Ams, Isaac and I were curled up on the sofa with Explosions in the Sky coming through Blake's airport express. I can't remember much of what we talked about (you know how it goes), but I do remember her saying something about how she respects how I love God, even though she doesn't share the same convictions. She and I are in different in that I find myself chained to the need to be plugged into something--or, rather, Someone--bigger than me, the compulsion to be part of something greater than me, something that doesn't hinge on my success and failures. Some would call this a sort of weakness; it's a common insult by the New Atheists, that those who find a need for God are weaker than those who don't (how they measure strength and weakness, who can say?). If I were Calvinist, I'd attribute this irrefutable need to my own election. I'm not Calvinist, though, and I take a more... what's the word... physiological approach (and, yes, I know that's not the right word, but I'm running with it). Doctors Meyers and Briggs told me, multiple times and on multiple occasions, that I'm an INFP koala. INFP koalas, such as myself, are driven to find meaning and purpose in life, a primary obsession. Regardless as to the origin of this drive, it's there nonetheless, an integral part of who I am, something that cannot be denied, explained away, or marginalized, except to the detriment of my person.
~ faith ~
As an innate facet of who I am, faith is something to which I must pay attention. I don't count this as the universal human experience (or even a general one), but when I go without nourishing my faith, life turns sour and empty. Perhaps once you've tasted and seen that the Lord is good, any journey away from that reveals precisely why the Lord tastes so great. A life lived in rhythm with God and plugged into his kingdom is a life characterized by such things as peace, joy, love, and hope. Sure, the facade may not change that much (a life with God doesn't bring about Health & Wealth), but there's a stark difference in the experience of it, and even a sharper difference in how you turn out at the end. In my experience, a life absent God breeds nothing but despair, hopelessness, emptiness and futility. That "quiet desperation" Thoreau's so damned keen on. Any question of what I want my life to look like has my faith, and its implications, front-&-center. When I envision my life five down years the road (as optimistically as possible), I'm known as a man of prayer, a confident and crazy religious nut-job who's nonetheless nicer and more loving and hilarious than sane people. I imagine a spiritual relationship with my wife, raising my children well, being involved in a church and perhaps leading a small group, nourishing the faith of my family as the head of the household. As much as I say I want a family one day, it's so very important to me that my future family share my beliefs and convictions. I can't imagine a future family absent that, and that's the reason that I only date Christian chicks. See, I'm not THAT desperate!
The lesson I've been learning the past two years, and written about so much on this blog and in countless moleskin journals now shoved into my desk, is that my faith isn't connected to a career in ministry. Freed from the chains of professional ministry, the bonds of spirituality as a career, I've found that my love for God, my desire to please and honor him, has intensified. For so long I measured my worth as a Christian against the measuring stick of my involvement (or lack thereof) in ministry. The realization that I didn't have to go into professional ministry felt like an anvil being lifted off my shoulders. I was able to breathe better, and I felt a new passion for God flowing through my veins. It was no longer about performance but about life, and that opened up so many windows in my own spirituality. Not that I feel repulsed by the idea of ministry, or that I don't like the idea of it. As I wrote above, I still desire to participate in Christian community and even teaching, just not on a "professional," career-oriented scale.
A lot went into my struggle with Christianity last year, not least the wrestling with vocation. I'm still teasing dark motivations and doubts from my heart, but the wrestling and struggling, the confronting of my biggest doubts head-on and without restraint, brought more questions to the surface than there were before; but I didn't give up, kept striving to determine whether or not my faith was justifiable, and at the end of it, I came out far more confident in God's existence and in the justifiability of the Christian worldview. The whole process, painful and scary, brought me to a more reverent and humble faith in God and in my insignificant place in the cosmos, and this has had a profound effect on the way I view my own spirituality, my own practice of conformity to Christ.
Because my spirituality isn't bound up in my career, but in WHO I AM, a creature redeemed and standing before God as a new creation, made new, no longer condemned but righteous and holy and secure in that position, the fear of failing God, of not being good enough, is wiped away. I don't have to strive to make the cut: I've already made it, I'm already part of the team, and no matter how good or awful I do on the court, I'm still a member of the team and the captain loves me too much to kick me off. I'm sorry that analogy went so far, but the point is that there's freedom to pursue God when the pursuit of being accepted by God is shown up as foolishness. God's desire for me, as part of the team, isn't so much bound into what position I play but the kind of player I am. What matters is that I conform to the image of Christ, that I strive for what Christ was, a genuine human being in every shape and fashion. Pursuing Christ-likeness isn't about rifling through the gospels and trying to do what Jesus would do; it's about understanding who Christ is, the perfect human being, and striving after genuine humaneness by aid of the Spirit. This is what God wants from me: my love and devotion, my fitting into the new skin of his new creation called me. And though my love for him, my devotion to him, and my commitment to Christ-likeness may waver, that's ok: I'm not kicked off the team. Players don't get kicked off teams when they get stuck in a rut or have a few awful games.
The focus is on who I am, not what I do, so that at the end of it all, if I die absent of any of my dreams and ambitions, I may at least be known as a man after God's own heart (who could all but armwrestle King David for biggest fuck-ups). Shining the light on what God wants to do in me rather than through me opens up a whole new scope of spirituality for me: when my faith hinged upon what I was doing, how I was advancing, now it's hinged upon who I am and coming to terms with that in every aspect of my being. I'm able to pursue my dreams and ambitions rather than constricting myself to a sort of postmodern self-flagellation wherein I do nothing and pursue nothing unless it has a giant cross stitched into the fabric. I'm able to take the exhortation from Ecclesiastes, "Live life and honor God," and find joy in it. This spirituality isn't complex nor complicated, a spirituality nourished by scripture, prayer, and Christian community.
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