Seeking Understanding

At lunch today, a student approached me and asked me why I believe in God.

Thoughts like, ‘Lord, don’t let me mess up’ and ‘Lord, please don’t let me spout nonsense’ went through my mind as I tried to put together something meaningful to say. This other student was very attentive and polite as I spoke. He asked me a few more questions, which I tried to answer as well as I could. Afterwards, he thanked me, shook my hand, and walked away, leaving me to sit, perplexed, at my table.

Thinking about it later, I was struck by how hollow my words must have seemed. I had given textbook answers that stated the reasons why Christianity is desirable and all the benefits we receive from being a part of it. And that was exactly what I didn’t want to sound like.

Now maybe this student didn’t hear those things. Maybe he isn’t as cynical as I am. Maybe he was asking people for a class, or out of curiosity. In any case, it would be arrogant of me to think that my words would change his life, or that my lack of authenticity during this encounter would permanently put him off. But I do think that knowing in my head why I believe and why my faith is so central to me, and being able to articulate those things when asked, is important. Otherwise, I would be basing crucial parts of my life on a set of feelings and intuitions.

I don’t think belief should be about benefits. I mean, the ‘best’ Christians were probably the disciples, and look where their belief got them. Certainly, strong faith gives contentment and a sense of purpose and belonging—but I don’t want to have signed up in order to get those things; and I certainly shouldn’t be believing in God because I at this moment in my life have those things. What happens when things are hard and I don’t feel that deep, meaningful connection to God where I am content and things are okay? If those feelings are what my faith is based on, I’m going to run into trouble soon. And if we tell people that that’s what our faith is based on, they’re not going to believe it. They’re going to look at us and say, ‘You’re just trying to sell me something, just like all those other religions are trying to sell me something—and guess what? I’m not buying it.’

Belief is about there being a point in your life when you realise that there’s something much bigger than just you going on. You are confronted by God, and the only thing you can do is believe, or else walk away from the experience in denial. I don’t believe because of the things it does for me; I believe because it would be silly of me not to, knowing what I know. I have encountered God so many times that to refuse to believe would be like when a small child petulantly puts her hands over her eyes, insisting that ‘if she can’t see it then it’s not there.’ I believe because I have been confronted with the truth. And so even if I’m not doing a very good job of serving God and loving others, even if life is hard and things feel hopeless, I will still believe.

We make the mistake of thinking that we can sell belief. But that’s not how it works. There are many people who respect Christianity for its morals and for its attempts to make things right, but who don’t—and can’t—claim the faith because they don’t have it yet. They want to believe (though they might not know it), but they have not yet encountered God in a way that shows them the truth. And that’s okay, because God’s working on it. We’re not doing these people any favours by trying to sell some cheap form of faith to them.

It does little good and much harm to track down the atheists and the agnostics and the people of other faiths and tell them that they’re feeling unfulfilled and that they need what we’re offering. Chances are, they’re not feeling unfulfilled—or if they are, they haven’t noticed it yet. And chances are, when they do feel unfulfilled later on, they’re not going to know where to go. Telling people what they want when they don’t really want it doesn’t work (except for maybe those people who are addicted to the Shopping Network), and even if it does, it’s not going to be for the long-term. Some might be willing to try faith out, but if it isn’t what they were looking for after all, they’re going to check it off their list, possibly forever.

Belief is not about benefits. Belief is not about morality. Belief is about relationship—and relationships don’t happen without trust. We don’t go around telling people from different friend groups to be best friends with each other when they’ve never met or don’t know each other well. So perhaps we shouldn’t do that when it comes to God and nonbelievers.

Maybe what this world needs is for us to stop treating faith like a consumer product. Maybe what this world needs is for us to unashamedly speak the truth—to own up to the fact that faith doesn’t solve our problems, that we still struggle, we still have doubts, we still mess up, we still don’t know which way to go. If we want what is best for others, maybe the place to start is living with authenticity and loving without division. If we really want to help, maybe we should wait for others to tell us what they really need, instead of barging in with our own assumptions.

