Stumbling Toward God?

(Before you begin, here is something old that I never finished.)

It used to be my job to find places for various things. One day, I was looking for a place to store some block-and-tackles. I realized that an ideal spot would be to hang them on a nearby wall, so in order to confirm this proposition, I placed them exactly where I thought they should go. I watched in disappointment as they dropped in a heap on the floor. An onlooker said that at that moment, he lost all faith in “faith.” For there were no hooks of any kind on this wall. I had simply placed them up against the wall and let go, hoping that they would defy gravity of their own accord. My friend claims never before to have seen anyone act with so much confidence in something that so obviously was not true.

As the preacher says, it is not faith that saves you, but faith in the truth.

There is far too much in the world for anyone to take it all in. We have no choice but to be selective. We filter, and thus create our own individual “realities.” I get that. But I still contend that there is a greater reality outside of each of our individual realities. I “believe” that there is universal truth that effects all of us, whether we choose to believe it or not. If “truth” and “reality” are only in our heads, then no one would ever get in a car accident. Or, as one speaker put it, “Truth is what you believe. Reality is what you run into when you’re wrong.”

Some of my readers seem to suggest that I would do well to find my own place in the world, and then find a concept of god that suits me. I reject this outright. If I was simply looking for a “god” as a way to make me feel better, I like to think that I might look for something that actually made me feel better.

I want to know if there is a god that exists outside of my reality and outside of your reality. A god that simply IS, not subject to individual perception or perspective. Is such a thing possible? I do not know, but it seems reasonable to assume that if God exists, and that if He was willing and capable of revealing Himself to mankind in a way that they could comprehend, then He would have done so by now. That if the truth about God can be known, then someone already knows it. I happen to think that such issues of whether or not I actually LIKE God, or whether or not I think that He likes me, are fairly irrelevant to the question of His existence.

Nobody else here, baby.
No one here to blame.
No one to point the finger,
It's just you and me,
And the rain.

[Soulless, soul down
By your door]
--U2

I was going to change the title of the blog this weekend. In fact, I nearly stormed out of my church group meeting on Sunday night in order to do so. That title just does not not seem honest anymore. However, to my recollection, I have only “stormed” three times in my adult life, and this occasion did not quite qualify. I would hate to expend all that energy for a group of people whom I doubt would have understood the point anyway. And once again, why does everything always have to be about me?

That’s right, I am so utterly indecisive that I literally have to weigh the pros and cons before I can even lose my temper. (If you think that I am being facetious, there are witnesses who could confirm this.)

Anyway, I have not thought of better title yet.

I think that God is a real prick.
I would feel a bit better if I could say that God was an imaginary prick, but there’s nothing for it.

Last week, I went to a talk given by Lee Strobel, a very well known Christian apologist. Lee Strobel also claims to have been an atheist for thirty years. He said a great many interesting things, but the one that has stuck with me the most is when he stated that Christians have an unfair advantage in debate, because “The truth is on our side.”

Atheists obviously do not like Lee Strobel. Initially this troubled me. “How can you not like him?” I ask to the imaginary group of atheists. “He was one of you!” But that assertion is down right idiotic. He is obviously not an atheist.

So I have to wonder, what makes a guy like this tick? After thirty years of atheism, how can he stand there and so openly declare that Christians have truth on their side? How is he not haunted by the doubts and struggles that I battle daily? Perhaps he was not really an atheist. Could he just be saying that to try to add what hip hop would call “street cred” to his message? Maybe he was really just casually indifferent for awhile, and not a real hard core disbelieving skeptic.

That could be, but still it does not seem to get to the real core of the matter. At some point, it came up that his wife was a Christian first. AHA! Now this is significant. I think many, if not all of you would agree that the rules guiding a man’s life change when there is a woman involved. reason and rationality are usually the first to go.

So I can not help but to question, if this man became a Christian because of his wife, can that really be considered a legitimate conversion?

does that count?

I went to a party tonight. It was an entertaining time, for most of it. As things were winding down and a lot of people had left, two people were engaged in a deep theological discussion off to themselves. I was somewhat participating in another activity with far less cosmic significance. Perhaps I don’t need to say, I was deeply envious of those other two. But it definately did not seem like the sort of conversation that was open to a third party stumbling in late. I went away sad.

