired to drive that far and "waste" that many spoons on such a short-lived endeavor), and for everything else I've been neglecting lately, but that's just not the root of it.
The root is that I'm angry at faith.
I'm not angry at God. I love God. I pray to Him and explain to Him how I think my prayers are meaningless because of the neglects mentioned in the previous paragraph. God doesn't listen to those who only go to Him when they need something, they say. Repent, they say.
They, they, they.
They make me angry.
I was going to say, "Ever since Tim Keller answered my question asking if he had any advice to give a believer engaged to a non-believer," but it was even before that (by the way, he answered, "Oh, that's easy: get unengaged.").
I think it's ever since I explained to the pastor of this particular Montreal church in explicit detail why I wasn't going to church that I've had this anger. Maybe even before that.
him:
So, where are you at in terms of being part of a gospel community? Are you plugged in anywhere? If not, you should come be a part of [his church] (or at least check out the service piece of it).
me, a day later:
Hi,
I've been trying to figure out how to answer this... No, I'm not plugged in anywhere. I still have a hard time with churchy things, both on and emotional level (the confinement and obligation bothers me) and as a remaining conflict of life-long agnosticism. Also, I tend to lack self-discipline as far as meaning to attend goes, in large part because my job allows me to work at night (I'm a natural night owl) so waking up in single digit time is difficult for me. And by difficult, I don't mean tedious and painful. I actually get really upset about it and cry very easily. :D
All those excuses aside, I think I am having a hard time reconciling church practice with my life. Without intending to sound like a stereotype, I know that my relationship with my boyfriend is not the ideal, but I also know I don't trust God enough to go any other way at this point and somehow going to church seems... dishonest. I know that church isn't "a museum of saints", but I pray on everything and plead with God to be merciful because honestly, I feel too broken to give up certain parts or patterns within my life that I've come to use as a measure or means of progress and growth.
When I'd met with you guys, this relationship had just started and prior to it, I really had no intention on dating at all. But I had plugged in to Christians a little to ask how a Christian dating relationship is supposed to play out because it just doesn't make sense to me and while the advice I got wasn't all that helpful, I did try to do things differently this time, and I think for the most part, I did grow apart from a lot of the behaviors that used to be staples in my relationships, but some remain- some that aren't "biblical", even if I can't seem to find anywhere in the Bible to back that up properly.
Anyway, I know you're a busy guy so I'll stop there, but I know you've probably heard the same story a thousand times already and hearing "but I'm different" another time doesn't make it any different. I just wanted to be honest...
I am praying on it. I know church is my downfall in Christianity. I've hated church since before I even started school and no matter what the form, it still elicits a strong negative reaction out of me...
Anyhoooo, I should get going to work.
I didn't get a reply. And I know he's a busy guy (I even said it in the email and I mean what I say), but I can't help but feel the way I did when I was agnostic: church Christians love you within the walls of the church and the minute those walls are gone, so is the love. And it burns me up.
And over the past few months (nearly a year since I wrote that email), it's been accumulating in me.
If the love we experience in this world, both the giving and receiving, is meant to show us God, meant as a form of worship, how does this happen in Christian communities? How do so many of the people not know how to love?
And some might reply that they're just human, etc etc, but in my lifetime, if I was to add it all up, I have witnessed more utterly selfless examples of love through atheists and agnostics than I have with religious people of any faith. If we are all just human, why aren't the probabilities even all across the board?
Christianity, if not played right, is a sport of introversion. I have to make me better, I have to serve, I have to repent, I have to pray, I have to stop sinning, no wait, I don't have to stop sinning, I have to love and trust God more. It goes on and on and on and at the end of it, you have a person who is ONLY serving to be (or feel like?) a better person, not because he is a nobody who deserves nothing.
Get unengaged. It reminds me of the blog post I read written by a missionary a couple years ago in which he was absolutely elated that this guy who was cohabitating with his non-believing girlfriend dumped her (FINALLY!) and decided to pursue his faith more determinedly. Is that really a cause for elation? Doesn't anybody know what love is?
There's a passage everybody knows, right? The one everybody uses at their wedding:
1 Corintians 13, from the ESV:
Let's break it down, shall we?
1. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
3. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
What's he saying here about love? Nothing matters, not being supernaturally spiritual, not knowing everything, not being all-faithful, not being generous, not sacrificing yourself, if there is no love? Is that not what he's saying?
4-6. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
What is love? It is humble, human, selfless and true.
7. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
"Bear" goes two ways, I think. Love allows us to carry weight we wouldn't otherwise be able to carry but it also reveals all things. It has no secrets and hides nothing. And love also gives us hope. It keep us from growing cynical and bitter. Through everything, through all we go through both in our lifetime and as a species in general, love endures. I actually say that to people when I am asked for proof that miracles happen: the fact that we are still able to love when the world is so full of reasons not to (and has always been full of brutal reminders not to- this isn't a new thing), is a miracle. It really, really is. The fact that I am still able to love is a miracle. And on that miracle rests all of the hope I have for anything else in this lifetime and beyond.
8. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
It never ends. Humans will come and go. Knowledge will come and go. All things will come and go, but love? Love endures. Love never ceases. What does that say about our daily priorities? What is on top? What should be on top?
9 & 10. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
Here's where we get into my interpretation, so bear with me if you know more than me. We only barely have a glimpse of the love of God. The sum of every bit of love we absorb and give in our lifetime is only a part of the perfect love we will come to know with God. Imagine that for a second. Imagine that if you spend your entire life loving and that is all you do, you will still end up with only a partial view of what love is.
11. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
12. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
This part, the ESV study Bible jumbles up for me. To me, the child is us in this lifetime, the man is the one who knows God. Now, as children, our view is obscured, we only see part of what it's all about, even if we're face to face with what we're supposed to see. As men, we will see it all and realize how small and naive and dim our perception really was.
And love is most important.
Now you take all that and you compare two versions of how it's played out in our lives.
First, through a dog.
A dog wakes up and is ecstatic that you are there. If you're upset, it tends to you. If you're happy, it feeds off your happiness and reflects it back to you. It lives to see you smile. It lives to see you make the most of every day. It adores you and forgives you, whatever your mood. It regards you through an unwavering childlike perspective, even as the years go by.
Don't you find it odd that you can train a dog from birth to death, teaching them full sentences and even teaching them to ask for what they want, expanding their capacities both physically and mentally until they reach the limits set by the degradation of their abilities due to old age and yet, no matter what we do, what we put these animals through, we can never seem to impart on them our humanly bitterness, cynicism, vengeance and selfishness?
I remember standing with my Boo in an airport waiting for a friend's plane which was hours delayed and these weary travelers got off the plane, and as soon as they saw us in the terminal, the overwhelming majority of the tired, defeated passengers smiled at my Boo. They smiled. It was a beautiful thing to be a part of.
But I'm also admittedly biased in that I believe that dogs are meant to teach us the love of God beyond the capacity of any human.
Every day with a dog is a new day, a fresh day, and everything is forgiven and love is strengthened.
Now let's look at the guy who dumped his non-believing girlfriend. What kind of ripples does that cause?
I know from the perspective of the woman, it will be hard to stave the bitterness, the cynicism, the lack of trust. Will she ever date a Christian again? Will she ever be a Christian? What does she learn about love and loyalty from this experience?
And the guy? Even if Christians (I won't agree with) believe it was not selfish of him to abandon her for his faith, you cannot deny it was selfish of him to leave her behind, was it not?
Get unengaged.
This man I am with is not a Christian (he does believe in God, however). He is also the kindest, most loving, most respectful, most honorable person I have ever met. He wakes up every day and loves me more. And I don't mean the type of thing where our love grows because we've been together for a while, I mean this guy actively grows his love for me. He pursues me and learns about me and asks questions. He encourages me and takes care of me. He pushes me to grow and tells me when I need to fix my junk. He doesn't let me stay the same.
This man embodies everything I know (and hope) to be true about love.
Get unengaged?
To me, that is a terribly unChristian statement.
I live with this man (in sin!) and sleep with this man (also in sin!) and tell this man I love him. What, to me, is the Christian thing to do in this situation?
Love him fully. Commit to him fully by honoring the vows we have already made. Marry him. Follow through with the love I have started such that it will not be unholy. Pursue him. Show him the love that I am capable of through Jesus, through God. Show him that tiny glimpse of God's love through me. Love him unconditionally and selflessly. Respect him and help him to grow into a stronger, more forgiving love.
And in doing so, we will both be an example the world around us that this miracle, this love of which we are not only still capable but also able to grow throughout our lives, is but an immeasurably infinitely small fraction of the love of God.
That, to me, is how this relationship plays out from my perspective as a Christian.
Am I wrong?
Why is my faith on the back burner? It's not because I'm invested in other things. It's only partly because of my disease, which causes me to spend my time between sleeping, moping, being angry at being mopey and overextending myself only to wind up with even less energy the next day. Only partly because even if I would love to blame my disease for my lack of reading of the Bible these days (I honestly don't have enough focus to wrap my head around it right now, nor the memory to retain it), for my lack of church attendance (I really am too tired to drive that far and "waste" that many spoons on such a short-lived endeavor), and for everything else I've been neglecting lately, but that's just not the root of it.
The root is that I'm angry at faith.
I'm not angry at God. I love God. I pray to Him and explain to Him how I think my prayers are meaningless because of the neglects mentioned in the previous paragraph. God doesn't listen to those who only go to Him when they need something, they say. Repent, they say.
They, they, they.
They make me angry.
I was going to say, "Ever since Tim Keller answered my question asking if he had any advice to give a believer engaged to a non-believer," but it was even before that (by the way, he answered, "Oh, that's easy: get unengaged.").
I think it's ever since I explained to the pastor of this particular Montreal church in explicit detail why I wasn't going to church that I've had this anger. Maybe even before that.
him:
So, where are you at in terms of being part of a gospel community? Are you plugged in anywhere? If not, you should come be a part of [his church] (or at least check out the service piece of it).
me, a day later:
Hi,
I've been trying to figure out how to answer this... No, I'm not plugged in anywhere. I still have a hard time with churchy things, both on and emotional level (the confinement and obligation bothers me) and as a remaining conflict of life-long agnosticism. Also, I tend to lack self-discipline as far as meaning to attend goes, in large part because my job allows me to work at night (I'm a natural night owl) so waking up in single digit time is difficult for me. And by difficult, I don't mean tedious and painful. I actually get really upset about it and cry very easily. :D
All those excuses aside, I think I am having a hard time reconciling church practice with my life. Without intending to sound like a stereotype, I know that my relationship with my boyfriend is not the ideal, but I also know I don't trust God enough to go any other way at this point and somehow going to church seems... dishonest. I know that church isn't "a museum of saints", but I pray on everything and plead with God to be merciful because honestly, I feel too broken to give up certain parts or patterns within my life that I've come to use as a measure or means of progress and growth.
When I'd met with you guys, this relationship had just started and prior to it, I really had no intention on dating at all. But I had plugged in to Christians a little to ask how a Christian dating relationship is supposed to play out because it just doesn't make sense to me and while the advice I got wasn't all that helpful, I did try to do things differently this time, and I think for the most part, I did grow apart from a lot of the behaviors that used to be staples in my relationships, but some remain- some that aren't "biblical", even if I can't seem to find anywhere in the Bible to back that up properly.
Anyway, I know you're a busy guy so I'll stop there, but I know you've probably heard the same story a thousand times already and hearing "but I'm different" another time doesn't make it any different. I just wanted to be honest...
I am praying on it. I know church is my downfall in Christianity. I've hated church since before I even started school and no matter what the form, it still elicits a strong negative reaction out of me...
Anyhoooo, I should get going to work.
I didn't get a reply. And I know he's a busy guy (I even said it in the email and I mean what I say), but I can't help but feel the way I did when I was agnostic: church Christians love you within the walls of the church and the minute those walls are gone, so is the love. And it burns me up.
And over the past few months (nearly a year since I wrote that email), it's been accumulating in me.
If the love we experience in this world, both the giving and receiving, is meant to show us God, meant as a form of worship, how does this happen in Christian communities? How do so many of the people not know how to love?
And some might reply that they're just human, etc etc, but in my lifetime, if I was to add it all up, I have witnessed more utterly selfless examples of love through atheists and agnostics than I have with religious people of any faith. If we are all just human, why aren't the probabilities even all across the board?
Christianity, if not played right, is a sport of introversion. I have to make me better, I have to serve, I have to repent, I have to pray, I have to stop sinning, no wait, I don't have to stop sinning, I have to love and trust God more. It goes on and on and on and at the end of it, you have a person who is ONLY serving to be (or feel like?) a better person, not because he is a nobody who deserves nothing.
Get unengaged. It reminds me of the blog post I read written by a missionary a couple years ago in which he was absolutely elated that this guy who was cohabitating with his non-believing girlfriend dumped her (FINALLY!) and decided to pursue his faith more determinedly. Is that really a cause for elation? Doesn't anybody know what love is?
There's a passage everybody knows, right? The one everybody uses at their wedding:
1 Corintians 13, from the ESV:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Let's break it down, shall we?
1. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
3. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
What's he saying here about love? Nothing matters, not being supernaturally spiritual, not knowing everything, not being all-faithful, not being generous, not sacrificing yourself, if there is no love? Is that not what he's saying?
4-6. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
What is love? It is humble, human, selfless and true.
7. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
"Bear" goes two ways, I think. Love allows us to carry weight we wouldn't otherwise be able to carry but it also reveals all things. It has no secrets and hides nothing. And love also gives us hope. It keep us from growing cynical and bitter. Through everything, through all we go through both in our lifetime and as a species in general, love endures. I actually say that to people when I am asked for proof that miracles happen: the fact that we are still able to love when the world is so full of reasons not to (and has always been full of brutal reminders not to- this isn't a new thing), is a miracle. It really, really is. The fact that I am still able to love is a miracle. And on that miracle rests all of the hope I have for anything else in this lifetime and beyond.
8. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
It never ends. Humans will come and go. Knowledge will come and go. All things will come and go, but love? Love endures. Love never ceases. What does that say about our daily priorities? What is on top? What should be on top?
9 & 10. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
Here's where we get into my interpretation, so bear with me if you know more than me. We only barely have a glimpse of the love of God. The sum of every bit of love we absorb and give in our lifetime is only a part of the perfect love we will come to know with God. Imagine that for a second. Imagine that if you spend your entire life loving and that is all you do, you will still end up with only a partial view of what love is.
11. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
12. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
This part, the ESV study Bible jumbles up for me. To me, the child is us in this lifetime, the man is the one who knows God. Now, as children, our view is obscured, we only see part of what it's all about, even if we're face to face with what we're supposed to see. As men, we will see it all and realize how small and naive and dim our perception really was.
And love is most important.
Now you take all that and you compare two versions of how it's played out in our lives.