Comfort and Joy

This past weekend was really difficult for me. Life has been hard. Yet the past few days have been beautiful and joy-filled. I still have many things to do, and the people I care deeply about are still struggling, yet all I can see is the wonder of Advent. I’m constantly seeing the beauty and the wretchedness side by side, and it is a new and strange experience.

I am still deeply sad about the things I see, yet I no longer am overwhelmed by it. Instead, I am studying and singing and dancing around my room, drunk on the wonder that is Emmanuel, God with us. And I realise that Christmas and the coming of Messiah is not about things not being sad or terrible anymore. Christmas is not about pretending that everything is okay or expecting everything to be okay, or even trying to make everything okay; Christmas is about hope.

Israel was deeply hurting when Christ came. The world was deeply hurting—just as it still is today. God did not fix our pain. What he did was give us hope. He gave us the power to overcome our pain—even if overcoming it means simply enduring.

The world is not black and white. There is nothing that is purely good or purely evil. And the wonder of Christmas is that despite the brokenness, there is beauty. Beauty is everywhere, despite brokenness and through brokenness.

And this beauty manifests itself through love. The love of a Father for his lost children, the love of a young girl for her unexpected baby, the love of a teacher for his students, the love of a God who ‘goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.’

This love is so strong that it broke death. This love is so strong that it moved mountains. This love is so strong that it created from nothingness. This love is so strong that it does away with all fear.

And this love is so strong that it pursues us to the ends of the earth.

o come, o come Emmanuel
and ransom captive Israel
who mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear

o come, Thou Dayspring, come and cheer
our spirits by Thine advent here
disperse the gloomy clouds of night
and Death’s dark shadows put to flight

o come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny
from depths of Hell Thy people save
and give them victory over the grave

rejoice! rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, o Israel

Gratitude

It’s nearly Thanksgiving, and thus I’ve been thinking about in what ways the holiday is an opportunity, and in what ways we often cheapen that opportunity or miss it altogether.

I don’t really care all that much about the history of the holiday, romanticised or not. I remember far too many times in elementary school where the week was taken up by dressing up and then being told the story of all the nice Pioneers and Native Americans eating together on Thanksgiving Day. And then afterward we would raise our hands and share with the class that we were thankful for Jesus and our families and our school—all the abstract, nice things that didn’t really mean much or cost anything of us to say.

We cultivate that sort of attitude of thankfulness early, and then when we’re asked to share what we’re thankful for at age 16, 17, 20, 40, the list isn’t all that different from the one we gave in first grade. Maybe it’s a bit longer and contains more pretty words, but once again, the sharing of gratitude doesn’t cost us anything.

The attitude of thankfulness we have cultivated is an incredibly cheap one.

It may be true that I’m thankful for my school, but are there certain aspects of it that I dislike, and certain aspects that I think are awesome? And are there specific people in my family who have impacted my life and growth in a significant way? And are there other, less externally obvious parts of my life that help me to see God’s grace and love, and that give me hope that there is shalom in this broken, beautiful world?

Of course there are.

So why do I keep to the cheap list of gratitude? Why do I ignore those special things and fail to affirm them with the appropriate degree of reverence?

Life is not the nice meal together with friends and family, where everyone is smiling and laughing and no one has any problems; life is gritty and messy, where I’m annoyed with my sister and my parents are tired from work and my grandmother and aunt are getting flustered with kitchen logistics and most of us don’t really have time for an extended family get-together.

Life is where I affirm that yes, it sucks that some of my best friends are bearing the weight of depression and anxiety and deep, hurtful family drama; and yes, it sucks that along with these burdens, we’re overwhelmed by the demands of homework and our own needs and the needs of our friends and family members.

And so real life is where I affirm that everything isn’t nice or perfect or okay by saying what I’m truly grateful for—those people and things that restore me and renew me and bring me joy in a very real or practical or powerful way.

