This Is Our Greatest Offense
A couple of quarters ago, I was taking my first literature class. One of the stories I read was by Langston Hughes. Something one of the characters said in the story was that sometimes you have to tear down the church to get Jesus off the cross. I remember being struck by that line. I pondered it for a while and couldn’t quite figure out what I found so meaningful or honest about it. But it’s stayed with me for a while now, and it came back to me last night. I started thinking about it, and I came up with this…
I think there are two types of Christians. Those who live in the shadow of Christ’s resurrection and those who do not. What I mean is that some Christians live their lives as if Christ never rose at all. They’re still believers, they’re still good, but that’s where it ends. But is it really enough to simply be good?
Those who live in the shadow of Christ’s resurrection are people of hope. They know that when life is at its worst, there is still a small chance for something amazing to break through. They have faith, but they also allow themselves to wrestle. They don’t pretend that God’s ways are always crystal clear. They don’t pretend that their lives are spotless. They don’t pretend to be someone they’re not just because they happen to be in a church building. They are real, but they are striving to be more like the One who created them, without judging those who do not share their ambitions.
The other type of Christian I see are those whose faith ends at the cross. They were a sinner, Jesus came to save them, and He died for their sins. But it seems these people forget that he also rose. They forget the hope that comes with the resurrection. They forget that the life Christ promises His Bride is not simply a new life in heaven, but a new life here on this earth. These people acknowledge salvation and even have it, but they often neglect to claim all of it.
I was talking to a friend of mine last night and I told her that I’m not drawn to people that seem too good, too perfect. The people I’m drawn to, the friends I have, are good, but there’s something else there. There’s passion about something. I think passion is the number one thing missing in the life of the church today. I don’t mean simply my church, but the Church as a whole. If the Church had the passion we should, if I had the passion I should, I think the world would be completely different. It would much more grace-filled.
So now to explain how the Hughes quote inspired all of this thinking. I guess it just struck me that sometimes God puts things in a person’s life to get them to fall. Maybe not fall, but to understand their need of Him. Something the Eldredge’s said in Captivating is that often the longings we have in our hearts were placed there by God, hoping that instead of filling them with “things”, we’d turn to Him, understanding there is nothing better that could make us whole. And perhaps the only way of showing us this is to “tear the church down.”
I guess I just find it sad how many believers settle for mediocre when they could have excellent. We let selfishness ruin us. I believe selfishness is the number one thing that destroys a church. Church is not about personal gain; it is about loving your brother (which I am not that good at), taking joy in another’s worship, bearing the burdens life together as one, and being brutally honest when life doesn’t make sense. I think sometimes that people try so hard to be good that they forget there’s more to it. Without passion, goodness means next to nothing. Without true love, goodness is garbage. The church falls apart without passion. When the picture a person has of Jesus is one of Him on the cross, they are forgetting that He brought new life. The resurrection should inspire passion and craft passionate believers. Instead it seems that people always reflect on the sacrifice Christ made with a somber attitude and tone. And while the sacrifice was greater than I could ever imagine, the fact that He defeated death should be the focus. Without that fact, Christianity is a joke, made up of people who are not joyful, loving, or passionate.
As I try to be joyful, loving and passionate, I know that those three traits are enough to change the world. As Flannery O’Connor said, the life you save may be your own.
Oh my God, look around this place
Your fingers reach around the bone
You set the break and set the tone
Flights of grace, and future falls
In present pain
All fools say, “Oh my God”
Oh my God, why are we so afraid?
We make it worse when we don’t bleed
There is no cure for our disease
Turn a phrase, and rise again
Or fake your death and only tell your closest friend
Oh my God
Oh my God, can I complain?
You take away my firm belief and graft my soul upon your grief
Weddings, boats and alibis
All drift away, and a mother cries
Liars and fools; sons and failures
Thieves will always say
Lost and found; ailing wanderers
Healers always say
Whores and angels; men with problems
Leavers always say
Broken hearted; separated
Orphans always say
War creators; racial haters
Preachers always say
Distant fathers; fallen warriors
Givers always say
Pilgrim saints; lonely widows
Users always say
Fearful mothers; watchful doubters
Saviors always say
Sometimes I cannot forgive
And these days, mercy cuts so deep
If the world was how it should be, maybe I could get some sleep
While I lay, I dream we’re better
Scales were gone and faces light
When we wake, we hate our brother
We still move to hurt each other
Sometimes I can close my eyes
And all the fear that keeps me silent falls below my heavy breathing
What makes me so badly bent?