First, through a dog.
A dog wakes up and is ecstatic that you are there. If you're upset, it tends to you. If you're happy, it feeds off your happiness and reflects it back to you. It lives to see you smile. It lives to see you make the most of every day. It adores you and forgives you, whatever your mood. It regards you through an unwavering childlike perspective, even as the years go by.
Don't you find it odd that you can train a dog from birth to death, teaching them full sentences and even teaching them to ask for what they want, expanding their capacities both physically and mentally until they reach the limits set by the degradation of their abilities due to old age and yet, no matter what we do, what we put these animals through, we can never seem to impart on them our humanly bitterness, cynicism, vengeance and selfishness?
I remember standing with my Boo in an airport waiting for a friend's plane which was hours delayed and these weary travelers got off the plane, and as soon as they saw us in the terminal, the overwhelming majority of the tired, defeated passengers smiled at my Boo. They smiled. It was a beautiful thing to be a part of.
But I'm also admittedly biased in that I believe that dogs are meant to teach us the love of God beyond the capacity of any human.
Every day with a dog is a new day, a fresh day, and everything is forgiven and love is strengthened.
Now let's look at the guy who dumped his non-believing girlfriend. What kind of ripples does that cause?
I know from the perspective of the woman, it will be hard to stave the bitterness, the cynicism, the lack of trust. Will she ever date a Christian again? Will she ever be a Christian? What does she learn about love and loyalty from this experience?
And the guy? Even if Christians (I won't agree with) believe it was not selfish of him to abandon her for his faith, you cannot deny it was selfish of him to leave her behind, was it not?
Get unengaged.
This man I am with is not a Christian (he does believe in God, however). He is also the kindest, most loving, most respectful, most honorable person I have ever met. He wakes up every day and loves me more. And I don't mean the type of thing where our love grows because we've been together for a while, I mean this guy actively grows his love for me. He pursues me and learns about me and asks questions. He encourages me and takes care of me. He pushes me to grow and tells me when I need to fix my junk. He doesn't let me stay the same.
This man embodies everything I know (and hope) to be true about love.
Get unengaged?
To me, that is a terribly unChristian statement.
I live with this man (in sin!) and sleep with this man (also in sin!) and tell this man I love him. What, to me, is the Christian thing to do in this situation?
Love him fully. Commit to him fully by honoring the vows we have already made. Marry him. Follow through with the love I have started such that it will not be unholy. Pursue him. Show him the love that I am capable of through Jesus, through God. Show him that tiny glimpse of God's love through me. Love him unconditionally and selflessly. Respect him and help him to grow into a stronger, more forgiving love.
And in doing so, we will both be an example the world around us that this miracle, this love of which we are not only still capable but also able to grow throughout our lives, is but an immeasurably infinitely small fraction of the love of God.
That, to me, is how this relationship plays out from my perspective as a Christian.
Am I wrong?
Monday, November 21, 2011
On suffering and the limits of being human...
One of the few verse fragments I had actually heard before I got my Bible a couple years ago was from Matthew 22:46:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I was listening to a sermon from Tim Keller on suffering (I think it was from a long time ago), and he was saying that the suffering now will make whatever is to come all the more sweet and talked about how the reason Jesus endured such suffering was not to get to heaven, but to get us to heaven, that we were his hope in his time of greatest pain.
And aside from the sermon message, it occurred to me that if Jesus is God, how could He feel abandoned by God? And I know I've heard preachers explain it already, that in that particular moment, because of some accumulation of sins, Jesus was actually apart from God. Some even go so far as to say he went to hell for a while.
But if Jesus was fully human, there could be another explanation.
In the depths of greatest suffering, what happens to us? In the midst of some suffering, we shrug it off. Give us a little more and we're likely to turn to God, right? Given the right conditions, even the non-believers might find themselves pleading with a God they don't otherwise believe in. But throw us into extreme suffering, suffering where the body is absolutely overwhelmed and can feel nothing else but suffering and what happens?
I've never been there, I guess, but at the same time, I suppose my own moments of greatest suffering, even if they're insignificant in the realm of possible suffering, might paint a glimpse of what might happen and I think it really is the feeling of being abandoned by God.
If you're a self-aware believer, you've probably noticed that very many of the atheists you meet carry with them this deep unresolved pain (as do most humans...). And I know in my experience before learning about Jesus, I had it too and it did keep me away from God. If my own family, in particular my own mother, did not love me when they are naturally predestined to love me, then how could God love me and not only that, but why would He allow me to experience such a strong, irreparable abandonment? Those questions, along with the fundamental sorrow I carried with me about them, did keep me from knowing God. It all kept me angry at God, even if I didn't believe in Him at all.
So what if that is a layer to Jesus' death on the cross?
And I also realized that the actual physical death on the cross and its complex multidimensional physical nature has the potential to grasp anybody. I've noticed that people who are afraid of death are left in awe by the fact that Jesus knowingly died, but for people like me, who aren't afraid of death, the dying part isn't the most significant. For us (of course I'm speaking generally), it's the earthly suffering that is what creates awe. He didn't just die knowingly; he endured hours of torture first. Knowingly. That is a sacrifice.
Back to my point. What if the human body in a state of suffering overwhelm detaches in such a way that there is no God? What if God, in all His might and power, is intangible at that level of suffering because our broken body creates this impenetrable wall to block out anything but the knowledge of our suffering? And it would be a wall so strong that even Jesus endured it. It would be a distinct human limit to our connection to God.
Then let's take that concept and modify it to accommodate each individual's ability to cope in the face of suffering, however mild or extreme and then you'd have this sort of human predisposition to losing faith under certain pressures.
And so, under these particular circumstances, depending on our own personal vulnerability, we find ourselves utterly alone, completely abandoned. But we know that Jesus wasn't actually abandoned. We know God never stopped loving Him, right? We know that eventually, Jesus was going to be at the right hand of God. (Or maybe we don't and I'm wrong?) But even if we are limited by the mechanisms we've evolved to cope with suffering, even if those mechanisms might have the potential to bring about a state where faith is impossible, it is also impossible that our perception in that moment causes God's love to cease to exist.. While we might not be able to feel God in that particular moment, God is always there.
And I think, as with anything about God, you can look at it as infinitely vast beyond our realm of knowledge, but you can turn it the other way, into the microscopic aspects of our lives. In moments of great suffering where we are rendered incapable of anything but suffering, God is there and conversely, in moments of minor suffering, even if we aren't overwhelmed and isolated, God is also there.
I don't know- I just thought it made sense as a possibility because if God is God and God influenced the Bible, then without a doubt there are layers in there we can't even begin to analyse.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I was listening to a sermon from Tim Keller on suffering (I think it was from a long time ago), and he was saying that the suffering now will make whatever is to come all the more sweet and talked about how the reason Jesus endured such suffering was not to get to heaven, but to get us to heaven, that we were his hope in his time of greatest pain.
And aside from the sermon message, it occurred to me that if Jesus is God, how could He feel abandoned by God? And I know I've heard preachers explain it already, that in that particular moment, because of some accumulation of sins, Jesus was actually apart from God. Some even go so far as to say he went to hell for a while.
But if Jesus was fully human, there could be another explanation.
In the depths of greatest suffering, what happens to us? In the midst of some suffering, we shrug it off. Give us a little more and we're likely to turn to God, right? Given the right conditions, even the non-believers might find themselves pleading with a God they don't otherwise believe in. But throw us into extreme suffering, suffering where the body is absolutely overwhelmed and can feel nothing else but suffering and what happens?
I've never been there, I guess, but at the same time, I suppose my own moments of greatest suffering, even if they're insignificant in the realm of possible suffering, might paint a glimpse of what might happen and I think it really is the feeling of being abandoned by God.
If you're a self-aware believer, you've probably noticed that very many of the atheists you meet carry with them this deep unresolved pain (as do most humans...). And I know in my experience before learning about Jesus, I had it too and it did keep me away from God. If my own family, in particular my own mother, did not love me when they are naturally predestined to love me, then how could God love me and not only that, but why would He allow me to experience such a strong, irreparable abandonment? Those questions, along with the fundamental sorrow I carried with me about them, did keep me from knowing God. It all kept me angry at God, even if I didn't believe in Him at all.
So what if that is a layer to Jesus' death on the cross?
And I also realized that the actual physical death on the cross and its complex multidimensional physical nature has the potential to grasp anybody. I've noticed that people who are afraid of death are left in awe by the fact that Jesus knowingly died, but for people like me, who aren't afraid of death, the dying part isn't the most significant. For us (of course I'm speaking generally), it's the earthly suffering that is what creates awe. He didn't just die knowingly; he endured hours of torture first. Knowingly. That is a sacrifice.
Back to my point. What if the human body in a state of suffering overwhelm detaches in such a way that there is no God? What if God, in all His might and power, is intangible at that level of suffering because our broken body creates this impenetrable wall to block out anything but the knowledge of our suffering? And it would be a wall so strong that even Jesus endured it. It would be a distinct human limit to our connection to God.
Then let's take that concept and modify it to accommodate each individual's ability to cope in the face of suffering, however mild or extreme and then you'd have this sort of human predisposition to losing faith under certain pressures.
And so, under these particular circumstances, depending on our own personal vulnerability, we find ourselves utterly alone, completely abandoned. But we know that Jesus wasn't actually abandoned. We know God never stopped loving Him, right? We know that eventually, Jesus was going to be at the right hand of God. (Or maybe we don't and I'm wrong?) But even if we are limited by the mechanisms we've evolved to cope with suffering, even if those mechanisms might have the potential to bring about a state where faith is impossible, it is also impossible that our perception in that moment causes God's love to cease to exist.. While we might not be able to feel God in that particular moment, God is always there.
And I think, as with anything about God, you can look at it as infinitely vast beyond our realm of knowledge, but you can turn it the other way, into the microscopic aspects of our lives. In moments of great suffering where we are rendered incapable of anything but suffering, God is there and conversely, in moments of minor suffering, even if we aren't overwhelmed and isolated, God is also there.
I don't know- I just thought it made sense as a possibility because if God is God and God influenced the Bible, then without a doubt there are layers in there we can't even begin to analyse.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
On the lies demons tell us...
Me again.
As I do my copying and pasting, as I have been for work for the past... um, longer than I can remember anymore, I finally figured out that it's so mindless that I can listen to sermons again while doing it. And so, until I'm done, which will hopefully be this week, this place will probably be flooded more than usual with sermon snippets. Apologies if you find it dull and/or don't really like Matt Chandler's sermons, but really, I think they're awesome, and so that's how it goes.
So he rambles on (in the sermon from April 10th, 2011, which you can hear/read here) and somewhere near minute twenty, he quotes Colossians 2:13-15:
13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14. by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.
And then a little later he says this:
And sure, anybody who knows me might see how that sort of explanation might affect me directly, even though my story isn't nearly that brutal, but I've never heard demons explained that way. I mean, I've heard them explained in a few ways, mostly with self-destructive behavior alteration, but this is the first time it's been said in a way where the person still makes all their choices on their own, but the information they're given in order to make those choices, and in particular, the information they're given about themselves, is very, very wrong.
And in my own personal story, there was a really distinct and abrupt shift from that perception of me where that treatment was what I deserved to realizing that I could get out of that pattern if I would just call a spade a spade and stop justifying the mistreatment of myself as being something unchangeable or even usual.
And in that sentence, it makes it seem like an easy thing to do, but it really wasn't. I spent months trying to figure out what it was that I was emitting that made me vulnerable, what those men's radar was picking up. And then just like that, a friend last summer told me my perception of events that had transpired in the winter of 2000 were wrong, it negated everything I'd felt about what I deserved in a flash, even though I'd spent the ten years after those events in that same trap of abuse as Matt Chandler described.
The thing with deserving is we don't deserve anything. I think I've talked about it before, either in this blog or the black blog, but even from a natural, non-religious standpoint, we don't deserve anything. I mean, nature is a cruel, cruel game of survival and the fact that we have shelter, that we have food and water, that we have things in our lives that go above and beyond simple survival and that's not enough and we think we deserve things on top of that? It makes no sense. We don't deserve anything. There is no deserving. Even earning is iffy in the world we live in. You earn your living, earn your car, earn your house and then what? It gets wiped away in a tsunami. Just like that, in a second, it's gone. Add to that the disproportionate way that income is inversely related to work and really, what is earned anymore? You have the person working their ass off making minimum wage, going home utterly exhausted and spent physically and emotionally and totally beaten down at the end of the day and you have the executive who spends three hours of his workday on facebook.
So what is it that makes us feel we deserve anything?
But what I never realized in having that point of view is that I also held the opposite view. It's not that I deserve nothing at all, which really is what not deserving anything is, right? No, instead, all along, I've believed I deserve bad things. I deserved to be abused. I deserved to be mistreated. And it was only when Matt Chandler used that word that it clicked.
I've never said I have bad luck, but I have said I am unlucky in some aspects of life. To me, they're not the same. One implies junk is forced upon you as though you're some sort of victim, while the other, I felt, was more proactive. I tried, I did my best to remain idealistic and to stave off the cynicism, but in the end those aspects of my life just weren't meant to go well. But I didn't stop trying, even though I "knew" that. But the thing is, when you try and try and try all while believing you deserve horrible things, you will get those horrible things.
And I did analyse to death how those men got into my life, and I did find a pattern wherein they'd hurt me or reject me in some brutal, blatant way and when I wouldn't leave, when I'd forgive them and move on, that's when they knew. Whether it was conscious or not on their part, it was the same in every abusive relationship I've been in so far. And because I craved that indifference because I thought that was all there was out there because it was all I knew, I stayed and in staying, I shut myself off to any other possibilities.
But really, when I found God, or God picked me, stuff started to fall apart. How could God love me, how could I be a child of God, and- not that He'd let these things happen, but that He'd let me do these things to myself- how could He not make me feel loved enough to not even know what kind of love to hope for? And it made no sense because He made me loving. He made me forgiving. He made me strong enough to not carry a grudge (in the majority of situations anyway). What if God's example for love in my life was me all along? How could selfless, sacrificial love not exist if that was how I was living?
Or at least, striving to live.
And then that friend said without using the words, "You were loved; it just didn't come across that way," and things changed. There was love for me in the world, but I was missing it.
And so, I kind of do believe that explanation of demons. Not to shield myself from responsibility, but people say I'm fairly self-aware, but how else could I miss something so huge?
As I do my copying and pasting, as I have been for work for the past... um, longer than I can remember anymore, I finally figured out that it's so mindless that I can listen to sermons again while doing it. And so, until I'm done, which will hopefully be this week, this place will probably be flooded more than usual with sermon snippets. Apologies if you find it dull and/or don't really like Matt Chandler's sermons, but really, I think they're awesome, and so that's how it goes.