My challenge for myself and for others, therefore, is to cultivate an attitude of thankfulness that costs. Because when we cultivate that mindset of costly, introspective, open-eyed gratitude for the Thanksgiving season, it’s far more likely that we’ll continue to feel and express gratitude every day and in every situation—even when (and especially when) life is incredibly and unbearably hard.

[vulnerable]

hello my old heart
how have you been
are you still there inside my chest?
I’ve been so worried
you’ve been so still
barely beating at all

oh, don’t leave me here alone
don’t tell me that we’ve grown
for having loved a little while
oh, I don’t want to be alone
I want to find a home
and I want to share it with you

hello my old heart
it’s been so long
since I’ve given you away
and every day I add another stone
to the walls I built around you
to keep you safe

hello my old heart
how have you been?
how is it, being locked away?
well don’t you worry
in there, you’re safe
and it’s true, you’ll never beat
but you’ll never break

nothing lasts forever
some things aren’t meant to be
but you’ll never find the answer
until you set your old heart free

until you set your old heart free

from The Oh Hello’s

[journey]

I have made mistakes, I continue to make them
the promises I’ve made, I continue to break them
and all the doubts I’ve faced, I continue to face them
but nothing is a waste if you learn from it

and the sun, it does not cause us to grow
it is the rain that will strengthen your soul
and it will make you whole

we have lived in fear, and our fear has betrayed us
but we will overcome the apathy that has made us
because we are not alone in the dark with our demons
and we have made mistakes
but we’ve learned from them

and the sun, it does not cause us to grow
it is the rain that will strengthen your soul
and it will make you whole

and oh my heart, how can I face you now?
when we both know how badly I have let you down
and I am afraid of all that I’ve built
fading away

from Through the Deep, Dark Valley

Enough [Beautiful Disasters⁻¹]

Life is beautiful, but it’s complicated. It is so incredibly complicated.

And while we have experiences and make mistakes and go through times of triumph and times of failure, the world keeps spinning. Things keep happening, and we’re in the middle of it, trying to make sense of it all.

This world is such a broth of false and true—terrible and beautiful and awful and splendid. We see this complexity and we love it and fear it and write books or blog posts or speeches about it—

and then we have to roll out of bed the next morning, shut off the alarm, and stare at ourselves in the mirror as we, weary, bleary, unwashed souls that we are, prepare for another day in the life of an average teacher or secretary or businessman.

This is not the life of a warrior. This is not the life of a hero, of some knight who rides in to defeat the dragon and rescue the princess. This is the life of Ivan Denisovich, of Kaladin Stormblessed—in short, of every man or woman who is pleased by the prospect of just getting by.

And this is how we must live sometimes, by simply making our way through each day. Not being heroic or spectacular or raging against injustice and poverty and sickness and pain. Sometimes, this is all we can do. And sometimes, that’s enough. It’s enough to survive. 

It’s enough to trudge forward, head down, murmuring some unintelligible prayer devoid of flowery words or passion. It’s enough to say, ‘I can’t. I can’t do this right now. So God, I need you to fill in these gaps for me. And I’m going to need grace, because I’m going through hell right now. I trust you—or at least I trust that I need to trust you.’

It’s enough to stop and rest by the side of the road for a time.

But. 

Though it’s good and proper and acceptable and enough to sit there and rest, it is not good to remain there. Because when we do that, we’ve stopped living, and instead stepped into the grey, soul-eroding realm of unlife—and that’s the worst sort of hell.

The thing about being a child of the King is that we’re just that. We’re children. Not warriors. Not heroes. Not knights. We are weak and ignorant and confused. There are countless times when our Father uses us despite our weakness and ignorance and confusion—and in those times, his power is incredibly evident to all. But that’s not us. We are not the source of the strength or the courage that we feel in those moments.

Often, the problems we create happen when we get it into our heads that we can do it on our own.

When God empowers us, it is our responsibility as his children to do his will. But when we feel weak and vulnerable and incapable, that’s okay. We do as much as we are able, and God will do the rest.

Life can be hard, but God is good. We are not alone.

Beautiful Disasters [door]

There comes a time when I realise that I just can’t anymore.