We all have a chance to murder
We all feel the need for wonder
We still want to be reminded that the pain is worth the thunder
Sometimes when I lose my grip, I wonder what to make of heaven
All the times I thought to reach up
All the times I had to give
Babies underneath their beds
Hospitals that cannot treat all the wounds that money causes
All the comforts of cathedrals
All the cries of thirsty children – this is our inheritance
All the rage of watching mothers – this is our greatest offense
Oh my God
Oh my God
Oh my God
(lyrics by Jars of Clay, from their album Good Monsters)
The Answer to My Question
This blog has been quite neglected lately, largely due to the fact that I’ve been journaling more in an actual journal, with paper and everything. Also, school has started back up for me, after a seemingly endless summer. I welcome fall with open arms, as it means cooler weather and the fact that I get to buy pens.
A few weeks ago, I was having dinner with a friend and she mentioned starting a Bible/book study for the girls in our church’s youth group. She wanted to go through the book Captivating by John Eldredge and his wife Stasi. Three or four years ago, when I was still in youth group, our group of girls went through Wild at Heart, another one of Eldredge’s books. Wild at Heart is a book for men about their wounds and their hearts. Captivating is the Wild at Heart for women, basically. Both books have a lot of great thoughts and contain some challenging insight. I read through Captivating a few months ago and was encouraged by it. As the planning for the Bible study progressed, I knew that if I was going to co-lead this thing, that my heart had to be on its way towards healing or else my impact on these girls would be little.
Captivating deals with the heart and soul of a woman. It addresses issues of beauty, friendship, romance, the desire to be seen as lovely, and how easily a woman’s heart is broken and also how often it stays that way. The book makes the claim that all women are haunted by a question which is “Am I lovely? Am I worth something? Am I captivating?” This is certainly a question I have asked. The book also says that each woman has been wounded at some point in her life, that the answer to her question has been a loud and angry “no.”
When I was involved in the Wild at Heart study a few years back, we talked about the idea of being wounded. For the first time, those few years ago, I saw my wound. I had been blind to it for quite some time, not quite understanding how much it had shaped the way I acted and the way I interacted with other people, especially men. When I picked up Captivating a few weeks ago to get my heart ready to lead this study, I thought my wound was almost healed, or was certainly on its way. But it was still very present. It had been years since my wound was received, and years since I acknowledged it and asked for healing. But there it was, still present, still aching, and still convincing me that I was not who I was meant to be.
While all the claims in Captivating may not be true for every single woman, so many of the ideas in the book were true for me. I took the book chapter by chapter, writing down my thoughts, prayers, Scriptures, etc. I have allowed myself to grieve, not just over my wound but for the fact that I have believed so many of the lies Satan has fed me.
Satan is an aspect of Christianity I don’t consider much, to be honest. I’ll talk about God freely with any person, but when I speak of Satan I almost feel silly. But I shouldn’t. Evil is a real thing. Satan is evil incarnate, the opposite of God in His splendor. Captivating made a point I found interesting. Satan, once Lucipher, was at one point heaven’s most beautiful and powerful angel. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more. He wanted to be God. Because Satan was once beauty, the Eldredge’s pointed out that he attacks beauty anytime he can. He whispers lies in the ears of the Bride of Christ, attempting to convince her she is ugly, not worthy, too much or too little. And I believed these lies for so long about myself. I am still struggling to let go of some of them.
It is amazing the lies we believe about ourselves. For so long now, I have believed that I am anything but lovely. On some days I might consider myself cute, even fewer days pretty. But beautiful? Captivating? Never.
It wasn’t just physical lies that I believed. I doubted each and every one of my friendships. I would analyze conversations to death, dwelling on any negative thing. I would take something completely mundane and turn it into this dramatic scenario inside my head. I was always the victim. I would never have a true friend. No one really loved me. No one would ever stay.
I believed that I was too dirty for God. I believed for so, so many years that I had to be clean before I prayed or worshipped, that I could not come flawed or with dirty hands. It was not until just this year, my 19th year of life, that I realized for the first time that God loves me. All of me. I have learned that I cannot earn His love, and I have learned that I cannot lose it. He chose me, and He delights in me.
God has started an amazing process of healing in my heart. I no longer believe that I am some ugly duckling that no man would ever choose to pursue. I believe that I was created in the image of God, the epitome of beauty.
I no longer believe that I am alone. I believe in my friendships, and I see how blessed I am to know the people I do.
I no longer believe that I am too much for God to handle, too unclean for Him to chase. God sees me, all of me. He knows my scars, yet loves me anyway. He always has. He always will. When a person truly understands that God loves him or her, they cannot help but be changed by that knowledge.