So he rambles on (in the sermon from April 10th, 2011, which you can hear/read here) and somewhere near minute twenty, he quotes Colossians 2:13-15:
13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14. by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.
And then a little later he says this:
Now I love that last line in that text that says, “He puts to open shame the rulers and the principalities.” That’s a reference to demonic creatures. And I know we’re in the West and we want to pretend that stuff is not real, but in the Scriptures and in our experience here as your pastors here, there are demonic activities still very much functioning. Really the sole weapon they have is lying. They just lie and get us to believe lies. And those lies lead us into dark places.
Here’s what the text just said. A couple weeks ago, we were doing baptisms, and the girl who was baptized before my daughter gave this testimony of being sexually abused by a family member who was a deacon at a church. And then another family member did the same thing, which led her into a life of deep darkness, depravity and choosing to be abused by people. In fact, in her testimony, she said, “There are men with a radar for women like me.” She talked about how she had been abused and had just surrendered herself, thinking that she deserved that abuse somehow. Those are dark lies that she has believed. Who is whispering those lies to her? The authorities and principalities of this fallen world. And then yet in the middle of all those lies, being led down dark and deplorable, unspeakable paths, Jesus intervenes. Do you know what’s crazy? She gets in the water in front of a thousand strangers and shares her darkest moments. Do you know what happened in that moment? Jesus just said, “See? I’m better, bigger and stronger than this.”
And sure, anybody who knows me might see how that sort of explanation might affect me directly, even though my story isn't nearly that brutal, but I've never heard demons explained that way. I mean, I've heard them explained in a few ways, mostly with self-destructive behavior alteration, but this is the first time it's been said in a way where the person still makes all their choices on their own, but the information they're given in order to make those choices, and in particular, the information they're given about themselves, is very, very wrong.
And in my own personal story, there was a really distinct and abrupt shift from that perception of me where that treatment was what I deserved to realizing that I could get out of that pattern if I would just call a spade a spade and stop justifying the mistreatment of myself as being something unchangeable or even usual.
And in that sentence, it makes it seem like an easy thing to do, but it really wasn't. I spent months trying to figure out what it was that I was emitting that made me vulnerable, what those men's radar was picking up. And then just like that, a friend last summer told me my perception of events that had transpired in the winter of 2000 were wrong, it negated everything I'd felt about what I deserved in a flash, even though I'd spent the ten years after those events in that same trap of abuse as Matt Chandler described.
The thing with deserving is we don't deserve anything. I think I've talked about it before, either in this blog or the black blog, but even from a natural, non-religious standpoint, we don't deserve anything. I mean, nature is a cruel, cruel game of survival and the fact that we have shelter, that we have food and water, that we have things in our lives that go above and beyond simple survival and that's not enough and we think we deserve things on top of that? It makes no sense. We don't deserve anything. There is no deserving. Even earning is iffy in the world we live in. You earn your living, earn your car, earn your house and then what? It gets wiped away in a tsunami. Just like that, in a second, it's gone. Add to that the disproportionate way that income is inversely related to work and really, what is earned anymore? You have the person working their ass off making minimum wage, going home utterly exhausted and spent physically and emotionally and totally beaten down at the end of the day and you have the executive who spends three hours of his workday on facebook.
So what is it that makes us feel we deserve anything?
But what I never realized in having that point of view is that I also held the opposite view. It's not that I deserve nothing at all, which really is what not deserving anything is, right? No, instead, all along, I've believed I deserve bad things. I deserved to be abused. I deserved to be mistreated. And it was only when Matt Chandler used that word that it clicked.
I've never said I have bad luck, but I have said I am unlucky in some aspects of life. To me, they're not the same. One implies junk is forced upon you as though you're some sort of victim, while the other, I felt, was more proactive. I tried, I did my best to remain idealistic and to stave off the cynicism, but in the end those aspects of my life just weren't meant to go well. But I didn't stop trying, even though I "knew" that. But the thing is, when you try and try and try all while believing you deserve horrible things, you will get those horrible things.
And I did analyse to death how those men got into my life, and I did find a pattern wherein they'd hurt me or reject me in some brutal, blatant way and when I wouldn't leave, when I'd forgive them and move on, that's when they knew. Whether it was conscious or not on their part, it was the same in every abusive relationship I've been in so far. And because I craved that indifference because I thought that was all there was out there because it was all I knew, I stayed and in staying, I shut myself off to any other possibilities.
But really, when I found God, or God picked me, stuff started to fall apart. How could God love me, how could I be a child of God, and- not that He'd let these things happen, but that He'd let me do these things to myself- how could He not make me feel loved enough to not even know what kind of love to hope for? And it made no sense because He made me loving. He made me forgiving. He made me strong enough to not carry a grudge (in the majority of situations anyway). What if God's example for love in my life was me all along? How could selfless, sacrificial love not exist if that was how I was living?
Or at least, striving to live.
And then that friend said without using the words, "You were loved; it just didn't come across that way," and things changed. There was love for me in the world, but I was missing it.
And so, I kind of do believe that explanation of demons. Not to shield myself from responsibility, but people say I'm fairly self-aware, but how else could I miss something so huge?
Saturday, July 16, 2011
On idols and love...
From Matt Chandler's sermon given on March 20, 2011, questions which he says he took from Tim Keller originally:
I figure the best way to answer those questions is to just whip out answers as fast as possible without thinking. Here are mine.
1. Everything. There’s no real singular subject, but it’s everything. My dad refers to it as my anxiety, but it’s not usually anxiety so much as trying to figure things out. Assessment, I guess.
2. Love. More specifically, to be loved.
3. Everything. Life itself.
4. Lack of control.
5. Hard to put into words, but there are these moments where I’m the bad guy and I’m going to lose somebody and I have zero control over what they will do with me next. In those moments, I am ruined for the day. It doesn’t help that they’re usually brought on by things I’ve said or done that I really shouldn’t have.
6. Dogs. Probably. But I talk a lot, so I’m not sure that’s the only subject they might pick up on.
7. A car. Cars are freedom. And my dogs. Dogs are joy and family. Comfort and protection, I guess, is what I get from both.
8. Nothing. God, I guess, because nothing of this world brings me solace. It’s a major complaint lately. I have no escape. I have no tv, I have no substance that I can take to take me away and people would say the internet is my solace, but really, it’s more work than it is fun most of the time. It’s not relaxing. Writing does give me some relief, but I haven’t gone without it in over four years so I don’t know how big of a part it plays. You can always write- wherever you are. There’s always a pen and a receipt or business card or whatever. And if you know yourself well enough, you can write tiny and in code to fit it all in.
9. Happiness, I guess. Just knowing what that feels like. Maybe I already have it but I just don’t realize that this is what happiness feels like.
10. Love me. I wish I could know it’s there. I wish I could feel it even if I don’t feel it directly. You know? I wish I could be sure of it. Same goes for earthly loves too. I’m not even sure my own dogs love me.
Sometimes, I wish my idols were the easy ones, like money or lust or stuff. Or maybe they are easy ones and I just don’t see it. The most obvious one is my dogs but even then, I don’t think they’re idols so much as a part of my life I know a lot about and that just makes me laugh every day. They’re a source of a lot of stories. But I guess that’s it, right? If God is everything, shouldn’t He be a source of stories? I never do talk about God. Well, not never, but rarely. Of all the things I talk about, His pepperings are probably among the rarest. Shyness, I guess. How do you talk about greatness without ruining it? It’s like trying to describe how the Rockies make you feel to somebody who has never been. (Except that there's a 98% chance that they're somehow adamantly opinionated and confrontational about whether or not mountains exist.)
The other most obvious one is control. There are two instances of control with which I have the most trouble. One is the one I talked about in #5 and the other is with my dogs in public. I got yelled at by neighbors in the city so often that I am actually still quite scared of walking them in the daytime. I'm on high alert the entire time, waiting for somebody to come out and scream at me. As a result, if I'm out with my dogs in the daytime, I stress an enormous amount over the control I have over them. If they do something out of line, I panic. I become so easily frustrated because of the tenseness of the situation that the whole ordeal becomes so unpleasant that I just won't do it. I'll either walk them in the middle of the night or not at all.
I guess if I branch that out further, the overall theme is that I can't make mistakes. Whether I make a mistake in a relationship or I make what some stranger perceives as a mistake, I lose the control. I lose my confidence and my equality. All of a sudden, I'm the underdog and there's nothing I can do about it. In those moments, to be honest, I loathe myself.
Because if I was good enough, if I was a quality individual, I could make mistakes and people would forgive me. But since I'm not, people don't forgive me and instead, choose to walk out of my life completely or berate my person without any regard for me as a soul. Evidently, my quality of person makes it such that either one of those becomes easy.
And there is the other point Matt Chandler made in the same sermon:
Right there, the point being I should be allowed to make mistakes, I should be allowed to fail and I should be allowed to just be me because that's enough. I may not be the best and I may not be perfect, but God made me lovable.
Jesus, the most loving character ever written, was sacrificed to make me perfect and take away my profound failings and to make me enough just as I am.
One day, I'll figure it out. Maybe.
And until then, it (this particular bit of idolatry), among many other things, will stand between me and God, from my end, not His.
So how do you identify idols? I have ten questions to ask yourself:
1. What consumes most of your thoughts and feelings?
2. What motivates the things that you do?
3. What are you most afraid of?
4. What brings the highest amount of frustration or anger into your life?
5. What is one thing that can change your mood in a second?
6. What would your friends say is your favorite topic of conversation?
7. What are some things that you feel you can’t live without?
8. What brings you solace?
9. What do you yearn for?
10. What is one thing that you wish God would do for you?
If you begin to answer those questions, you’ll be able to find your idols. Because what you think about, what you yearn for, what you talk about, what you want God to do for you, what drives you, what makes you angry, what satisfies you and what brings you comfort is what you worship.
I figure the best way to answer those questions is to just whip out answers as fast as possible without thinking. Here are mine.
1. Everything. There’s no real singular subject, but it’s everything. My dad refers to it as my anxiety, but it’s not usually anxiety so much as trying to figure things out. Assessment, I guess.
2. Love. More specifically, to be loved.
3. Everything. Life itself.
4. Lack of control.
5. Hard to put into words, but there are these moments where I’m the bad guy and I’m going to lose somebody and I have zero control over what they will do with me next. In those moments, I am ruined for the day. It doesn’t help that they’re usually brought on by things I’ve said or done that I really shouldn’t have.
6. Dogs. Probably. But I talk a lot, so I’m not sure that’s the only subject they might pick up on.
7. A car. Cars are freedom. And my dogs. Dogs are joy and family. Comfort and protection, I guess, is what I get from both.
8. Nothing. God, I guess, because nothing of this world brings me solace. It’s a major complaint lately. I have no escape. I have no tv, I have no substance that I can take to take me away and people would say the internet is my solace, but really, it’s more work than it is fun most of the time. It’s not relaxing. Writing does give me some relief, but I haven’t gone without it in over four years so I don’t know how big of a part it plays. You can always write- wherever you are. There’s always a pen and a receipt or business card or whatever. And if you know yourself well enough, you can write tiny and in code to fit it all in.
9. Happiness, I guess. Just knowing what that feels like. Maybe I already have it but I just don’t realize that this is what happiness feels like.
10. Love me. I wish I could know it’s there. I wish I could feel it even if I don’t feel it directly. You know? I wish I could be sure of it. Same goes for earthly loves too. I’m not even sure my own dogs love me.
Sometimes, I wish my idols were the easy ones, like money or lust or stuff. Or maybe they are easy ones and I just don’t see it. The most obvious one is my dogs but even then, I don’t think they’re idols so much as a part of my life I know a lot about and that just makes me laugh every day. They’re a source of a lot of stories. But I guess that’s it, right? If God is everything, shouldn’t He be a source of stories? I never do talk about God. Well, not never, but rarely. Of all the things I talk about, His pepperings are probably among the rarest. Shyness, I guess. How do you talk about greatness without ruining it? It’s like trying to describe how the Rockies make you feel to somebody who has never been. (Except that there's a 98% chance that they're somehow adamantly opinionated and confrontational about whether or not mountains exist.)
The other most obvious one is control. There are two instances of control with which I have the most trouble. One is the one I talked about in #5 and the other is with my dogs in public. I got yelled at by neighbors in the city so often that I am actually still quite scared of walking them in the daytime. I'm on high alert the entire time, waiting for somebody to come out and scream at me. As a result, if I'm out with my dogs in the daytime, I stress an enormous amount over the control I have over them. If they do something out of line, I panic. I become so easily frustrated because of the tenseness of the situation that the whole ordeal becomes so unpleasant that I just won't do it. I'll either walk them in the middle of the night or not at all.
I guess if I branch that out further, the overall theme is that I can't make mistakes. Whether I make a mistake in a relationship or I make what some stranger perceives as a mistake, I lose the control. I lose my confidence and my equality. All of a sudden, I'm the underdog and there's nothing I can do about it. In those moments, to be honest, I loathe myself.
Because if I was good enough, if I was a quality individual, I could make mistakes and people would forgive me. But since I'm not, people don't forgive me and instead, choose to walk out of my life completely or berate my person without any regard for me as a soul. Evidently, my quality of person makes it such that either one of those becomes easy.
And there is the other point Matt Chandler made in the same sermon:
The Bible is filled with shady characters. And this goes back to the point that the book is about the mercy and beauty of God in Christ and not you and me. Because almost all the men and women in Scripture are these abject failures who God uses mightily. Why? Because the point is Him, not you. So for those of you who like the other end of the spectrum where you loathe yourself, that’s just as much idolatry as loving yourself. Both are saying, “I have no need of the cross of Christ.” Both are wrong.
Right there, the point being I should be allowed to make mistakes, I should be allowed to fail and I should be allowed to just be me because that's enough. I may not be the best and I may not be perfect, but God made me lovable.
Jesus, the most loving character ever written, was sacrificed to make me perfect and take away my profound failings and to make me enough just as I am.
One day, I'll figure it out. Maybe.
And until then, it (this particular bit of idolatry), among many other things, will stand between me and God, from my end, not His.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Always critical...
There are some things I find difficult about the church structure. And I'm always hesitant to say anything about it (even though this blog would suggest otherwise) because I really don't want to be the one who sits on the outside and tells the inside how to do its thing. But there are two things a few pastors seem to do that I've noticed a lot lately that just lose me.
1. Rehoming animals.
This one, if you know me at all, is kind of obvious. If somebody rehomes a dog, I immediately begin to question their person. To discard a dog is to discard a soul. It's to actively participate in the emotional scarring of an individual. It's also to throw that individual you've scarred onto somebody else.
Sure, life as a pastor is rough. I don't doubt it. But how many pastors these days say church comes in fourth on the priority list?
1. God
2. Wife
3. Family
4. Church
Seems to me that a dog would fit in #3. And not only is the emotional scarring of the abandoned dog significant, the negative lessons it teaches your children and those around you about loyalty, unconditional love and frankly, the elderly are also very important.
