I went to church today feeling terrible…for various reasons, none of them important at the moment nor worth wading through in case anyone is feeling confrontational. The message of the day was simple, after all it was an emergent and deeply liberal presbyterian church. (Somewhat of an oxymoron I know.) The message centered upon our honesty before God, the uncovering of out true selves and the invitation for Him to enter our very own holy of holies. (I was apalled by the analogy but then tried to be humble about it, work with me.) It struck a chord in me, this desire to be honest, to be real. Lately it has been an immense issue in my life, when I am before people, when I am before God, when I am simply by myself (granted God being present in all cases.)
Who am I really, and how does that correspond with what I do, what I say, and essentially how I live?
The answer off hand would of course be, I am a child of God, a prodigal of course, but nonetheless one who has impossibly made his way over the years back to his Father and by that unspeakable grace, which we know as the cross of Christ, stepped upon the narrow path leading to eternal life and subsequently eternal joy. May God be blessed forever, Amen.
And yet, why then do I feel so strangely out of joint. As though my heart is missing a piece, or some inexplicable mist is hovering over my head, invisible and yet ominously present. Is it my sin? Is it my shameful collection of secrets that I hide behind emotional locks and vaults? But wait, I thought I spread those out already before the Lord? I thought I dealt with them. Jesus blood covers my treachery, I ought to be dancing with the joy of freedom. What’s wrong with me?
After walking out of that church, in no spectacular way, the answer dawned on me. That mist, that foreboding darkness, was simply pain. It was pain for past sin, pain for current frustrations, pain for how I’ve hurt people and pain for how I failed to help them, pain for losing my passion, pain for losing my purity, but most of all a single relentless pain fed by all the thousands that came before, a pain for those whom I loved and love still, who in the complexity of their souls and minds intermingled with my own life and behavior have chosen to remain as they are and refuse to say “I will” to the God who beckons them.
The reason why I never noticed this sort of pain in the past, is shameful. To be honest, I never ached for non-Christians before because I never poured my life out for any. I never let myself get close enough to love any let alone be attached to them. Even those I called best friends, were approached with a general air of cynicism resulting in a sort of guarded social “behavior.” If you can even call it that. Now, in order to dispel any false misconceptions, to say that I never felt pain or discomfort from the knowledge that my friends who did not know Christ were damned, is simply wrong. That is not it. It is one thing to feel frustrated and saddened for friends but quite another to feel bereaved and ruthlessly broken by those whom you have handed a piece of your heart. The former is bearable, the latter is torture.
It is a so weird that we walk upon this world together, sharing the same air, the same light, and the same genetic make up while we simultaneously stand infinitely far apart on the spiritual plane. It is not our purity, our holiness, or our righteousness that divides us, but simply the undeserved favor of God, and the personal, experiential knowledge of our relationship with His Son, the Lord Jesus as displayed by our obedience to Him. As humans we are the same, sinful, bent towards error, and manically ego-centric. I no longer dare attribute to Christians a higher aptitude for moral adherence or even a more elevated capacity for great and lofty emotions. As descendants of Adam, we all share in moral wickedness and as humans, we all have been given access to the full gamut of what our hearts can feel. Granted, the Holy Spirit and thus the influence of an omnipotent God within the Christian is no small thing in making them holy, however most Christians still choose to live their own lives, and they end up just like the next guy, simply human. Nothing more.
What can I say after all this? Love those who don’t call your God, God. And don’t just love them with that intellectual assent, but do it with your heart and your life. Waving hello is fine but when will we start letting them in to who we are, letting them see us at our best but also at our worst. No, I don’t suppose it has any power to make them Christians, but it does have power in making you less of a two-faced liar and more of a disciple of the one who says “I am the truth”. The price that we, lame unworthy and unholy Christians, have to pay when we love others, is pain. Pain for our failures to represent a holy God, pain for our busted words and pathetic alibis, and pain for having roots dug deep into hearts that are heading towards hell. But for all that pain, I still think it’s worth it. Personally, I know that I have been the worst example of a Christian ever, and believe you me, that is the understatement of the century, but I think for once in my life I can say I loved the lost.
So for all my friends who have never bowed the knee to Christ, I tried to be honest, but ended up a blight. Forgive me for my pathetic love.
