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:

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.

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?

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

On faith and unknown unknowns...

One thing my meanderings into Christianity has brought me is a new perspective of truth. Pastors seem to like the elephant analogy where a bunch of blindfolded people represent all the religions, and each religion representative touches a part of the elephant and has their own version of the truth of what the elephant looks like based on their tiny fragment of it and combined, they form the whole picture, the one which the self-proclaimed outsider claims he sees when they don't. And they like it because it shows that the outsider thinks they know more about truth than everybody else, and it illustrates the sort of arrogant self-righteousness of that particular truth claim.

But from the other side, none of the blindfolded people will ever think they're the blindfolded ones either. Yes, the atheist or agnostic or Oprah can make a truth claim and we can laugh about how they don't think it's a faith-based truth claim because they think they have no faith in anything but science, but where does that leave us?

The problem is the categories. When you categorize a Christian, you say things like, "All Christians think they know where they go when they die," or, "Christians think they know what is God's will." But I don't know those things. I don't know where I go when I die. As a Christian I think I'm supposed to believe it's somewhere with God? But only when He decides it's over? I don't know.

[Whoever does the supposing in the "Christians are supposed to" statements and whether they are of any worth is beyond my realm of knowledge also.]

I used to be firm in my belief that death was a grocery store of possibilities. Aisle six had the possibility that we reincarnate. Aisle seven, that we reincarnate irrespective of time. I could be Jim Morrison in my next lifetime. Or my last one. Another was that we're one collective soul, split up into fractions, each fraction left to fend for itself and only when we work as a collective will we ever end this suffering. Another still was that we are all God on holiday. God was all, "I want to know what it's like," so he split himself into the billions of people and animals and things and is experiencing every breath of everything simultaneously. And when we die, we will be one again.

There are endless possibilities really. And even if I like my Jesus, I don't presume to know how it ends. Jesus says there's a paradise of some sort, but God also says, "Never presume to understand what I mean or intend because your little pea brain really has no idea." Paraphrased, of course.

My point being that Christianity has taught me a lot about truth in that none of us really has any idea what's going on. Not even the atheists. Not even the agnostics (like me) who think they know they have no idea what's really going on.

I do like that Bush quote, even if it makes me a social outcast- the one about how there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Because he's right. Known knowns are science. Known unknowns are the breaches of faith and unknown unknowns are... well... who knows? And in my humble opinion, none of us can make a full truth claim until we can actually see all the unknown unknowns.

In the meantime, we have partial truths that end where faith begins.

All of us.

And that's my truth claim. :D

On white-knuckles and trust issues...

God will be glorified in me regardless of how I live my life. Whether it be through His mercy or through His justice, my life will be a means through which He will show Himself.

And in the meantime, my failings as a Christian don't change that. Nor do they change the world. I am not that important and my failures and faults aren't surprises either. If I am a piece of a puzzle, I can't suddenly change shape. Even if I rip off the sticky outy bits or patch up the dents to either better myself or ruin myself, God will still find all the pieces, clean me up and make me fit.

And there's nothing I can do to change that.

And in the meantime, the things I do, the habits I fall into, the things I refuse to ask for help with, all affect my joy. They're all to my own detriment. They don't affect my relationship with God on His end. Because you know what? Even if I conquer all those things, all the things I perceive to be detrimental to my relationship with God, they are but the tip of the iceberg. And to believe that I will be able to somehow be good enough for God one day is to underestimate God's righteousness and undeservingly amplify my own.

Repent. I think that's what I'm having trouble with. Repenting without action is a meaningless admission of flaws. Repenting with action is behavior modification, which often leads to the replacing of one behavior with another, rather than absolving the need for the behavior to begin with. It also seems like a way to control your salvation. So where's the line between futile, self-important repentance and real repentance? Asking God for help? Asking God to remove whatever it is? Asking God to be more satisfying than the benefits of the behavior? Asking God to change your heart?

But what if that behavior pattern or lifestyle is the only facet of your life in which you have any sort of certainty at all? What if that is where you're comfortable and you don't want it to be removed? What if without it, life just doesn't seem worth it?

Obviously, there are a whole bunch of underlying issues there. But they're there regardless. This is the hand we've been dealt and in some ways, it's a bad one. In some ways, we need something to hold onto for fear that if we let go to merely hold onto God, we'll get dropped.

I'm the girl who, when my dad would carry me on his shoulders as a tiny child, would grip his hair so hard in an effort to keep myself from falling that he'd get a headache and lose handfuls of hair. Every time. God knows I can't let go. Not yet anyway. And I like to assume that He knows I would if I could and I wish I could.

And in the meantime, I guess all that's left is to pray that God might protect me and watch over me while I make my mistakes so that eventually, I might realize He's got a tighter grip on me than any grip my tiny white-knuckled fists could ever muster on their own.

It's true...

"[God] is not glorified in begrudging submission."
- Matt Chandler

[... in the Culture & Theology talk thingy he gave last week on homosexuality. You can watch it here. It's long. Lonnnng. But it has funny bits... And some moments where you're like, "Yes! Thank you for saying that in a room full of churchies..." And only a couple of moments that really make you cringe. And by "you", I mean "left-wing, ultra liberal me". But I digress.]