Dogs, I think, are a gift from God to show us what unconditional love looks like. They're meant to help us understand how to give sacrificially and how to put aside the events of our day and love wholeheartedly as if that were all that mattered.
Something about a pastor rehoming a dog, especially an elderly one, makes me question whether he knows love at all. How can he teach the love of God when he has no respect for the love of a dog? I'm serious too. Dogs don't need much and as they grow older; they need less and less (albeit more in vet bills sometimes). To abandon a faithful friend as they enter into their older years where they require compassion and the fulfillment of trust is just cruel. It's blatantly unloving. And somehow, I still hold pastors above regular people in that sense. They should love more. They should strive to love harder and fuller than the rest of us.
And really, if you foresee a pastoral life in your future, don't get a dog if you can't prioritize properly. Be responsible.
2. One-sided communication.
In another lifetime, I joined a pet forum on the internet. At the time, I was pretty sick and couldn't really do anything with myself, so I decided to try to help people with their dogs online. When I first got there, there were about twenty threads updated every day. It wasn't that many in spite of the admin's bloated membership number.
Once in a while, somebody would post a thread with some obscure medical issue that nobody knew anything about. They'd be upset and you could kind of tell by the tone of their post that they'd be sitting there waiting for a response. And I won't hesitate to say that a couple times after I was made more aware of those empty threads, that person was me. I remember asking how to train Jemma when she overreacts in a very negative way to any sort of correction. At the time, she had really low estrogen too, so that contributed to her submissive upset. Nobody answered. I remember feeling hopeless and a little bit rejected.
All that to say, I quickly learned that people just want an ear most of the time. They don't necessarily need all the answers but they do want somebody to hear them and just be there. And on this forum, it was a little bit of an extreme because of the panic that sets in when somebody we love is afflicted with something we can't figure out, but on a lower level, this happens everywhere with everybody in every situation.
A commenter on that forum who appeared out of nowhere one time, commented that this Prin person (i.e. me) had a "sickness" whereby she'd answer everything. And I did. I tried my best to answer all the threads nobody would answer, even if just to push it back up to the new threads so somebody with actual answers would see it.
When I left that forum a few years ago, the daily thread count had risen from the twenty or so when I'd arrived to around 120. And it's not just because of me. Other people started doing the same and it became a really caring forum. People listened. They tried to help. It was great.
I still try to do it now, in my daily life. I try to hear when somebody just needs an ear- although sometimes, it's hard not to offer unsolicited advice. I've been told that somehow, people feel they can open up to me and say things they wouldn't otherwise say out loud. I love that. I love the privilege of people letting me in.
Pastors have that privilege built into their role. People open up. People want to be heard. People want direction or at the very least, understanding.
A pastor has to reply. Has to. I understand schedules are tight and pastors are pulled every which way, but still, there has to be a way, even if that way is finding a volunteer who will help you sort through your email or phone messages or other requests. You have to answer.
Nothing makes a person feel invisible quite like being asked, "How are you?" and being shut down during the reply. Sure, in some parts of society, people ask that question without meaning, but a pastor is supposed to care. And worse still is the next time the person is asked the same question. How do you answer a question to which the asker has already expressed no interest in hearing an answer?
You just stop answering. You shut down. You build a boundary between you and your pastor and that boundary makes the relationship superficial and uncaring. It makes it so that you and your pastor will never become more than acquaintances who exchange meaningless pleasantries.
And I honestly don't think any pastor goes into ministry with that kind of goal for personal relationships.
Answer the emails. Answer the phone calls. Learn to communicate so that your replies are thick and juicy and the interaction can be short and fulfilling.
Learn to communicate so that, as tight as your schedule gets, nobody feels left behind.
Learn to communicate.
Because really, who cares if you give three hundred talks and write seventeen books this year when nobody (as far as I know) has felt true community from a book? Or even a lecture? Who cares when none of those words you put out makes anybody feel loved? Who cares when all the effort you put into those endeavors is not felt at a level of personal connection?
Stop putting effort into things that seem big but do nothing for the people you love or are called to love. Who cares if the biggest pastor in the United States thinks your book is great when your most loyal church member's life is falling apart and you're just not there? Who cares if other pastors lift you up when you slap away the hands reaching out to you?
It's the little things that count.
1. Rehoming animals.
This one, if you know me at all, is kind of obvious. If somebody rehomes a dog, I immediately begin to question their person. To discard a dog is to discard a soul. It's to actively participate in the emotional scarring of an individual. It's also to throw that individual you've scarred onto somebody else.
Sure, life as a pastor is rough. I don't doubt it. But how many pastors these days say church comes in fourth on the priority list?
1. God
2. Wife
3. Family
4. Church
Seems to me that a dog would fit in #3. And not only is the emotional scarring of the abandoned dog significant, the negative lessons it teaches your children and those around you about loyalty, unconditional love and frankly, the elderly are also very important.
Dogs, I think, are a gift from God to show us what unconditional love looks like. They're meant to help us understand how to give sacrificially and how to put aside the events of our day and love wholeheartedly as if that were all that mattered.
Something about a pastor rehoming a dog, especially an elderly one, makes me question whether he knows love at all. How can he teach the love of God when he has no respect for the love of a dog? I'm serious too. Dogs don't need much and as they grow older; they need less and less (albeit more in vet bills sometimes). To abandon a faithful friend as they enter into their older years where they require compassion and the fulfillment of trust is just cruel. It's blatantly unloving. And somehow, I still hold pastors above regular people in that sense. They should love more. They should strive to love harder and fuller than the rest of us.
And really, if you foresee a pastoral life in your future, don't get a dog if you can't prioritize properly. Be responsible.
2. One-sided communication.
In another lifetime, I joined a pet forum on the internet. At the time, I was pretty sick and couldn't really do anything with myself, so I decided to try to help people with their dogs online. When I first got there, there were about twenty threads updated every day. It wasn't that many in spite of the admin's bloated membership number.
Once in a while, somebody would post a thread with some obscure medical issue that nobody knew anything about. They'd be upset and you could kind of tell by the tone of their post that they'd be sitting there waiting for a response. And I won't hesitate to say that a couple times after I was made more aware of those empty threads, that person was me. I remember asking how to train Jemma when she overreacts in a very negative way to any sort of correction. At the time, she had really low estrogen too, so that contributed to her submissive upset. Nobody answered. I remember feeling hopeless and a little bit rejected.
All that to say, I quickly learned that people just want an ear most of the time. They don't necessarily need all the answers but they do want somebody to hear them and just be there. And on this forum, it was a little bit of an extreme because of the panic that sets in when somebody we love is afflicted with something we can't figure out, but on a lower level, this happens everywhere with everybody in every situation.
A commenter on that forum who appeared out of nowhere one time, commented that this Prin person (i.e. me) had a "sickness" whereby she'd answer everything. And I did. I tried my best to answer all the threads nobody would answer, even if just to push it back up to the new threads so somebody with actual answers would see it.
When I left that forum a few years ago, the daily thread count had risen from the twenty or so when I'd arrived to around 120. And it's not just because of me. Other people started doing the same and it became a really caring forum. People listened. They tried to help. It was great.
I still try to do it now, in my daily life. I try to hear when somebody just needs an ear- although sometimes, it's hard not to offer unsolicited advice. I've been told that somehow, people feel they can open up to me and say things they wouldn't otherwise say out loud. I love that. I love the privilege of people letting me in.
Pastors have that privilege built into their role. People open up. People want to be heard. People want direction or at the very least, understanding.
A pastor has to reply. Has to. I understand schedules are tight and pastors are pulled every which way, but still, there has to be a way, even if that way is finding a volunteer who will help you sort through your email or phone messages or other requests. You have to answer.
Nothing makes a person feel invisible quite like being asked, "How are you?" and being shut down during the reply. Sure, in some parts of society, people ask that question without meaning, but a pastor is supposed to care. And worse still is the next time the person is asked the same question. How do you answer a question to which the asker has already expressed no interest in hearing an answer?
You just stop answering. You shut down. You build a boundary between you and your pastor and that boundary makes the relationship superficial and uncaring. It makes it so that you and your pastor will never become more than acquaintances who exchange meaningless pleasantries.
And I honestly don't think any pastor goes into ministry with that kind of goal for personal relationships.
Answer the emails. Answer the phone calls. Learn to communicate so that your replies are thick and juicy and the interaction can be short and fulfilling.
Learn to communicate so that, as tight as your schedule gets, nobody feels left behind.
Learn to communicate.
Because really, who cares if you give three hundred talks and write seventeen books this year when nobody (as far as I know) has felt true community from a book? Or even a lecture? Who cares when none of those words you put out makes anybody feel loved? Who cares when all the effort you put into those endeavors is not felt at a level of personal connection?
Stop putting effort into things that seem big but do nothing for the people you love or are called to love. Who cares if the biggest pastor in the United States thinks your book is great when your most loyal church member's life is falling apart and you're just not there? Who cares if other pastors lift you up when you slap away the hands reaching out to you?
It's the little things that count.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
On secrets...
I've been thinking about secrets lately. I'm not a very secretive person and as such, the life dramas I get into tend to be of a different nature than people taking issue with me as a result of some inconsistency or omission on my part.
But secrets and misunderstandings wherein both parties lack forgiveness and empathy tend to be the main driver of television and movies on the whole, and I find that sad. It's sad because even if you know what's going to happen, even if you see it coming the entire time you're watching and you know how it'll end, so many people do it in their own lives anyway, as if they are somehow immune to being outed.
In truth, they are immune, for the most part. In this society where everybody talks and nobody listens, you can say pretty well anything, truth or not, and very few will take notice. Even fewer will notice when something has been omitted. We're all very busy in our lives, right? Too busy to reply to emails, too busy to return calls and too busy to worry about whether or not those in our entourage are genuine.
We've stopped caring also because even if those in our entourage are found to be disingenuous or blatantly devious, we can just discard them, as loyalty these days is scarce, if at all existent.
But the thing is, Matthew chapter 9 says this:
3 And behold, some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming.” 4 But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, “Why do you think evil in your hearts? 5 For which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’? 6 But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he then said to the paralytic—“Rise, pick up your bed and go home.”
And Matthew 12:25 starts in a similar way as verse four above. So if the Bible is true and Jesus is God and Jesus hears thoughts, then what of secrets?
There's endless talk about how the Bible says we should or should not live, and yet, openness seems so frowned upon among Christians I know.
When a pastor asked me a few weeks ago how I was doing and if I was involved in a church, I took my time answering. I could have gone two ways: I could have answered no, but I'm still looking, or I could have answered honestly. I chose to do the latter.
I explained things from the perspective that from all I've learned through the teachings of my favorite pastors, there is a distinct difference between living in sin while living a life of repentance and living in sin knowingly all while refusing to change anything about it. I am living in the latter.
I'm living with my boyfriend now, as of May first. We're not married. We do plan on getting married eventually, but we're not engaged either. And God only knows how often even the best laid plans fall through, in spite of all the wishful thinking.
So there it was, laid out as text on a screen, honest and in an effort to state where I am, how I'm doing, why I'm not in church without making excuses for myself.
And I know most people these days- Christians or not- wouldn't really see the sin in living with one's boyfriend before marriage if marriage is intended, even if there is a strong statistical possibility of dissolution. (That statistic is much higher for people who live together prior to getting engaged.) But the difference here is that I know it's not what God intends. It's the knowledge that creates the problem here. It's what makes this rebellion against what God intends for me.
While I don't repent and make my boyfriend move out or marry me immediately, I do pray a lot. I pray that God would make of my mistakes godliness and guide me to what He intends for me anyway, even if I trip on my own feet the entire way. I pray it because I want to know what it feels like to have what God wants for me, even if I'm too cynical, controlling and distrusting to allow it and plan it for myself. I want to not be wrong about the outcome of this. I want this guy to be the guy I commit to forever because we find ourselves in this situation already and because that is the only way to honor God through this blatant rebellion. If I refuse to repent by going backwards and undoing things that have been done, then I will repent by moving forwards toward what will hopefully make this right.
But I digress.
My point is, I was open and honest and didn't get a reply. Maybe my email got lost. Maybe. Or maybe he just didn't know how to respond.
But I find myself protecting the Christians I know from me. I find myself censoring myself, not for my own protection but for theirs, as if somehow they believe that their own faith is so fleeting that to be touched by the sin of another individual, however minor or major, will be the end of their own relationship with God.
How well do you trust God if those around you have to keep themselves secret in order to protect you? Does it imply such a strong lack when even the people around you see it?
But what of these secrets? If I had told the pastor everything was fine and I was still on the hunt for a church where I'd fit in, cleverly omitting the part where very few gospel-centered churches would allow me to fit in in my current circumstance, what would that serve? Is he better off for it? Am I better off for it?
In this society where nobody is listening anyway, what difference does it make? I could have just as easily not even replied.
But you can't compartmentalize truth. You can't compartmentalize honesty. It's either your everything or it's nothing at all. Ultimately, there are no secrets from God.
So really, what difference does it make? It depends on where your heart is, I guess.
But secrets and misunderstandings wherein both parties lack forgiveness and empathy tend to be the main driver of television and movies on the whole, and I find that sad. It's sad because even if you know what's going to happen, even if you see it coming the entire time you're watching and you know how it'll end, so many people do it in their own lives anyway, as if they are somehow immune to being outed.
In truth, they are immune, for the most part. In this society where everybody talks and nobody listens, you can say pretty well anything, truth or not, and very few will take notice. Even fewer will notice when something has been omitted. We're all very busy in our lives, right? Too busy to reply to emails, too busy to return calls and too busy to worry about whether or not those in our entourage are genuine.
We've stopped caring also because even if those in our entourage are found to be disingenuous or blatantly devious, we can just discard them, as loyalty these days is scarce, if at all existent.
But the thing is, Matthew chapter 9 says this:
3 And behold, some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming.” 4 But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, “Why do you think evil in your hearts? 5 For which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’? 6 But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he then said to the paralytic—“Rise, pick up your bed and go home.”
And Matthew 12:25 starts in a similar way as verse four above. So if the Bible is true and Jesus is God and Jesus hears thoughts, then what of secrets?
There's endless talk about how the Bible says we should or should not live, and yet, openness seems so frowned upon among Christians I know.
When a pastor asked me a few weeks ago how I was doing and if I was involved in a church, I took my time answering. I could have gone two ways: I could have answered no, but I'm still looking, or I could have answered honestly. I chose to do the latter.
I explained things from the perspective that from all I've learned through the teachings of my favorite pastors, there is a distinct difference between living in sin while living a life of repentance and living in sin knowingly all while refusing to change anything about it. I am living in the latter.