Why can’t I ever get involved in deep theological disscusion? I mean seriously, what is it that is stopping me? I honestly do not know why I can’t; all I know is that it doesn’t happen. Back when I was going to a new church every week, one thing that I really desired was to have someone to go to lunch with afterwards and discuss the sermon. Now I go to lunch with a group nearly every week after church, but most weeks I think that I would be hard pressed to even recall the title of the sermon by the time we get to the restaurant. Where did it all go wrong?

Or perhaps a more pressing question, why do I have to get depressed over every single event of every day? Why can’t I ever be thankful, content, joyful, about anything? Ever? All I do is complain about the same crap over and over. Who’s fault is any of this but my own? Why don’t I just shut up and start taking some action? I am so sick of me.

I’m sorry about the attitude
I need to give when I’m with you
But no one else would take this shit from me
I’m so terrified of no one else but me
I’m here all the time
I won’t go away

Yeah, it’s me.
But I can’t get myself to go away
It’s me, but I can’t get myself to go away
Oh God, I shouldn’t feel this way
–Matchbox 20

On another level, I recognize that this has happened before, when God has said to me, “You know that thing that you want more than anything? Not only am I not going to give it to you, but I’m going to give it to someone else, right in front of you. Whatcha gonna do about that?”

I’ve been here before. I know how this ends. I just hope that I learned something last time.

For number (2) in my last post, I considered putting in something about how I know from personal experience that you can not come to God on your own terms, but it just did not seem not seem to fit the flow of that passage.
It is, however, entirely true. I have been trying to find God on my own terms for going on three years now. I have never once gone to church with any intention of worshiping God… not even when I was on the, ahem, worship team. (That’s a christian euphemism for “the band”.) I only went to church to learn; and I have learned and learned but nothing has come of it.

It would be meaningless to call my own post “thought provoking,” for clearly I was thinking about this topic already. But I have been thinking about it a lot more since then, and I finally realized how I am like that rich young man. I know what my issue is; what it is that I can not give up, what I will not give up, what I do not think that I should have to give up…

I never heard Jesus say, “Follow me.” On the contrary, I thought that God was essentially telling me, “Whatever you do, don’t come this way.” But I was so intrigued by the idea that there would actually be a god telling me anything at all, and I was determined to go that way, whatever it took. Well, almost whatever. There is that one thing, that deep down I have really wanted all along, that was more important to me than God- that I actually thought I could get to through God…

There it is… my “great wealth.” So what now? Do I just go away sad?

For awhile now I have had the picture in my head, of me stumbling on my own, and every time I fall down, God is standing back with arms crossed asking, “Are you done yet?” But suddenly I shout, “No!” and jump back up and start off in my own direction again. And God just patiently says, “Well, okay…”

From that analogy, it seems clear that I just need to learn to stay down, and let God come help me up. I need to put my faith in God, abide in Christ, make Him the Lord of my life, and so on… But while that works in analogy, what does it really mean? What does ANY of that mean? If I decide to entirely trust God with my schoolwork, and therefore I stop going to class, stop doing homework, stop taking tests and finals, because God has it all under control… I just don’t think that that would work out. Clearly I need to do something. But every time I pick a new direction thinking that it is of God, I just fall flat on my face again and realize, “Nope, not God. That was just me again.”

I am tired of this.

Three incidents:

1) A fellow named D. James Kennedy has a radio show on the Christian station that I listen to occasionally. The station will also play 90 second “Kennedy Commentary” segments in between other shows. One of these a couple of weeks ago began with the announcer asking, “Why did Jesus preach the sermon on the mount?” I fully expected Dr. Kennedy to say something to the effect that the sermon was to expose the sins of the world, to convict people, show us all the need for a savior, etc, etc. He basically said that this was the standard by which we will all be judged and we will one day be called to give an account of whether or not we lived by it. I was left thinking, “AND…?” Ah, but there was more: apparently we can share this fact with our unbelieving friends! You sir, clearly do not have any unbelieving friends.