It's true though. If you make God seem like a chore, how does that glorify God at all? How does that stir people up to challenge themselves and their faith/spiritual beliefs?

Nobody looks at a dog owner as they squat down to load up a baggy with dog doo and says, "Man, I want a dog."

Well, unless they're being sarcastic.

So if our life starts to revolve around those particulars which cause us to mumble and grumble incessantly, not only do the people around us not see God through us, but over time, we start to detach from God as well. Why follow a God who is nothing but a pain in the ass? Why worship a God who does nothing but impose impossible rules on us? Why adore a God who makes us feel like a constant failure in everything we do and feel?

And I think when we [I] start asking questions of that genre, that's when we've [I've] forgotten what it's all about.

On setting yourself up for failure...

Lately, I'm having a lot of trouble with the rules and exclusions of Christianity.

We spend our entire lives setting rules for ourselves, rules that not only do we intend to keep, but that are actually easy to keep. Often, they're even rules that would better us in some way, or at the very least, make our current lives a little more tolerable.

Take, for instance, milk. If I eat dairy products, not only do I have symptoms of lactose intolerance, but they also give me migraines. And once a migraine is triggered, I risk months and months of a low level migraine in its wake. So, obviously, I have to set a rule in my life: no dairy. Based on the consequences and the alternatives available to me, one would think that "no dairy" wouldn't be all that difficult a rule to follow.

And then you realize how milk products are in everything- bread, cookies, um... that's all I can think of right now, mainly because I've had a fierce craving for cookies for like a week now. But I digress.

So it's not that easy to avoid milk products, but still, it's doable. I've spent every day since I was ten years old watching out for oats in everything, and that too is difficult, but I got used to it. Along with the wheat intolerance that came later. Then the citrus intolerance. And so on and so on.

It is absolutely possible to do cut stuff out entirely.

Vegans do it...

Today, I was hungry, so I ate cheese. And then I decided that cheese wasn't enough, so I went to the store to buy supper materials, came home and on the way, ruined my appetite with milk chocolate.

Oh, yes.

It was tasty.

And it got me wondering. God is supposedly all about knowing how we operate and working around that. He's also all about the rules that are really to our own benefit. They benefit our soul. Right?

But how can this God know us at all if He supposedly decides who is in or out based on a set of intangible rules?

I can't even go a day without eating some sort of dairy product, and in the grand scheme of things, that's a drop in the bucket.

So then Jesus comes and He says He fulfilled the Law, and yet, establishes a whole bunch of new laws. Or, rather, they're the same ones, but since He fulfilled the old ones, they're new again...ish? And then He dies on the cross so that our sins are washed away and we can be with God... but only if we try hard enough? Only if we go to church? And let's not forget, we have to recruit new members for the army (otherwise they'll be excluded).

Ah, the exclusion part. That's where my agnosticism kicks in. I still can't imagine a God who creates us this way, ultimately sending us straight to hell. I can't imagine that some of the things we do to help each other out in this unbelievably messed up world are things on the list that also lead to damnation.

"There are no levels of sin," they say. "Sin is sin."

So if a rapist rapes, if a victim aborts, if a friend lies to protect the victim, sin is sin. And God abhors sin.

If a priest molests a kid, if a man moves in with his girlfriend, if a woman can't forgive her mother for the horrible pain she has caused, if two people of the same gender intertwine souls, sin is sin and it's all the same.

There's just no way. There's no way that a) God would give us this "sense of justice" that supposedly reflects His own and then have us believe that "sin is sin" and b) God cannot be God if He doesn't know that we're terrible at rules.

In theory, b) is easy to rationalize away. He knows we suck at rules, so that's why He sent Jesus. Right? Except that Jesus left us with rules, so that's kind of a circular argument.

Unless...

If it really is "just Jesus", then it makes sense. Then we aren't expected to follow any rules, rather they're guidelines and Jesus, being full of empathy after having lived in this busted up world, knows that it's almost impossible to stick to them all the time.

I mean, really, the guy only lived till thirty. It's kind of like Marilyn Monroe. You wonder if she had survived a little longer, would she have aged well? Would she have stayed sexy like Sophia Loren? Or would she have ended up a washed up mess with no dignity? And sure, Jesus was God so He had that, but depending on your view of Him, don't you wonder if He could have made it till ninety without sinning? Of course, as a good Christian, you have to answer, "yes," right?

But my point is if Jesus came here and endured this and has empathy for our situation as a result, why is everybody going to hell? It's so bizarre and twisted. Why, if our God is so loving, is the default hell? I don't get it.

God created us this way. God knows who we are. God knows what we'll do before we do it. God loves us. So then clearly it only makes sense that ultimately He's going to ship us to hell by the bus load? And don't forget- if you don't believe that, you're bumped up to the first bus.

Fantastic.

So yeah, lately, I'm having a lot of trouble with the rules and exclusions of Christianity. :D