I'm living with my boyfriend now, as of May first. We're not married. We do plan on getting married eventually, but we're not engaged either. And God only knows how often even the best laid plans fall through, in spite of all the wishful thinking.
So there it was, laid out as text on a screen, honest and in an effort to state where I am, how I'm doing, why I'm not in church without making excuses for myself.
And I know most people these days- Christians or not- wouldn't really see the sin in living with one's boyfriend before marriage if marriage is intended, even if there is a strong statistical possibility of dissolution. (That statistic is much higher for people who live together prior to getting engaged.) But the difference here is that I know it's not what God intends. It's the knowledge that creates the problem here. It's what makes this rebellion against what God intends for me.
While I don't repent and make my boyfriend move out or marry me immediately, I do pray a lot. I pray that God would make of my mistakes godliness and guide me to what He intends for me anyway, even if I trip on my own feet the entire way. I pray it because I want to know what it feels like to have what God wants for me, even if I'm too cynical, controlling and distrusting to allow it and plan it for myself. I want to not be wrong about the outcome of this. I want this guy to be the guy I commit to forever because we find ourselves in this situation already and because that is the only way to honor God through this blatant rebellion. If I refuse to repent by going backwards and undoing things that have been done, then I will repent by moving forwards toward what will hopefully make this right.
But I digress.
My point is, I was open and honest and didn't get a reply. Maybe my email got lost. Maybe. Or maybe he just didn't know how to respond.
But I find myself protecting the Christians I know from me. I find myself censoring myself, not for my own protection but for theirs, as if somehow they believe that their own faith is so fleeting that to be touched by the sin of another individual, however minor or major, will be the end of their own relationship with God.
How well do you trust God if those around you have to keep themselves secret in order to protect you? Does it imply such a strong lack when even the people around you see it?
But what of these secrets? If I had told the pastor everything was fine and I was still on the hunt for a church where I'd fit in, cleverly omitting the part where very few gospel-centered churches would allow me to fit in in my current circumstance, what would that serve? Is he better off for it? Am I better off for it?
In this society where nobody is listening anyway, what difference does it make? I could have just as easily not even replied.
But you can't compartmentalize truth. You can't compartmentalize honesty. It's either your everything or it's nothing at all. Ultimately, there are no secrets from God.
So really, what difference does it make? It depends on where your heart is, I guess.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Something's not right...
One of the "versions" of Hell that was explained to me at some point was the idea that Hell isn't a flamey pit of intolerable heat for eternity but an absence of God. On the other hand, Heaven would be where we get to see the big picture. We get to stand with God and learn what all this was for.
If that is the case, then atheists would have their way. Upon dying, they would simply die, as they tend to predict, and that would be it. No afterlife, no judgment, just an eternity dead. That eternity, of course, being spent apart from God without ever knowing what this life was about and without knowing the essence of who God is.
But if that is the case, that would imply then that those who spend their lives believing but come up short of salvation would endure a more painful eternity without God because they would know that God does indeed exist. Not only that, but they would have faced Him for judgment and the Bible tends to say that being in the presence of God is something we just are not equipped to handle because He is simply too great and too Holy.
Also, if that is the case, it would imply that God is not enough. It would imply that even if we'd know God upon our earthly death, the real benefit of Heaven would be to finally have the answers to the questions we'd spent this entire lifetime asking.
So then what is Heaven and what is Hell? Or do we have the right to know as Christians? Because shouldn't God be enough? Shouldn't we be focused on Him anyway, rather than projecting the outcomes of our curiosities onto the future to appease our worries and falsely stifle the unknowns?
What if only God knows what happens after this? Shouldn't that be enough? Shouldn't we trust Him enough?
If that is the case, then atheists would have their way. Upon dying, they would simply die, as they tend to predict, and that would be it. No afterlife, no judgment, just an eternity dead. That eternity, of course, being spent apart from God without ever knowing what this life was about and without knowing the essence of who God is.
But if that is the case, that would imply then that those who spend their lives believing but come up short of salvation would endure a more painful eternity without God because they would know that God does indeed exist. Not only that, but they would have faced Him for judgment and the Bible tends to say that being in the presence of God is something we just are not equipped to handle because He is simply too great and too Holy.
Also, if that is the case, it would imply that God is not enough. It would imply that even if we'd know God upon our earthly death, the real benefit of Heaven would be to finally have the answers to the questions we'd spent this entire lifetime asking.
So then what is Heaven and what is Hell? Or do we have the right to know as Christians? Because shouldn't God be enough? Shouldn't we be focused on Him anyway, rather than projecting the outcomes of our curiosities onto the future to appease our worries and falsely stifle the unknowns?
What if only God knows what happens after this? Shouldn't that be enough? Shouldn't we trust Him enough?
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Romans and I don't get along. (Still.)
Romans 9:1-3:
1 I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit— 2 that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.
The ESV study Bible says this about it:
So let me see if I have this right. Paul would sacrifice himself such that his fellow Jews would be saved but that would be futile because only Jesus can do that. Right? But being that he wrote that in Romans, which was written after Jesus' crucifixion, doesn't that mean... that... Jesus already did that? Or was what Jesus did not as good as what Paul would have done had he been the one sent to be the sacrifice?
You know what I mean?
Why, by human standards, does it seem through this passage and its ESV explanation that what Jesus did was incomplete? Why didn't Jesus sacrifice Himself so that all of us could be saved?
And if He did, why doesn't Paul believe it?
1 I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit— 2 that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.
The ESV study Bible says this about it:
Paul suffers from great anguish because his Jewish kinsmen are unsaved (see also 10:1). Indeed, if it were possible, Paul might almost choose to be accursed (to suffer God's punishment in hell) so that his fellow Jews would be saved (cf. Moses in Ex. 32:30–32). But he knows this would achieve nothing, for none but Christ could be any person's substitute to bear God's wrath.
So let me see if I have this right. Paul would sacrifice himself such that his fellow Jews would be saved but that would be futile because only Jesus can do that. Right? But being that he wrote that in Romans, which was written after Jesus' crucifixion, doesn't that mean... that... Jesus already did that? Or was what Jesus did not as good as what Paul would have done had he been the one sent to be the sacrifice?
You know what I mean?
Why, by human standards, does it seem through this passage and its ESV explanation that what Jesus did was incomplete? Why didn't Jesus sacrifice Himself so that all of us could be saved?
And if He did, why doesn't Paul believe it?
Sunday, October 3, 2010
On not deciding how or when God will show you things...
I suppose I should blog here once in a while. I think about it all the time. I just don't know what to write. I'm in a period of reflection lately, far less studying, falling behind in all the sermons I used to keep up with. But this time is different than usual. Most of the time, when I go through periods of withdrawal from God and from passionate learning, it's some sort of rebellion. This time, it's not. This time, it's more of a wall I'm hitting but through circumstance as of late, I might actually get through it.
See, there is a boy who is quite fond of me. But the whole situation is unsettling because of a post I wrote here a while back about God loving me. I won't go back and read it because I don't want to affect my memory of it for the sake of this post, but the way I remember it, I wondered why I expect God to take it all away from me all the time. Why would a loving God, who wants to see me smile once in a while, always be threatening to take everything I love away?
And so there's this boy and no matter how hard it is to admit it, I adore him. And I do know that it's all in God's hands and God could very well take it all away from me at any moment, but I know we'll be ok, regardless of what happens. I know that I am a child of God first and everything else comes second, if at all.
But I also know that it is so hard for me to trust.
And I can't help but wonder how God feels about all this because I haven't ever smiled this way. I haven't ever had somebody love me this way. And all the other times in the recent past, I remember having to shut my God off before interacting and this time, I don't. He isn't a Christian, though, but does appreciate my perspective. He lets me talk about God and he actually listens and feeds off my passion. In the land where angry atheism reigns, it's really amazing to be able to talk openly with somebody I love about the God things. So for once, my interactions feed my faith rather than put it on the back burner.
But there is this trust thing. Does God really want me to be happy? Isn't that a frivolous thought? Don't we grow more in suffering? Don't we look to God more in pain?
Sometimes, rainclouds are necessary for life, but when they break in the dark of night and reveal the stars, we find God there also. And I do have to trust that God does want me to see Him in the stars and the things of beauty and the feelings of awe. And I have to trust that God might also want to teach me to love Him more through bonding me to another person to my utmost human ability. I have to trust that I am not certain that my life will be spent as some sort of modern day, first world martyr. It is not a certainty as much as anything else is.
Why would God take away everything I love to test my love for Him, when it's my sadness and brokenness that I cling to most?
When he hugs me, I look different. My eyes change and I see myself as he describes me. I don't see the sadness I thought was me. I never realized how much I'd come to rely on something that is actually supposed to be temporary as my baseline for existence.
I wasn't depressed. I mean, I may have had instances, sure, but on the whole, I was doing alright. But I had so little trust in God's love for me that the only good things I ever expected were the ones that never left my imagination. And while it seems terribly sad to never expect anything good in one's own reality, I am eternally grateful that my imagination never dulled. I thank God for that.
And so now, this man, this absolute figment of my imagination, who seems to love me so perfectly, becomes reality and in doing so, is teaching me to let go of my fear of God a little and embrace the kind mercy and love of God a little more.
Even though so many seem to take that for granted, it always feels like one of the hardest things for me to grasp.
See, there is a boy who is quite fond of me. But the whole situation is unsettling because of a post I wrote here a while back about God loving me. I won't go back and read it because I don't want to affect my memory of it for the sake of this post, but the way I remember it, I wondered why I expect God to take it all away from me all the time. Why would a loving God, who wants to see me smile once in a while, always be threatening to take everything I love away?
And so there's this boy and no matter how hard it is to admit it, I adore him. And I do know that it's all in God's hands and God could very well take it all away from me at any moment, but I know we'll be ok, regardless of what happens. I know that I am a child of God first and everything else comes second, if at all.
But I also know that it is so hard for me to trust.
And I can't help but wonder how God feels about all this because I haven't ever smiled this way. I haven't ever had somebody love me this way. And all the other times in the recent past, I remember having to shut my God off before interacting and this time, I don't. He isn't a Christian, though, but does appreciate my perspective. He lets me talk about God and he actually listens and feeds off my passion. In the land where angry atheism reigns, it's really amazing to be able to talk openly with somebody I love about the God things. So for once, my interactions feed my faith rather than put it on the back burner.
But there is this trust thing. Does God really want me to be happy? Isn't that a frivolous thought? Don't we grow more in suffering? Don't we look to God more in pain?
Sometimes, rainclouds are necessary for life, but when they break in the dark of night and reveal the stars, we find God there also. And I do have to trust that God does want me to see Him in the stars and the things of beauty and the feelings of awe. And I have to trust that God might also want to teach me to love Him more through bonding me to another person to my utmost human ability. I have to trust that I am not certain that my life will be spent as some sort of modern day, first world martyr. It is not a certainty as much as anything else is.
Why would God take away everything I love to test my love for Him, when it's my sadness and brokenness that I cling to most?
When he hugs me, I look different. My eyes change and I see myself as he describes me. I don't see the sadness I thought was me. I never realized how much I'd come to rely on something that is actually supposed to be temporary as my baseline for existence.
I wasn't depressed. I mean, I may have had instances, sure, but on the whole, I was doing alright. But I had so little trust in God's love for me that the only good things I ever expected were the ones that never left my imagination. And while it seems terribly sad to never expect anything good in one's own reality, I am eternally grateful that my imagination never dulled. I thank God for that.
And so now, this man, this absolute figment of my imagination, who seems to love me so perfectly, becomes reality and in doing so, is teaching me to let go of my fear of God a little and embrace the kind mercy and love of God a little more.
Even though so many seem to take that for granted, it always feels like one of the hardest things for me to grasp.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
On mixed metaphors, parallels and the anthropomorphism of God...
Everything happens for a reason. People always say that, but usually, they mean it in the future, as if at some point eventually, things will make sense and without this particular event, other important events might not transpire in its wake. But when I say it, I mean it now. It's like how we're taught in high school English classes how authors of books write deliberately, choosing names that are symbolic in some way, times of day that are pertinent to the mood of the story and so on.
I have no idea what will happen later and to chalk something current up as a lesson for later irks me. It's like that other saying people have, "It'll be ok." Man, I hate that expression. That's all it is, really- an expression. Because you have no idea what will happen and have absolutely no assurances that it actually will be ok.
I remember failing a test one time, and I knew I'd failed it just because I didn't even answer enough questions to pass had I gotten them all perfectly right. And I came out and told a friend of mine that I'd failed it and she answered, "Don't worry. It'll be ok. I'm sure you'll pass." And I looked at her and said, "No, I'm telling you I failed." And she just kept reassuring me. I didn't get it. Facts are facts. I failed. There was no reassurance in the form of a potential for passing to be had. The only reassurance was that maybe the prof would alter the grading scheme overall and give this test less weight or something like that.
But I digress.
Everything happens for a reason.
And I used to sit in traffic every day for anywhere between forty-five minutes and three hours and the whole time, I'd listen to sermons. Well, sometimes, I'd listen to music, but I tend to listen to the same songs repeatedly and after a while, it just gets irritating (don't ask me why I don't just change songs...), so I'd end up back on the sermons. They're always different. And I quickly became overloaded with thoughts and newly learned things which stirs up the passion in me.
But lately, I've been working from home and trying not to drive anywhere and when I do drive, it's been so long since I listened to music that hearing the same song over and over doesn't irk me. And so I've fallen ridiculously behind in the sermons, which kind of sucks because I do miss the passion that was stirred up every time an awesome pastor would tell it like it is and I'd have the heart to listen.
Today, I found myself shattered. But not the usual shatterings that I ramble on and on about on my other blog. This one was different. Over the course of a regular conversation with a boy I'd been talking to a bit more lately, he said one word, in context obviously, and that one word shot my guard up so fast that I felt it. It spooked me so quickly and abruptly and completely shut me down. One word.
And the word?
Picnic.
I won't get into the context or anything, but it had absolutely nothing to do with me anyway. It wasn't like I was going to a picnic or I was invited to one in any way or anything of that nature. It was independent of me, but the important thing was my reaction to it. That one word took away every ounce of trust I had had in an instant. Every ounce of idealistic hopefulness too.
But everything happens for a reason. I got into my car because that's what I do when I need a breather, and I threw on a sermon. It was a relatively old one, but I'm so behind that it's new to me. And so my favorite theology pastor started talking in the sixteen or however many speakers my car ridiculously has and the first thing he talked about was how he was asked to preach but he's terrified of public speaking. He wouldn't give in to the shackles of fear, he said. And so there he was, standing up there in front of a crowd and speaking out of my pajillion speakers a month and a half later too. About fear.
Timing is everything.
I have to paraphrase because the more I start and stop my ipod, the shorter the sermon gets and I'm far too lazy to turn on my desktop and wait a half hour for it to finish doing what it does to warm up. I hope I don't get it too wrong...