2) I do not recall now exactly how I got to thinking of it, perhaps it was again something on the radio, but I was thinking of the story of the rich young man who comes to Jesus asking what he must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus tells him that he must follow all the commandments. When the man claims that he has followed them his whole life, Jesus responds, “One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” Then we are told that the man went away sad, because he was very rich, and Jesus went on to tell his disciples, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
On the surface, it seems obvious that Jesus is against wealth. I would further suggest that when the Lord and Creator of the Universe decided to come to earth in human form and chose to be born in a bleedin’ stable, in a feeding trough, then this is clearly not a guy who has a lot of interest in wealth and worldly comfort.
But as we all know, Christian = Republican = pro-wealth, so clearly there must be another explanation. I have heard several commentaries stating that it was not specifically that he was rich that was the problem, it was simply that his wealth was more important to him than following Christ. I do agree with that interpretation as far as it goes, but on this particular day, I realized that one can go deeper still. For around this time in the Bible, Jesus is walking around pointing to seemingly random people and saying, “Follow me.” But here was a guy who wanted to follow Jesus but could not. The difference I see is that while other people were being called upon, this guy was trying to come to Jesus on his own. It does not matter that he had followed all of the commandments (if indeed he had) nor that he was rich. The point is that no matter what you do, there will always be something more between you and God. “Then who can be saved?” asked the disciples. Jesus replied, “With people it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God.”

3)In church last Sunday, the orchestra played an instrumental version of As the Deer Panteth for the Water, while the main screen displayed something like:
Psalm 42:
1 As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?

Curious, I turned to Psalm 42 in my Bible. All I can say is that I feel that they SERIOUSLY cheapened that Psalm by only quoting the first two verses. My church does not deserve the blame for this however. Not being raised in an environment where I had much exposure to traditional Hymns, I had to look up the lyrics to that song when I got home. I think that it was really the author of this song, Martin Nystrom, who took all of the punch out of the original Psalm.
We can not really blame him either though, because this is a problem that runs throughout both worship and popular Christian music. This unabashed praise, as if nothing bad has ever happened to you; I can not speak for anyone else, but that kind of thing really turns me off. The thing is, I simply do not believe it. I do not believe that you have never had any doubts and struggles with God, and if you try to suggest otherwise, or pretend that none of that matters, then I ultimately just feel that you are being deceitful, and I reject that as a form of worship.
So, dear readers, let’s have Psalm 42 in its entirety, and I ask you, is this honoring to God? Would you dare to sing this in church?
As the deer pants for the water brooks,
So my soul pants for You, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God;
When shall I come and appear before God?
My tears have been my food day and night,
While they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
These things I remember and I pour out my soul within me
For I used to go along with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God,
With the voice of joy and thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.
Why are you in despair, O my soul?
And why have you become disturbed within me?
Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him
For the help of His presence.
O my God, my soul is in despair within me;
Therefore I remember You from the land of the Jordan
And the peaks of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.
Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls;
All Your breakers and Your waves have rolled over me.
The LORD will command His lovingkindness in the daytime;
And His song will be with me in the night,
A prayer to the God of my life.
I will say to God my rock, “Why have You forgotten me?
Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?”
As a shattering of my bones, my adversaries revile me,
While they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
Why are you in despair, O my soul?
And why have you become disturbed within me?
Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him,
The help of my countenance and my God.

So, am I wrong? Who am I anyway? It seems the very height of arrogance to even suggest that I might have a better understanding of the Bible than people who have been studying it longer than I have even been alive.

While my dad was visiting California several months ago, he made the observation that the church had become my community. It was an innocent enough observation, but it troubled me greatly. I did not initially go to the church in search of community, I was looking for truth. Yet I realized that he was absolutely right, I still had not found truth, but I had grow (relatively) comfortable in my community. For that reason, I seriously considered leaving that church and that community to start over somewhere else. I decided against it at that time, mainly because I recognized that there was just a little too much “I’ll show him,” and not enough honest searching in my motivation.

A month or two later, there was great concern over the diminishing attendance in our Sunday night group, and they began a series of meetings to discuss the future direction of the ministry. After the first of these, it suddenly seemed as though I would not even need to make the decision to leave, for they were throwing out everything I came for anyway. Of course, by that point, I was considering leaving, not to go a different church, but simply to go away.

