There is a common myth that Christianity tells you that if you just believe, all your problems go away. Another equally adhered to myth is that "God helps those who help themselves." The first is blatantly absurd due to all those who suffer and the latter makes God pointless because He doesn't do jack. Both are reviled by their opponents and both are boring philosophies. Clearly God wants what is best for us because we desire what is best for us and clearly a relationship is more than getting a bunch of useless junk.
However, there are times when we just don't feel it. Bills come due, our jobs feel monotonous at best, and we come to the realization that we have to wait for things we really want. The grinding suffering of life carries with it another problem, we cannot tell anyone about it because other people suffer in such excruciating ways that far exceed mere ennui. I know of a girl who is suffering from cancer, I know people who witnessed the devastation in Haiti, and I know of one friend stuck in loveless marriage. In the end, my problems seem so insignificant.
And yet they are not insignificant to me. Like wave after wave of unfulfilled hopes and unrealized joys, the spirit finds itself constantly attacked. And we have to admit, what is so hard to admit, that we cannot really speak of our problems. It isn't so much that we are afraid to sound like whiners or ungrateful people, we just don't see what it will accomplish. The problems we have are the constant ones that hang over our entirely lives.
And perhaps that is the reason for belief. I don't believe in some sugar-candy-mountain. Truth be told I don't think of heaven all that much. I believe that for the longest time of suffering and anguish, the people who have gotten the answer best are found in the Old and New Testaments. These are people who suffered everything from hostile-take-over to the long dark night of the soul. The religious books of the Greeks and Romans aren't this honest, while the books of the other religions are offering ways out and transcendence as if anyone can transcend their problems. I don't want to be free of the universe that I was born into any more than I want this to be all there is. Accept, reject, transcend, digress, live life to the fullest; these are empty promises of a world that wants to drown out the pain with innumerable opiates or liquors. At the end of the day whether we are on pain killers or not, we are still dead. The Prophets knew this. What was it that made them still worship? What was it that made them still believe when they had God come right out and say, "You are going to suffer"?
I suppose I want to know that. I want to know what makes a person tick like that. Perhaps the funniest thing is that most of us today lump all religions together. But Christianity, right down to its Hebraic roots, is utter madness. The answer it gives isn't "do this," its "believe;" and that is what the world finds the most unbelievable despite all the evidence that it seems to be the most correct answer. We don't cure cancer by doing something, but we do something because we have belief that we can accomplish something. I believe in God not because I will be free of my suffering or because everyone else is doing it, I believe in God because life is pretty nice with a bunch of crap along the way and to be perfectly honest its nice when Someone just listens.
I don't write this with any belief that this will "win" anyone to Christ. I write this to say, I'm still standing. I wish there were some other way or path or logical system. There isn't. God is God. Life doesn't work our way. That's the answer. In that way, Christians are far from close-minded, but rather open-eyed. We're done looking for systems or the sweet by and by, we just want to live life in good times and bad times.
1 comment:
Good, thoughtful post, Phil!
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