At one point, he said something like, "Life is a river but it doesn't flow toward God. It flows away from God. [...] And if you lift your paddles, you drift downstream." Apathy creates drifting. Complacency. And he said he doubted that there were many people who actively decided to harden their hearts to God, but that's this sort of process that happens when you just stop paddling and bit by bit, let go.
But I think I am one of those "not many". If I am drifting away, because I know I've stopped paddling, it's not passive for the most part. It's angry and deliberate.
He went on to ask why we'd go back to these inferior things when Jesus is better? What Jesus gives us trumps all. Why would we choose to pursue other things, even minor distractions, instead of Him?
And I think of my anger and that's what it's about. I know what God wants or I know the basic idea anyway, but I just don't believe it. And that's what I figured out today, after being shattered by fear. My fear and my shattering were the result of me drowning in mistrust.
God's word that shuts me down is heaven. I don't believe it. No, that's not entirely true. I don't believe in it for me. And I don't know what it is exactly, whether it's an actual place or just being with God or getting to see the full picture to finally understand why we had to endure all this, but somehow, whatever heaven is, I don't mind not finding out. I don't expect to get to heaven, and more accurately, I expect not to.
So why would I paddle so hard?
I love that God loves me now. I love that He loves me right now, in my not-so-perfect state, without me having to tidy up my person and my life to impress Him first. And I do hope that God will love me forever, but I guess I don't trust that He will. Maybe I'm one of those vessels He'll use to draw other people to Him without me actually knowing Him in the end. Or maybe it's something else that I'm unaware of, but what it comes down to is even if I believe that God picked me and beat me with a sledge hammer so that I'd finally see Him, I still don't believe that we're in this for the long haul.
And so I stop paddling. And I still love God, and I still see Him everywhere and in everything. But I'm not worth the effort.
What the boy's word meant to me was that I was an insignificant one of many. So I stopped paddling towards him too, but the parallels between the two situations made me more aware of how much I still project my feelings of being unlovable on God too.
It's so hard to pray for me still, both prayers from others and me praying for myself. It makes me so uncomfortable. I am ok with being a sort of tool for some sort of purpose without actually knowing God in the end, not because I don't want to know God, but because I expect Him not to want to know me, but if He could at least use me so I could serve some sort of benefit somehow, then that's ok.
And suddenly, God is every person and in particular, every man, who has ever crossed my path. Especially the men.
My God is the great God of the universe, and I don't give Him more credit than that.
But everything happens for a reason in this story. I've often wondered how books, especially ones on controversial subjects can have multiple authors. I co-authored a blog for a while and when they'd change some minor formatting things in my posts, it pissed me right off. And here I am, struggling to equally co-author this life with God, trying to piss Him off enough so He'll leave so I can run this show alone. I mean I'm the Princess of this story, right? Nevermind that I wasn't there when they handed out the names.
But at the same time, as the pastor said, "If you want cement to harden, just stop stirring," I know that even before I let God happen in my life, I did stop stirring many times and God stirred for me. When I gave up, somehow I kept going. When I was completely trapped, somehow I got set free. And now I know it was God. It was God stirring my cement when I was determined to let it harden.
But I still don't trust Him. I don't trust anybody. I love people with all my person, but they can't love me back, not even God.
And so I hold up my paddles, look up to God, shrug and say, "I just can't do it," and let go, drifting downstream until I become invisible...
... secretly hoping He'd keep stirring my cement anyway.
I have no idea what will happen later and to chalk something current up as a lesson for later irks me. It's like that other saying people have, "It'll be ok." Man, I hate that expression. That's all it is, really- an expression. Because you have no idea what will happen and have absolutely no assurances that it actually will be ok.
I remember failing a test one time, and I knew I'd failed it just because I didn't even answer enough questions to pass had I gotten them all perfectly right. And I came out and told a friend of mine that I'd failed it and she answered, "Don't worry. It'll be ok. I'm sure you'll pass." And I looked at her and said, "No, I'm telling you I failed." And she just kept reassuring me. I didn't get it. Facts are facts. I failed. There was no reassurance in the form of a potential for passing to be had. The only reassurance was that maybe the prof would alter the grading scheme overall and give this test less weight or something like that.
But I digress.
Everything happens for a reason.
And I used to sit in traffic every day for anywhere between forty-five minutes and three hours and the whole time, I'd listen to sermons. Well, sometimes, I'd listen to music, but I tend to listen to the same songs repeatedly and after a while, it just gets irritating (don't ask me why I don't just change songs...), so I'd end up back on the sermons. They're always different. And I quickly became overloaded with thoughts and newly learned things which stirs up the passion in me.
But lately, I've been working from home and trying not to drive anywhere and when I do drive, it's been so long since I listened to music that hearing the same song over and over doesn't irk me. And so I've fallen ridiculously behind in the sermons, which kind of sucks because I do miss the passion that was stirred up every time an awesome pastor would tell it like it is and I'd have the heart to listen.
Today, I found myself shattered. But not the usual shatterings that I ramble on and on about on my other blog. This one was different. Over the course of a regular conversation with a boy I'd been talking to a bit more lately, he said one word, in context obviously, and that one word shot my guard up so fast that I felt it. It spooked me so quickly and abruptly and completely shut me down. One word.
And the word?
Picnic.
I won't get into the context or anything, but it had absolutely nothing to do with me anyway. It wasn't like I was going to a picnic or I was invited to one in any way or anything of that nature. It was independent of me, but the important thing was my reaction to it. That one word took away every ounce of trust I had had in an instant. Every ounce of idealistic hopefulness too.
But everything happens for a reason. I got into my car because that's what I do when I need a breather, and I threw on a sermon. It was a relatively old one, but I'm so behind that it's new to me. And so my favorite theology pastor started talking in the sixteen or however many speakers my car ridiculously has and the first thing he talked about was how he was asked to preach but he's terrified of public speaking. He wouldn't give in to the shackles of fear, he said. And so there he was, standing up there in front of a crowd and speaking out of my pajillion speakers a month and a half later too. About fear.
Timing is everything.
I have to paraphrase because the more I start and stop my ipod, the shorter the sermon gets and I'm far too lazy to turn on my desktop and wait a half hour for it to finish doing what it does to warm up. I hope I don't get it too wrong...
At one point, he said something like, "Life is a river but it doesn't flow toward God. It flows away from God. [...] And if you lift your paddles, you drift downstream." Apathy creates drifting. Complacency. And he said he doubted that there were many people who actively decided to harden their hearts to God, but that's this sort of process that happens when you just stop paddling and bit by bit, let go.
But I think I am one of those "not many". If I am drifting away, because I know I've stopped paddling, it's not passive for the most part. It's angry and deliberate.
He went on to ask why we'd go back to these inferior things when Jesus is better? What Jesus gives us trumps all. Why would we choose to pursue other things, even minor distractions, instead of Him?
And I think of my anger and that's what it's about. I know what God wants or I know the basic idea anyway, but I just don't believe it. And that's what I figured out today, after being shattered by fear. My fear and my shattering were the result of me drowning in mistrust.
God's word that shuts me down is heaven. I don't believe it. No, that's not entirely true. I don't believe in it for me. And I don't know what it is exactly, whether it's an actual place or just being with God or getting to see the full picture to finally understand why we had to endure all this, but somehow, whatever heaven is, I don't mind not finding out. I don't expect to get to heaven, and more accurately, I expect not to.
So why would I paddle so hard?
I love that God loves me now. I love that He loves me right now, in my not-so-perfect state, without me having to tidy up my person and my life to impress Him first. And I do hope that God will love me forever, but I guess I don't trust that He will. Maybe I'm one of those vessels He'll use to draw other people to Him without me actually knowing Him in the end. Or maybe it's something else that I'm unaware of, but what it comes down to is even if I believe that God picked me and beat me with a sledge hammer so that I'd finally see Him, I still don't believe that we're in this for the long haul.
And so I stop paddling. And I still love God, and I still see Him everywhere and in everything. But I'm not worth the effort.
What the boy's word meant to me was that I was an insignificant one of many. So I stopped paddling towards him too, but the parallels between the two situations made me more aware of how much I still project my feelings of being unlovable on God too.
It's so hard to pray for me still, both prayers from others and me praying for myself. It makes me so uncomfortable. I am ok with being a sort of tool for some sort of purpose without actually knowing God in the end, not because I don't want to know God, but because I expect Him not to want to know me, but if He could at least use me so I could serve some sort of benefit somehow, then that's ok.
And suddenly, God is every person and in particular, every man, who has ever crossed my path. Especially the men.
My God is the great God of the universe, and I don't give Him more credit than that.
But everything happens for a reason in this story. I've often wondered how books, especially ones on controversial subjects can have multiple authors. I co-authored a blog for a while and when they'd change some minor formatting things in my posts, it pissed me right off. And here I am, struggling to equally co-author this life with God, trying to piss Him off enough so He'll leave so I can run this show alone. I mean I'm the Princess of this story, right? Nevermind that I wasn't there when they handed out the names.
But at the same time, as the pastor said, "If you want cement to harden, just stop stirring," I know that even before I let God happen in my life, I did stop stirring many times and God stirred for me. When I gave up, somehow I kept going. When I was completely trapped, somehow I got set free. And now I know it was God. It was God stirring my cement when I was determined to let it harden.
But I still don't trust Him. I don't trust anybody. I love people with all my person, but they can't love me back, not even God.
And so I hold up my paddles, look up to God, shrug and say, "I just can't do it," and let go, drifting downstream until I become invisible...
... secretly hoping He'd keep stirring my cement anyway.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
On failing the "stuff"...
I'm angry at God lately and I couldn't figure out why. I don't understand why He couldn't have laid out this faith thing in such a way that it fit every day life a little more easily. Instead, though random conversations with random people, I get to hear constant reminders about how absurd Christianity is and how ridiculously thoughtless its followers are.
Can you have God without the religion?
In theory, yes. But then if you believe in Jesus too, you get into the part where you ask yourself how it is that you know who Jesus is? You know Him through the Bible and the Bible preaches the structures and doctrines of religion.
I can't help but wonder if we're in a third era of the Bible. First, you had the sort of angry God full of rules part, then you had the redeemed by Christ part which negated most of the rules so people had to live differently than they were before under the rule of the angry God, and now we have this part. It's the post-Jesus, post-Bible era. It's the part where we've learned not only how not to live a life focused on appeasing the angry God, but also to take the new relationship with God through the sacrificing of Jesus for granted.
And I'm not sure that the way to fix that, the steps to improve this situation, are to revert to the practices of faith written in the Bible. We're not those people. We're not the ones who prioritize rules and decorum over God. Instead, we're the ones who seek constant freedom without realizing that it's from God. We're the ones who run away from God by excessively loving the gifts He's given us. We're the ones who actually love God already, but refuse to call it that.
As time progresses, I feel like I am losing my faith simply because I can't follow the rules. (And yes, "won't" substitutes nicely there, but I'm implying a stronger and more beligerant "won't" based on the fact that if I try, I doom myself to failure every time. Same goes for the rest of this paragraph.) I can't go to church. I can't read my Bible extensively every day. I don't look forward to the textbook slash ritual aspects of what to me is simply religion and not God.
Yes, we have to learn and yes, we need community. But what if our community is in a different form than the ones depicted in the Bible?
If nobody in my circles would set foot into a church by their own will, how is Jesus using the church to draw people to Him?
On the other hand, if we live in such a way that we can find way to integrate God into every thought and every action throughout the day, such that He becomes like breathing or any other unconscious function of the body, then we will end up presenting a picture to the world of a life with God that is actually doable and reasonable.
But maybe that's lazy. Right? Not going to church, not being bound by the rituals of religion, not forcing yourself to read chunks of the Bible every day, sitting at home listening to sermons in your pyjamas... It's laziness, right? It shows a lack of appreciation for God. But on the other hand, forcing yourself to do all those things shows a lack of appreciation for God's grace also. And really, if you believe in an almighty God of the universe who knows your thoughts before you think them and who chooses who has faith and when, then wouldn't said God be able to guide you to a rich knowledge without the religion? Couldn't He pepper our lives with situations that reveal to us our heart and the nature of God? Couldn't He move us in some way to get us to see His character?
If God chooses somebody in some sort of religious desert to have faith, then wouldn't said person have all the tools necessary to have faith and to know God? If the great God of the universe didn't account for the absence of resources when He chose this person, then He's not really a great God of the universe afterall.
So yeah, I am lazy. And I asked God to help me with that. But in the meantime, why shouldn't I be able to love God wholly and feel God with me? Why does it depend so heavily on the "stuff" and not the heart?
But then, if I read the Bible, Jesus basically says that- it is about the heart.
Then why do I feel like I'm constantly doing it wrong?
So I am angry at God. He created a situation wherein He'll love me unconditionally provided I do the "stuff". He explained what real love was in Luke ch 6 in the sermon on the mount, a pure and selfless love, and then made it all meaningless if I don't wedge myself into a pew every week for an hour of false love and false community torture.
Don't get me wrong- maybe your church is your community and you love the people there. That's great for you. But I don't feel at home in church, even in my favorite ones. It feels forced and contrived and entirely unnatural for me. And the fact that I've been made aware that the love often stops when you stop attending the church, that it doesn't transfer into real life, doesn't help. Sometimes, it does though. Sometimes, Christians do actually love people, regardless of circumstance. And in those situations, it reinforces in me that the church is apart from the building, that the community is my own and the knowledge of God can be shared rather than learned from a textbook all the time.
All I know is that if God knows who I am, then He'll know how I express my faith and when I need help with it. And He knows where my heart is. And He feels me struggling. And all I need is exactly that- to know that He's with me and to know that He knows me. If I can keep that, then I think I just may be alright.
Can you have God without the religion?
In theory, yes. But then if you believe in Jesus too, you get into the part where you ask yourself how it is that you know who Jesus is? You know Him through the Bible and the Bible preaches the structures and doctrines of religion.
I can't help but wonder if we're in a third era of the Bible. First, you had the sort of angry God full of rules part, then you had the redeemed by Christ part which negated most of the rules so people had to live differently than they were before under the rule of the angry God, and now we have this part. It's the post-Jesus, post-Bible era. It's the part where we've learned not only how not to live a life focused on appeasing the angry God, but also to take the new relationship with God through the sacrificing of Jesus for granted.
And I'm not sure that the way to fix that, the steps to improve this situation, are to revert to the practices of faith written in the Bible. We're not those people. We're not the ones who prioritize rules and decorum over God. Instead, we're the ones who seek constant freedom without realizing that it's from God. We're the ones who run away from God by excessively loving the gifts He's given us. We're the ones who actually love God already, but refuse to call it that.