As I said, there were a series of meetings. Over the course of these, different opinions were expressed, and it was eventually decided that the Sunday night meetings would take on a variable format with different people responsible for one evening a month. It was further decided that this new format would launch the Sunday following the Superbowl, with the first session being a discussion group led by… me. That’s right, me.

Now just try to tell me that God does not have a sense of humor. This is exactly the kind of crap that made me believe in God in the first place. Honestly, though- how would you like to walk in to a church on a Sunday evening, bright eyed, Bible in hand and ready to be fed the word of God, only to find me in charge? Me, who wouldn’t know Jesus if He spit on the ground and rubbed mud in my eyes? What were they thinking? Desperate times all around, I suppose.

Well, if you’ve done the math, you may have figured out that the first Sunday after the Superbowl was last weekend. So what in the world did I talk about? Why… U2 of course… what else?

I mentioned rather in passing that I saw a movie about God last week. It was called End of the Spear. I do not know how much press this is getting and whether or not to expect that any of you have heard of it. Without saying too much, this movie was about missionaries to an indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and if you did not know going in that the story was true, you would never believe it. At least, I would not have.

It is so easily to believe that God exists while sitting in church, or reading the Bible. So easy to go into that “world” where God is real… and then walk back out again when you are finished. God is in there, he’s not out here with us in the real world. Not really. So what are these people doing? God really did that? Out here? HOW? I find that thinking about this movie is like staring at the sun; I just can’t bare to do it for very long.

I am not merely saying that this movie is true simply because it states, “From a true story,” at the beginning. Who knows what that “from” might mean? I know that it is true because I have heard this story before. The headquarters of the missionary organization depicted in this film is located in my home town. I know several people who work there. This is not just something that happened to some people sometime in history; this story is true in the sense that it actually intersects my own life, albeit through several degrees of separation.

For my believing friends, who may not understand the difficulty in facing this, I would say that it’s something like reading …oh let’s say… 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, and you really just would rather turn the page and not think about it. [Maybe you are fine with those verses, but I’m sure there is a passage in there somewhere that you feel that way about, please don’t miss my point on a tangent.]

In another interesting moment this weekend, I was thinking through a certain issue- rationally, logically, empirically- and when I finally reached a conclusion, it suddenly occurred to me, “But that’s what the Bible says!” And in that moment, I felt as though my eyes were open. I did not quite understand what I was looking at, just blurry shapes and colors, but, perhaps for the first time, it was light.

I know what some of you are thinking. Wrestling demons? Seeing light? Raise your hand if you think I’m losing my mind… again. Or maybe you just wonder how few meals I had last week.

As I was piecing together this post in my head, I caught upon the U2 song with the title Staring at the Sun. I actually learned how to play that song once upon a time. I always just considered it a light-hearted summertime song… nothing to do with what I am talking about here. But I pulled out the music for it to refresh my memory and was reading through the lyrics, and suddenly, “Jesus! This is exactly what I’m talking about!” Who knew? Now don’t worry, I won’t subject you to another craptacular cover version, just go find it yourself if you are interested.

If my posts have been a little down lately, it’s because I have been wrestling with demons all week. Imagine the things that I DIDN’T feel like sharing. Or maybe you shouldn’t.

Last night, I honestly believed that God broke my computer in order to teach me a lesson. (Not a lesson related to the computer, that just happened to be the last in a series of things to really drive the point home.) I have to admit, that seems more than just a little silly today. Today I took my computer over to a friend who was able to diagnose the problem in under two minutes. That left an hour or so before we joined some others to see a movie about the grace of God, followed by a nice late night breakfast. It was the most peace I have had all week.

Then as soon as I came home, it was straight back to the darkness. I mean I was literally still sitting in the car with the garage door open not even wanting to move. Does fellowship really have that dramatic of an effect on my mood? …Or is it something worse? Maybe the reason I was not wrestling with demons while at someone else’s house was simply because there aren’t any demons in that house… but there are in mine. Meaning, of course, that demons would have to be actual real beings that occupy a specific location.

This is not something that I want to be true.