There are still days my heart is not completely whole. There are still days when I ache for romance with a man instead of romance with God. There are still days when I see myself as flawed and unpretty. But there are more days when I feel joyful, when I feel lovely, when I feel loved and pursued by a Lover no man could ever be.
I have been craving romance for so long now. I have believed that a man could fix me, that he could heal my wound. I have realized that I can’t expect for another human being to ever fix me. I still crave romantic love, but it’s not because I feel I need it. I simply want it, as most do. And now I am convinced that it will happen, when my heart is a bit more healed and when I am ready to accept it.
It feels good to rest in the knowledge of love and beauty, being so certain of both.
Song of the Moment: “All the Stars”, eastmountainsouth
Pulling In
I find it hard to love God. It’s very easy for me to like God, to look at God with great admiration, and sometimes it’s even easy to pray to God. But to love Him is different. It demands more. It demands all of me. I think people toss the word “love” around so often that it has perhaps lost a bit of its punch. I say I love my friends, but I also say I love Hello Kitty. And while I do greatly enjoy Hello Kitty, I would not lay down my life for her. I would not go out on a limb and defend Hello Kitty. I would not invest my life in Hello Kitty. I would not try to make Hello Kitty feel loved and special because Hello Kitty is a cartoon cat and not someone I can laugh with, talk to, or just sit quietly with while watching Mulder and Scully fight forces of evil. When talking about my friends and Hello Kitty, I use the same word but it means two very different things.
When I say I love God, I wonder how often I truly mean it in the most basic, Webster-defined sense of the word. I don’t think you can love someone until you truly know him or her, and I know that I do not know God very well. But then again, I’m not sure how well anyone knows God. I’m not sure how much He allows us to see. I’m not sure how much any of us could actually handle seeing.
I hate the thought of hurting someone that I love. I go out of my way to avoid it. And when I know I have hurt them anyway, a bit of my heart hurts too because I know I made a bit of theirs also ache. I hate the thought of disappointing my earthly father, but when it comes to God, I daily make choices that I know must make Him grieve. Sometimes I make these choices without really thinking things through, but other times, most times, I think, I make them fully aware of my actions. I voluntarily hurt the One who left heaven for me.
As I’ve thought this through, I’ve wondered what the difference is. Why is it that I can love mere mortals more than I can love the creator of the universe? And I think that it is because in order to love someone, you also have to let him or her love you. And I am not often very good at letting God simply love me. As I thought about this further, I began to believe that I am not the only one.
I was thinking about John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart in which he discusses what men and women often look like inside the church. He described many as tired, without passion, still, good but dull. I have to wonder if these people, too, have trouble with letting God love them. Within the community of church, there is such emphasis on doing, on serving. And serving is indeed important, but I think it often gets placed on a higher shelf than it really should. There is such importance placed on doing things for God that I wonder how often we forget that God sometimes just wants us to sit still and let Him wow us. Sometimes I think He wants us to simply delight in Him and His miracles. There is this constant struggle to prove to God our goodness, to prove that we are strong and worthy and brave and beautiful. It’s a worthless cause, and I know it, but I very rarely stop. Love is easier when you’re busy doing, but it gets personal when the doing stops and the stillness sets in.
I think it’s a lot like a car ride with someone you don’t know very well. When you’re riding with someone you don’t quite yet feel fully comfortable with, there is this need to fill in the silence. This is this pressure to chat and make small talk to fill in the gaps. But after you’ve known a person for a while, the silence is no longer awkward. There is talking, but it’s not forced. The silence is not weird or abnormal. It feels fine, feels normal and natural.
Anyone who has step foot in church even once hears about the importance of prayer. Even people who don’t believe find themselves praying when life gets at its worst point. But I wonder how often I, and others, pray because of obligation instead of passion. Instead of a natural dialog with the Almighty, prayer becomes like the chatter inside the car with a stranger. Because of this emphasis on giving and doing, I wonder how much I have missed because there is so little emphasis on taking and silence.
Love is not easy, and if it feels easy, then I doubt it’s really love at all. Love is rich and passionate and the best of all things, but it demands that we look past the way things seem and examine the way things really are. It demands that we give, but it also demands that we take the goodness being offered us. It is in the taking we learn how love feels and work, what love looks like. The giving must come after the taking, the acceptance of love.
I have no idea if any of this made any sense at all, but I felt wordy. And when I feel wordy, it seems wrong to just deny the wordiness. : )