As time progresses, I feel like I am losing my faith simply because I can't follow the rules. (And yes, "won't" substitutes nicely there, but I'm implying a stronger and more beligerant "won't" based on the fact that if I try, I doom myself to failure every time. Same goes for the rest of this paragraph.) I can't go to church. I can't read my Bible extensively every day. I don't look forward to the textbook slash ritual aspects of what to me is simply religion and not God.
Yes, we have to learn and yes, we need community. But what if our community is in a different form than the ones depicted in the Bible?
If nobody in my circles would set foot into a church by their own will, how is Jesus using the church to draw people to Him?
On the other hand, if we live in such a way that we can find way to integrate God into every thought and every action throughout the day, such that He becomes like breathing or any other unconscious function of the body, then we will end up presenting a picture to the world of a life with God that is actually doable and reasonable.
But maybe that's lazy. Right? Not going to church, not being bound by the rituals of religion, not forcing yourself to read chunks of the Bible every day, sitting at home listening to sermons in your pyjamas... It's laziness, right? It shows a lack of appreciation for God. But on the other hand, forcing yourself to do all those things shows a lack of appreciation for God's grace also. And really, if you believe in an almighty God of the universe who knows your thoughts before you think them and who chooses who has faith and when, then wouldn't said God be able to guide you to a rich knowledge without the religion? Couldn't He pepper our lives with situations that reveal to us our heart and the nature of God? Couldn't He move us in some way to get us to see His character?
If God chooses somebody in some sort of religious desert to have faith, then wouldn't said person have all the tools necessary to have faith and to know God? If the great God of the universe didn't account for the absence of resources when He chose this person, then He's not really a great God of the universe afterall.
So yeah, I am lazy. And I asked God to help me with that. But in the meantime, why shouldn't I be able to love God wholly and feel God with me? Why does it depend so heavily on the "stuff" and not the heart?
But then, if I read the Bible, Jesus basically says that- it is about the heart.
Then why do I feel like I'm constantly doing it wrong?
So I am angry at God. He created a situation wherein He'll love me unconditionally provided I do the "stuff". He explained what real love was in Luke ch 6 in the sermon on the mount, a pure and selfless love, and then made it all meaningless if I don't wedge myself into a pew every week for an hour of false love and false community torture.
Don't get me wrong- maybe your church is your community and you love the people there. That's great for you. But I don't feel at home in church, even in my favorite ones. It feels forced and contrived and entirely unnatural for me. And the fact that I've been made aware that the love often stops when you stop attending the church, that it doesn't transfer into real life, doesn't help. Sometimes, it does though. Sometimes, Christians do actually love people, regardless of circumstance. And in those situations, it reinforces in me that the church is apart from the building, that the community is my own and the knowledge of God can be shared rather than learned from a textbook all the time.
All I know is that if God knows who I am, then He'll know how I express my faith and when I need help with it. And He knows where my heart is. And He feels me struggling. And all I need is exactly that- to know that He's with me and to know that He knows me. If I can keep that, then I think I just may be alright.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
On idealism and the value of a person...
Alternate title: On prayer... again...
When I pray, which lately has become a little more frequent, yet not as frequent as it used to be, I remember Moses praying in Exodus 32:11-14:
He basically says, "if you kill the Israelites, everybody else will wonder what kind of God you are. They'll see you make promises you don't intend to keep and that your intentions are evil and you don't want that, right? Show them instead that you're merciful and gracious and love us. And that's how they'll see you."
And my reference for prayer, even if the usual suggestion is Jesus' teaching of the Lord's prayer later on.
If God answers prayers to glorify Himself, then the way we should pray should reflect that also. Instead of asking God to heal a sick child because she's suffering and in pain (which without a doubt God hates), I'll ask God to glorify Himself through His mercy and healing. I'll say to God, "Here's your chance to make yourself known. If you do this, they'll have no choice but to respond."
Of course, the majority of the time, I'm wrong. I'll ask God to do the impossible for somebody who doesn't believe, and God will do the impossible and I'll be filled with this sort of unmatchable awe and my friend, upon whom the results of my prayer are bestowed, rejects it all. Sure, they might be grateful for the healing or whatever else it was, but they still won't thank God for it. And so feeling a little humbled, I return to God and apologize for my arrogant certainty and my unrelenting idealism.
And other times, they do know it and God is glorified and it makes prayer all the more amazing and full.
But then there are the selfish things, which I don't understand how people can ask of God. "Please, God, give me this promotion." Or "Please God, let my kid win his softball game." I don't get those. At best, God will ignore you and teach you some more profound lesson you totally deserve to learn. At worst, He'll give you everything you want and you'll eventually stop looking to Him for things.
And I know part of it is my skewed perception, as one friend put it, that everything good is undeserved and the bad things are just my fate and so I never dared to ask for anything, except maybe a little bit of guidance and healing.
But lately, I've found myself asking for more. After getting a glimpse of what life would be like if I had a soulmate, I started to ask God for more. But I know He won't do it if it's just for me, just a selfish ask, and if by chance, He does, I don't want such a selfish prayer answered either. It's too risky. And then as I thought of reasons why God should listen to me on this one, I realized it might not be nearly as selfish a prayer as it felt originally. So instead, I found myself asking God differently: "Glorify Yourself in me too," I said. "Take this girl with a beat up, broken past who can't be loved and let her show the world what love can be like in spite of that brokenness. Because to let me live the end of this life too broken to love anymore... It just makes me a horrible example of Your mercy and grace and healing. Heal me while everybody's watching. Restore me so they can know how good You are."
Maybe it's still selfish. And maybe it's not meant to be. But I have to believe that God will heal me. I have to because it hurts too much otherwise.
So maybe it's selfish, but at the same time, I find myself more afraid of Him healing me and me losing this need to press into Him to get through the suffery bits, which is actually even more selfish because not only am I not glorifying God to those around me because everything relating to Him is in suffering, but also because I'm isolating myself and I'm not loving people the way I used to. It's not good for anybody.
On the other hand, if I pray for everybody and never pray for me, I'm not loving one of God's children properly. And I'm also not trusting that God loves me as much as anybody else either.
I just really hope that people don't look at my life for all its brokenness and use it as a reason to dissociate from God. I hope they don't say things like, "See? She believed in God and where did it get her?" Because you know, even if my life ends tomorrow, what it got me was God. I did get to feel loved for the first time in my life. And that's not nothing. That's everything. I just wish I could make it more obvious, even if I should know by now that even if Jesus Himself stood in front of some people, they'd still say He didn't exist.
When I pray, which lately has become a little more frequent, yet not as frequent as it used to be, I remember Moses praying in Exodus 32:11-14:
11 But Moses implored the LORD his God and said, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’” 14 And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.
He basically says, "if you kill the Israelites, everybody else will wonder what kind of God you are. They'll see you make promises you don't intend to keep and that your intentions are evil and you don't want that, right? Show them instead that you're merciful and gracious and love us. And that's how they'll see you."
And my reference for prayer, even if the usual suggestion is Jesus' teaching of the Lord's prayer later on.
If God answers prayers to glorify Himself, then the way we should pray should reflect that also. Instead of asking God to heal a sick child because she's suffering and in pain (which without a doubt God hates), I'll ask God to glorify Himself through His mercy and healing. I'll say to God, "Here's your chance to make yourself known. If you do this, they'll have no choice but to respond."
Of course, the majority of the time, I'm wrong. I'll ask God to do the impossible for somebody who doesn't believe, and God will do the impossible and I'll be filled with this sort of unmatchable awe and my friend, upon whom the results of my prayer are bestowed, rejects it all. Sure, they might be grateful for the healing or whatever else it was, but they still won't thank God for it. And so feeling a little humbled, I return to God and apologize for my arrogant certainty and my unrelenting idealism.
And other times, they do know it and God is glorified and it makes prayer all the more amazing and full.
But then there are the selfish things, which I don't understand how people can ask of God. "Please, God, give me this promotion." Or "Please God, let my kid win his softball game." I don't get those. At best, God will ignore you and teach you some more profound lesson you totally deserve to learn. At worst, He'll give you everything you want and you'll eventually stop looking to Him for things.
And I know part of it is my skewed perception, as one friend put it, that everything good is undeserved and the bad things are just my fate and so I never dared to ask for anything, except maybe a little bit of guidance and healing.
But lately, I've found myself asking for more. After getting a glimpse of what life would be like if I had a soulmate, I started to ask God for more. But I know He won't do it if it's just for me, just a selfish ask, and if by chance, He does, I don't want such a selfish prayer answered either. It's too risky. And then as I thought of reasons why God should listen to me on this one, I realized it might not be nearly as selfish a prayer as it felt originally. So instead, I found myself asking God differently: "Glorify Yourself in me too," I said. "Take this girl with a beat up, broken past who can't be loved and let her show the world what love can be like in spite of that brokenness. Because to let me live the end of this life too broken to love anymore... It just makes me a horrible example of Your mercy and grace and healing. Heal me while everybody's watching. Restore me so they can know how good You are."
Maybe it's still selfish. And maybe it's not meant to be. But I have to believe that God will heal me. I have to because it hurts too much otherwise.
So maybe it's selfish, but at the same time, I find myself more afraid of Him healing me and me losing this need to press into Him to get through the suffery bits, which is actually even more selfish because not only am I not glorifying God to those around me because everything relating to Him is in suffering, but also because I'm isolating myself and I'm not loving people the way I used to. It's not good for anybody.
On the other hand, if I pray for everybody and never pray for me, I'm not loving one of God's children properly. And I'm also not trusting that God loves me as much as anybody else either.
I just really hope that people don't look at my life for all its brokenness and use it as a reason to dissociate from God. I hope they don't say things like, "See? She believed in God and where did it get her?" Because you know, even if my life ends tomorrow, what it got me was God. I did get to feel loved for the first time in my life. And that's not nothing. That's everything. I just wish I could make it more obvious, even if I should know by now that even if Jesus Himself stood in front of some people, they'd still say He didn't exist.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
On loving till it hates...
Listening to Tim Keller's sermon on marriage (I think it's called "Marriage: Part 3" or something), he talked about how when you put too much value into something, it will end up crushing you and ultimately falling apart. And even though this is Tim Keller's usual idolatry line of thinking, this time it was slightly different. He talked about parents who physically (or verbally, I guess too) abuse their kids. He said (paraphrased), "It's not that they hate their kids. It's that they love them too much." And he went on to describe how that works, and it made me wonder things.
My dad was a single dad with three kids- two boys, ages seven and three, and me, two. And over the years, I've come to empathize with his situation more and more, the more I realize how difficult it must have been to feed us, clothe us, look out for us, teach us, nurture us, and discipline us all completely and entirely alone. We lived in the country, away from everybody, away from all family. Apparently, they'd tried to get him to move to the city earlier, but he wouldn't. And he'd raise us likewise, without the ability (or with far too much pride) to ask for help.
I can't imagine being a single parent with three kids, let alone having two of them still in the toddler stage of life. And add to that a full time job in the city with an hour commute each way on a good day. I can't imagine.
So I empathize. I would lose it too. In an effort to get some sort of sense of control over my life, I would exert extreme control over my kids- the one aspect of life I can control. Kinda.
In the end, our childhood was like bootcamp, only the rules were unpredictable. And with the remnants of unlovableness (unlovability?) from my mom leaving us, this new set of reasons we were unlovable took shape and scarred all three of us for life. It doesn't matter how much I try to rationalize it away through empathy, the remnants are still there.
But then Tim Keller starts talking in a roundabout way about the effects that idolatry has on a parent who worships his kids and suddenly, my remnants got lighter on my shoulders.
It's not that he didn't love me. It's not that he didn't care. What if he loved me too much? What if all his value and self-worth were wrapped in us?
There came a time a few years ago when I cut him out of my life completely. Meanwhile, my brothers had done the same, but in very different ways. Suddenly, he didn't have us anymore, and I think that made him reevaluate things a little. It made him let go a little. And when I emerged from my isolation, it angered me how it felt like I was the only one at the dinner table who had remnants. It bothered me that nobody else seemed to care that the family dynamic had suddenly changed and everybody acted as though it'd always been this way, i.e. peaceful.
But if it was idolatry and the idolatry shifted to something else, then it is highly likely that over the span of time it took for a flash of insight, the entire dynamic could change. Suddenly, his value wouldn't be in us anymore. Suddenly, we weren't such massive failures regardless of what we did or did not accomplish. Suddenly, we could just be ourselves and that was enough.
Granted, he still goes through episodes where he is fiercely controlling, but all three of us seem to just back off when those situations arise, rather than cater to his need for control, whatever the root cause.
For a girl who has spent her entire life unlovable, Tim Keller's suggestion is highly controversial. It breaks the patterns I've fallen into almost at their source. I say "almost" because I know that even if my dad had been able to cope more solidly, I still would have remnants of being unlovable because my mom left before an age where I was able to reason or understand what was going on at a level beyond just, "She left because I wasn't lovable enough."
And just to neatly tie up within Christianity, this idea of the complete difference between the actual reasons somebody does something and the reasons we perceive from the point of view of the recipient of the actions is interesting because while the vast majority of the Bible (from my perspective anyway) is very vague and easily misinterpreted, Jesus' death isn't. He made it so clear what he was dying for. He made the reasons for most of his actions as depicted in the Bible so explicit. And I don't think there is any other time in the history of me where intentions, motivations and reasons for actions are so clearly understood. And I think that's why even if I'm unlovable, God is safe. God loves me and I know that because there is never a dichotomy in His love for me. There is never anything for me to interpret in His love for me. Sure, there are other things to interpret, like why things happen, why there's suffering, why the Bible is so ambiguous about so much... But there is just no question about His love for me.
And the thing about that concept is no matter how we receive it, no matter how difficult it is for us to grasp that inconceivable unconditional love, deep down I think we know we have all the time in the world to work towards it, to work towards figuring out how to accept it, how to deal with it.
What this Tim Keller sermon showed me is no matter how much somebody loves you, there will always be a barrier, a filter through which you receive that love. And whether the mis-reception or misunderstanding of that love is understandable as in the case of a tyrannical parent's over-love being misinterpreted for hate, or it's incomprehensible as in the case of a loving, forgiving, merciful creator God of the universe, the common denominator is me.
My shrink back in the day once said, "You have to stop expecting people to love you the way you want to be loved and accept the love they are able to give." That's not to say that in situations of abuse, one should feel adored or anything, just that maybe, even in the best of circumstances, we seek so fervently to be unlovable that no method of loving will ever break through those filters and barriers.
And then there's God, who loves us perfectly and how many of us spend our lives trying to prove Him wrong?
So here we are, surrounded by love, doing whatever we can, gathering endless bits of evidence, both consciously and not, to convince ourselves otherwise.
So what if it's not that they don't love us? What if it's that they love us too much? And if you look at the people in your life and scoff at that idea, maybe it's time to figure out the root of that cynicism.
