So, I've come to a few conclusions:
1. I am a hedonist.
2. I am an avid Greener-grasser.
3. I am rediculously self-addicted.
These are conclusions I've been mulling over for a while. They are certainly not new. I've been growing into these traits for a long time. But one of the happy joys of one's thirties seems to be an increased understanding of self - who am I, what makes me tick and what's made me this way... Oh, and one more thing, how do I change for the better?
I am just a couple of chapters shy of finishing
Blue Like Jazz for the first time. (I know I'm late on this train - this book has been around.) It's one of those that's just hit me right. Donald Miller speaks a language that I can understand. He describes a Christian spirituality I can actually
get. I don't feel so alone in my skeptical review of church as usual. And this book feeds my hope for something different. Church done differently - life lived differently. Not a complete disavowal and certainly not a judgement, but a recentering if you will. A reexamination of our, of my m.o.
Me: You see I'm a funny kind of Christian - kind of a misfit in some ways. I told Jeremy the other day in the car that maybe I'm like the elf that wants to be a dentist, a misfit toy. :) I love God - not a warm fuzzy happy love, more like a deep, quiet love, that cries and even rages, one that comes from deep inside - a
Truth that once encountered won't be denied. God and I have had a relationship since I was a child. And although my upbringing tended toward religious and legalistic - that was never all that it was about with me. I was baptized when I was 7. Not because I was some programmed little kid in psycho Christian fundamental land. No, I was a pretty sharp 7 year old I think. I
loved Jesus (and God). I had already learned quite a bit about the Bible and knew exactly why I wanted to be a committed follower of Christ. It was about
Love.
And although I've gone through plenty of different seasons of faith, countless doubts, growth and searching, I never truly walked away from God. It something that regardless of how I felt, the doubts that may have overwhelmed me, I couldn't just walk away from absolute
Truth. What I have had my ins and outs with has been Christian pop culture. As a young one searching for your way, it's so disorienting to try to navigate a spiritual life in a hyper Evangelistic "Christian" pop culture. It's like walking around a town that seems to be saying the right things, and looks pretty good too, but something just feels off, you know? Like if you walk through a door, you'll see that it's all just a facade - kind of like an elaborate movie set.
In college, I started to call it bubble Christianity - bumper sticker Christianity and T-shirt Christians. Because to me it seemed that as the Christian community, the church around me, was more concerned with keeping ourselves untainted by the filthy world. So much so, we would regard them as unclean. Their art was unclean. Their music unclean. Their speech, certainly. Our only hope was to have a world set apart within this one. Every now and then making a brave foray into enemy territory to deliver a track or crusade and then high-tailing it back to base. More concerned with hot topics like
homosexuality and
abortion than seeing those around us through the lenses of Christ's love. More concerned about protecting ourselves and our children than loving those around us - truly loving them where they are, as they are.
I know I'm being kind of hard core about that culture, but it's the critique that comes from a member of that circus. I certainly don't think the church is evil. I love the Church - as Christ sees it. I love what it is meant to be, and the Christ followers who are truly that, and even all the many of us who are well-intentioned, but have missed the mark. I also own my part of that. The many times I've been exactly that, just part of a show - just playing a part. I am sorry for my falsity, my hatred, my selfishness, my self-righteousness and pride, my judgment and my flagrant hypocrisy, the confession could go on and on. But what then?
As a true product of my generation, I need something real. I would rather have the ugly truth than have some false pretense. I don't want to hear about how sweet Jesus is or how he's softly and tenderly calling. This isn't Candyland, and there are truly times when I read church stuff and I think I might go into a sugar coma. Life is hard. It is gritty and dirty and even stinky. If I feel that way as a Christ follower and long-time member of the church, I know my peers feel that way. It's not just our hypocrisy that's killing the church. It's our unwillingness to set ourselves aside and try just loving people one by one. Introducing God and his Son by the way we live and more importantly the way we love. No longer trying to change people. Silencing our tongues and using our ears. Daily readjusting our vision - ready to see the world around us with an intentional mission - to love people like Jesus. Being willing to do church differently. Understanding that the Church is going to look a lot different than we had pictured it, filled with all kinds of people.
Even now, at this very moment, I find myself falling into cliches. Wanting simply to say the right things. The truth is that I don't always feel like a Christian. I don't just love to pray. I don't relish reading my Bible for hours on end. I don't enjoy most popular Christian books or music. As a preacher's wife, or otherwise. Weird, huh? What I do love is humanity. I love that we exist. I love the struggle of humanity. I love the emotion, the journey, the search, the triumph. I love what community can look like and feel like. And true unbridled Love is amazing. It makes my heart beat faster, not just the romantic kind. Just the true kind. It's what makes life worth living, and what makes you want there to be no end. Hope raises me up. It lifts me out of myself - my pessimism, my selfishness, my darkness and draws me forward. The hope that my faith will be made stronger, and one day fulfilled. The hope that people do change and seeing how that life change makes all of the difference to one person, and then a whole family, and then a whole neighborhood! How, beyond belief, miracles do seem to happen. And even the most skeptical of us, I think, has those secret suspicions. I love the way that my faith doubles in size (kind of like the Grinch's heart) when I let go of fear and just leap. And once you leap, and feel and see the hand of God catch you, you do it again, and again and again. What I do know is that I don't want me without God. I am a fragment, a mere shadow of who I am with Him. I can't give you an equation, I can't write that as a philosophical argument, but stick with me and you'll see it. I hope you will.
Anyhow, this book has challenged me to assess my spiritual journey, the ways I've been less than true, and the ways I've just kind of wallowed in myself. How can I as a hedonistic, greener-grassing, self-absorbed Christ follower love the people around me and change for the better? I think I'll just take it little by little - embracing community and working to love those around me in an authentic way. We'll see...
(thanks for sticking with me if you've had the patience to read this crazy-long rambling post)
I leave you with a couple of my favorite quotes from the book:
"In his book
Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton says chess players go crazy, not poets. I think he's right. you'd go crazy trying to explain penguins. It's best just to watch them and be entertained. I don't think you can explain how Christian faith works either. It is a mystery. And I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul."
"There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.)"