I can’t homework

I can’t people

I can’t even grammar.

And when this happens to a community of people, one of two things will happen: either things fall apart, or things fall together.

As the walls tumble down around me, my eyes are opened to all the crap that’s going on in people’s lives—including my own. And I become overwhelmed, because it hurts and it’s hard, and I don’t have any way to fix it or any answers to make the pain go away.

At times like these, there’s no wisdom. There aren’t answers. All artifice is stripped away, and all that is left is a collection of broken, sinful people, searching for truth or understanding or any sort of foothold in the darkness.

When we live in community, the things that hurt others hurt us too. And when everyone is hurting—really hurting—there’s nothing we can do. There are no words. All we can do is surrender to God and beg him to be king over our lives and to make something beautiful of our suffering. When we’ve given up on the trite ‘comfort’ sayings and verses, all that’s left is a lament. 

And so we lament. We lament the loss of what was. We lament the disparity between what is and what should be. We lament the injustices humanity suffers—the injustices humanity inflicts every day.

So with empty hands and broken hearts, we cry out to our Father. We cry as children who are hurting and don’t understand why. We cry as empty vessels from whom even more is being demanded. We cry as an oppressed people seeking deliverance. We cry because we feel lost and alone in this vast, dark night.

And in our lament, we see the many other mourners; and it becomes ever more evident that we are not alone—that we have never been alone in our mourning. The more we weep, the more we see that we are all the same.

So together, with joined hands and hearts, we surrender ourselves before the throne of God above, the God whose love for us runs so deep that he sacrificed his only begotten Son to pursue us—even to the ends of the earth and under the earth—and to return us to his side.

There is nothing left for us to do but to face the darkness—to stare Death full in the face and say, ‘We defy you. We recognise that your power has been broken. We know how the story ends. And so no longer. No longer will we stand by, complacent and pathetic, as you attempt to harm that which does not belong to you. We are fighting back. And what’s more, we will win, not by our power, not according to our definition of victory, but only by our Father’s power, and according to his definition. Because our Father—our God—our King—is perfect in his love and endless in his strength.’

The world does not need more nice, ‘put-together’ people with their nice, ‘put-together’ lives.

The world needs failures, disasters, screw-ups. It needs college drop-outs, alcoholics and porn addicts, the divorced and the depressed and the discontent. The world needs those who understand deeply and intensely that everything is broken, that life sucks and that we can’t do this on our own.

This is why we fight—because we cannot do anything else. Because when we fight, we take part in that triumphant lament which the universe has been singing ever since we handed Death power over our lives.

We fight for one another because God is fighting for us. We fight to take back the Kingdom.

We fight because our lives are a constant song of lamenting triumph.

The Lament of Eustace Scrubb

brother, forgive me
we both know I’m the one to blame
when I saw my demons
I knew them well and welcomed them

but I’ll come around
someday

father, have mercy
I know that I have gone astray
when I saw my reflection
it was a stranger beneath my face

but I’l come around
someday

when I touch the water
they tell me I could be set free

so I’ll come around
someday

from Through the Deep, Dark Valley

Of Dance and Dreams Come True

I’ve been searching for a way to write about graduating and leaving Turning Pointe, and found this blog post that expressed my feelings almost exactly. I might still get around to putting my own words down, but for now, enjoy.

Colonizer (Canopy Climbers)

The Quantum Dragons Blog

I discovered this group today. This track is thought-provoking, and I think the ideas it presents are worth contemplating.

[Lyrics:]

I made my way to an unknown unknown.
I thought it simple how they made their way here.
If I could climb over all their mountains
and find my way in control of what they own.

I took your goals and I stole your story
so I could give you mine.
You will be known by how I brought you glory
and how I saved your lives.

Now that I hold all the means of living
I’ll strip you of your dignity by giving.
My charity will only keep you floating
and keep you from the world your fathers gave me.

I took your goals and I stole your story
so I could give you mine.
You will be known by how I brought you glory
and how I saved…

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