Because if they do love us too much, wouldn't we react differently? And wouldn't we love them more? Wouldn't we try to bring them to the middle ground where loving us is safe and good and not a means of indication nor reflection of of their value?
And in the process, if God's love is perfect and without this brokenness that requires so much interpretation, wouldn't we start to view God differently?
My dad was a single dad with three kids- two boys, ages seven and three, and me, two. And over the years, I've come to empathize with his situation more and more, the more I realize how difficult it must have been to feed us, clothe us, look out for us, teach us, nurture us, and discipline us all completely and entirely alone. We lived in the country, away from everybody, away from all family. Apparently, they'd tried to get him to move to the city earlier, but he wouldn't. And he'd raise us likewise, without the ability (or with far too much pride) to ask for help.
I can't imagine being a single parent with three kids, let alone having two of them still in the toddler stage of life. And add to that a full time job in the city with an hour commute each way on a good day. I can't imagine.
So I empathize. I would lose it too. In an effort to get some sort of sense of control over my life, I would exert extreme control over my kids- the one aspect of life I can control. Kinda.
In the end, our childhood was like bootcamp, only the rules were unpredictable. And with the remnants of unlovableness (unlovability?) from my mom leaving us, this new set of reasons we were unlovable took shape and scarred all three of us for life. It doesn't matter how much I try to rationalize it away through empathy, the remnants are still there.
But then Tim Keller starts talking in a roundabout way about the effects that idolatry has on a parent who worships his kids and suddenly, my remnants got lighter on my shoulders.
It's not that he didn't love me. It's not that he didn't care. What if he loved me too much? What if all his value and self-worth were wrapped in us?
There came a time a few years ago when I cut him out of my life completely. Meanwhile, my brothers had done the same, but in very different ways. Suddenly, he didn't have us anymore, and I think that made him reevaluate things a little. It made him let go a little. And when I emerged from my isolation, it angered me how it felt like I was the only one at the dinner table who had remnants. It bothered me that nobody else seemed to care that the family dynamic had suddenly changed and everybody acted as though it'd always been this way, i.e. peaceful.
But if it was idolatry and the idolatry shifted to something else, then it is highly likely that over the span of time it took for a flash of insight, the entire dynamic could change. Suddenly, his value wouldn't be in us anymore. Suddenly, we weren't such massive failures regardless of what we did or did not accomplish. Suddenly, we could just be ourselves and that was enough.
Granted, he still goes through episodes where he is fiercely controlling, but all three of us seem to just back off when those situations arise, rather than cater to his need for control, whatever the root cause.
For a girl who has spent her entire life unlovable, Tim Keller's suggestion is highly controversial. It breaks the patterns I've fallen into almost at their source. I say "almost" because I know that even if my dad had been able to cope more solidly, I still would have remnants of being unlovable because my mom left before an age where I was able to reason or understand what was going on at a level beyond just, "She left because I wasn't lovable enough."
And just to neatly tie up within Christianity, this idea of the complete difference between the actual reasons somebody does something and the reasons we perceive from the point of view of the recipient of the actions is interesting because while the vast majority of the Bible (from my perspective anyway) is very vague and easily misinterpreted, Jesus' death isn't. He made it so clear what he was dying for. He made the reasons for most of his actions as depicted in the Bible so explicit. And I don't think there is any other time in the history of me where intentions, motivations and reasons for actions are so clearly understood. And I think that's why even if I'm unlovable, God is safe. God loves me and I know that because there is never a dichotomy in His love for me. There is never anything for me to interpret in His love for me. Sure, there are other things to interpret, like why things happen, why there's suffering, why the Bible is so ambiguous about so much... But there is just no question about His love for me.
And the thing about that concept is no matter how we receive it, no matter how difficult it is for us to grasp that inconceivable unconditional love, deep down I think we know we have all the time in the world to work towards it, to work towards figuring out how to accept it, how to deal with it.
What this Tim Keller sermon showed me is no matter how much somebody loves you, there will always be a barrier, a filter through which you receive that love. And whether the mis-reception or misunderstanding of that love is understandable as in the case of a tyrannical parent's over-love being misinterpreted for hate, or it's incomprehensible as in the case of a loving, forgiving, merciful creator God of the universe, the common denominator is me.
My shrink back in the day once said, "You have to stop expecting people to love you the way you want to be loved and accept the love they are able to give." That's not to say that in situations of abuse, one should feel adored or anything, just that maybe, even in the best of circumstances, we seek so fervently to be unlovable that no method of loving will ever break through those filters and barriers.
And then there's God, who loves us perfectly and how many of us spend our lives trying to prove Him wrong?
So here we are, surrounded by love, doing whatever we can, gathering endless bits of evidence, both consciously and not, to convince ourselves otherwise.
So what if it's not that they don't love us? What if it's that they love us too much? And if you look at the people in your life and scoff at that idea, maybe it's time to figure out the root of that cynicism.
Because if they do love us too much, wouldn't we react differently? And wouldn't we love them more? Wouldn't we try to bring them to the middle ground where loving us is safe and good and not a means of indication nor reflection of of their value?
And in the process, if God's love is perfect and without this brokenness that requires so much interpretation, wouldn't we start to view God differently?
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
What if?
What if we have it backwards? What if we need the misery and God's just accommodating that need? What if we are born divided from God, but not because God divides Himself from us but because when we acknowledge there is a God, suddenly, we become so inferior that we need some way to make up the difference? What if God is like, "Alright, fine, be bad, and when you'll feel like that badness divides you from Me and you start to feel guilty about the horrible things you do, I'll give you some rules to make you feel connected again. And when you rebel against those rules, I'll give you some sacrifice procedures to follow. And when you still can't keep up, then I'll do something of which you won't be able to deny the power and significance. And then maybe you might see that I love you no matter what, even if it seems like your goal in life is to be a failure."
And God will judge us on the last day, and we assume that'll be horrible because we're so terrible, even if He loves us no matter what.
What if rather than creating a God because there is an innate need to explain things, we've actually created suffering to make sense of this world? Or rather promoted it? What if we need the suffering? What if we need the pain and the separation from God to make sense of this world?
As an agnostic, it did make more sense. It made sense to believe there was possibly no God and we're just alone, abandoned by nothing to live on this planet for no reason. It makes more sense at a core level when your life has no meaning and no purpose and very little meaningful love and is riddled with abandonment.
We do crave the suffering. We crave mistakes and regret. We call it rebellion, and even if it has a name, we refuse to admit that that's what we're about.
We want to be in control, even if that control is the equivalent to a passenger grabbing the wheel of a car somebody else is driving. It's pointless and requires far more effort than letting the driver get on with it. But we have trust issues, so even if we're swerving dangerously, we've got the wheel and that's all that matters.
So what if God's all, "Ok... Seatbelts. Let's do seatbelts." And then we swerve more. "Alright, airbags." And still, we come dangerously close to death because of our rebellion and need for control. The next step? Automatic driving sensors- an autopilot. We'll be in the driver's seat and we'll have the illusion of driving, but we won't be in control at all. And being that we'll feel like we're in control, we won't give any credit to the actual driver. Maybe we have to crash every now and then to realize what we're doing, what it's costing us.
And what if all those rules and the procedures are meant to amplify that rather than actually "get good with God"? What if they're just the brick wall we're meant to hit before finally realizing the grace and mercy of God?
The other day when my car's wheel almost fell off, I praised God a thousand ways till Tuesday for what He did. I pulled over just in time. And my entire life built up to that moment. All the knowledge I had acquired about cars culminated into me pulling over at that moment. Other women I know wouldn't have stopped. And so yeah, it might just be my knowledge and a bit of luck, but naw. God is good. And I was so grateful. He saved my life. Or at least my finances. And a heap of time and trouble. And probably the same for whomever else became a casualty of my stray wheel.
Fast forward a few days, and the topic of prayer comes up in conversation. And a few people have told me it's a gift I have. Stuff happens when I pray. Incredible stuff. But it terrifies me because I know it's not me. I know that it can disappear any second because it's not mine. And I dread people becoming dependent on my prayer for that reason. It glorifies me and it's not me. It's God. And so in this conversation, I told the person it may be a gift, but I'm in denial because I don't like the responsibility it brings. It's like a dichotomy. God answers my prayers and then people come to me instead of to God. And I point them to God, always, because I know it's not me, but what happens if I lose it? Will they all lose God? Will they all start to wonder about their faith?
God answers prayers. I just think that He answers mine more explicitly because I believe He will. And that's not to say the people who ask me to pray don't believe, but they just believe more through me. It's more explicit when you tell somebody to do something and you let it go and it happens outside of your control.
It's why I praised God for my wheel. It was completely out of my control. It could have been gnarled up suspension parts. It could have been thousands of dollars' worth of repairs. It could have been deadly. It was outside of my control, and God gave me the tools to fix it. He gave me knowledge, a jack and a tire iron. Not to mention the physical capacity to jack up a car and remove a wheel. He gave me the inquisitiveness to have asked questions in the past that led me to assess that my suspension was indeed perfectly safe and fine. Nothing was in my control. In that moment, it was clear that my life was not in my own hands at all.
And that's what I believe my prayer does for other people. It separates them from the consequences. It separates them in such a way that they can't accidentally take credit for the things that happen. They can't brush it off as coincidence or as their own accomplishment.
And I have to admit, every time a prayer is explicitly answered, I love it. I love that this girl who hated even the idea of God is now not only heard but heard in such a way that deeply affects those around her. I look at my neglected prayer list and everything ends up done. It's the most bizarre thing ever. It's the only "to do" list I have that actually gets wiped clean. It really is a beautiful thing.
And it scares me. It really does. And so I don't pray. And I deny that I have a gift. Because I really don't. I'm not more special than anybody else. And one day, without a doubt, I'll feel like God's not listening. Well, actually, I'll feel it again. And again. And I could either start the processes to "get right with God", or I can stop praying for the wrong things and ask God to help me pray for the right things.
I can stop trying to drive the car and instead, use this opportunity to become more aware of my surroundings, all while pointing out the things I love as He drives us by all the people and places He built for me and show my gratitude and appreciation by letting Him take care of it all for me.
Because He loves it all too.
And somehow, I think He wishes we didn't need the suffering to understand that.
But it's merely speculation. God is God and even if I won't presume to know what any of it is all about, He gave me the drive to wonder. :D
And God will judge us on the last day, and we assume that'll be horrible because we're so terrible, even if He loves us no matter what.
What if rather than creating a God because there is an innate need to explain things, we've actually created suffering to make sense of this world? Or rather promoted it? What if we need the suffering? What if we need the pain and the separation from God to make sense of this world?
As an agnostic, it did make more sense. It made sense to believe there was possibly no God and we're just alone, abandoned by nothing to live on this planet for no reason. It makes more sense at a core level when your life has no meaning and no purpose and very little meaningful love and is riddled with abandonment.
We do crave the suffering. We crave mistakes and regret. We call it rebellion, and even if it has a name, we refuse to admit that that's what we're about.
We want to be in control, even if that control is the equivalent to a passenger grabbing the wheel of a car somebody else is driving. It's pointless and requires far more effort than letting the driver get on with it. But we have trust issues, so even if we're swerving dangerously, we've got the wheel and that's all that matters.
So what if God's all, "Ok... Seatbelts. Let's do seatbelts." And then we swerve more. "Alright, airbags." And still, we come dangerously close to death because of our rebellion and need for control. The next step? Automatic driving sensors- an autopilot. We'll be in the driver's seat and we'll have the illusion of driving, but we won't be in control at all. And being that we'll feel like we're in control, we won't give any credit to the actual driver. Maybe we have to crash every now and then to realize what we're doing, what it's costing us.
And what if all those rules and the procedures are meant to amplify that rather than actually "get good with God"? What if they're just the brick wall we're meant to hit before finally realizing the grace and mercy of God?
The other day when my car's wheel almost fell off, I praised God a thousand ways till Tuesday for what He did. I pulled over just in time. And my entire life built up to that moment. All the knowledge I had acquired about cars culminated into me pulling over at that moment. Other women I know wouldn't have stopped. And so yeah, it might just be my knowledge and a bit of luck, but naw. God is good. And I was so grateful. He saved my life. Or at least my finances. And a heap of time and trouble. And probably the same for whomever else became a casualty of my stray wheel.
Fast forward a few days, and the topic of prayer comes up in conversation. And a few people have told me it's a gift I have. Stuff happens when I pray. Incredible stuff. But it terrifies me because I know it's not me. I know that it can disappear any second because it's not mine. And I dread people becoming dependent on my prayer for that reason. It glorifies me and it's not me. It's God. And so in this conversation, I told the person it may be a gift, but I'm in denial because I don't like the responsibility it brings. It's like a dichotomy. God answers my prayers and then people come to me instead of to God. And I point them to God, always, because I know it's not me, but what happens if I lose it? Will they all lose God? Will they all start to wonder about their faith?
God answers prayers. I just think that He answers mine more explicitly because I believe He will. And that's not to say the people who ask me to pray don't believe, but they just believe more through me. It's more explicit when you tell somebody to do something and you let it go and it happens outside of your control.
It's why I praised God for my wheel. It was completely out of my control. It could have been gnarled up suspension parts. It could have been thousands of dollars' worth of repairs. It could have been deadly. It was outside of my control, and God gave me the tools to fix it. He gave me knowledge, a jack and a tire iron. Not to mention the physical capacity to jack up a car and remove a wheel. He gave me the inquisitiveness to have asked questions in the past that led me to assess that my suspension was indeed perfectly safe and fine. Nothing was in my control. In that moment, it was clear that my life was not in my own hands at all.
And that's what I believe my prayer does for other people. It separates them from the consequences. It separates them in such a way that they can't accidentally take credit for the things that happen. They can't brush it off as coincidence or as their own accomplishment.
And I have to admit, every time a prayer is explicitly answered, I love it. I love that this girl who hated even the idea of God is now not only heard but heard in such a way that deeply affects those around her. I look at my neglected prayer list and everything ends up done. It's the most bizarre thing ever. It's the only "to do" list I have that actually gets wiped clean. It really is a beautiful thing.
And it scares me. It really does. And so I don't pray. And I deny that I have a gift. Because I really don't. I'm not more special than anybody else. And one day, without a doubt, I'll feel like God's not listening. Well, actually, I'll feel it again. And again. And I could either start the processes to "get right with God", or I can stop praying for the wrong things and ask God to help me pray for the right things.
I can stop trying to drive the car and instead, use this opportunity to become more aware of my surroundings, all while pointing out the things I love as He drives us by all the people and places He built for me and show my gratitude and appreciation by letting Him take care of it all for me.
Because He loves it all too.
And somehow, I think He wishes we didn't need the suffering to understand that.
But it's merely speculation. God is God and even if I won't presume to know what any of it is all about, He gave me the drive to wonder. :D
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
