Beliefs like Jenga

We build too many walls and not enough bridges.

-Isaac Newton

You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.

- Jeremiah 29:12-14 

 
What are your toughest questions? The questions that grind on you, that gum up the works, ceaselessly irk the iron of your mind, the nagging thoughts which buoy you up in the depths of God's grace, the paved parts of your heart that stymie growth.

I believe there are answers, solutions, frameworks, theologies out there that will help answer and, sometimes more importantly, identify these questions that end up holding us back from delving deeper. But, at the same time, are the answers themselves what allow us to dive deeper with God?   Will they free us up to get to know Him as He truly is to us?  Will the answers unplug our ears and allow us to hear our Shepard’s voice?

The problem isn't in finding answers; there are millions of answers out there to suit whatever you want to hear.  The problem is in identifying the problem. Hearing the rattle in the engine and feeling it plod along the freeway is easy. Pulling the engine apart and finding the bent push rod is the difficult part.

When I first started being discipled, I had no questions. I knew there was something holding me back from diving deeper with God, yet had no idea what it was.  I had agreed to meet with Bernie, my mentor, and placed myself across the table from this man for a reason.  But I had nowhere to begin. Bernie and I met every week. We talked. He assigned homework, readings, booklets and writings and I completed them all to the best of my ability. And then we met again go over what I had completed and do it all over again.

It went like that for months. Months of reading, talking, homework, figuring out what I believed why I believed it, and how I could back it up with reason, answers, verses, philosophies, dogmas, boyhood experiences and general feelings. I thought he was just poking and prodding around in me identify and isolate the problems. I felt like he was doctor trying to complete a MRI from the outside of the body with nothing more than a stick and a notepad.  He wasn't.

What he was doing was showing me the wall of beliefs I had carefully constructed around my relationship with God.  The more we met and talked, the more he would gently push the blocks to see which ones were loose.  If he found a loose block, he would push, pull and slide the weak piece it out of the wall.  He never replaced any of the blocks; he pulled out weak information and left the void.  Eventually, all of the missing blocks left my conception and perception of God feeling weak and rickety. The slightest shift in the spiritual wind and my wall of beliefs would move to and fro as a palm tree in a hurricane. I could feel that I was no longer "sure" in my specific beliefs about God.  My belief in God never wavered, it was my specific view points that were carefully constructed
I stayed in that weakened state for a couple weeks as we continued to talk about God. His Grace. His righteousness. And Who I am in God's eyes. How I communicate and related to a being that created me.

Then, it all fell down.  I sat there. In church. On a Sunday like every Sunday before it and it happened. As I worshiped and sang songs I had sung before, He showed up. With my eyes closed, I saw Him. Standing there. Like I had never seen Him before. As the rest of the congregation filed down the aisles to celebrate communion, I hit the ground on my knees. I celebrated one of my first meetings with Jesus that day. Weeping, sloppering, snot dripping down my face, I was never happier to meet the God that I had searched so hard for and had finally found. Right there in the church. Who knew, He was there all the time?

The wall that I had built surrounded God.  I had imprisoned Him in the beliefs that I had set around Him.  He was trapped and was only allowed to operate in the ways in which I let Him.
I thought my mentor was destroying the wall of my beliefs to build them back up, but what was really happening was something more delicate and deliberate than I could have imagined. He made all of the arguements and assumptions that I had built around God weaker and removed just enough blocks so that God could show Himself through the wall until, ultimately, I tore down what I had built up in order to get to Him.

What have I learned is this: whatever someone can convince you of, someone else can un-convince you. Jesus, God, Christianity are no ideas to give accent to in order to gain the access to Heaven. Christianity is a living relationship with the living God. Once you have been introduced to God, who could unconvince you that who you met was not God? Who would or what could bribe you into forgetting the powerful and meaningful relationship you have with Jesus? Nothing.
That day was a game changer.

No longer did I just think about God, pray to Him, learn systems of thought that I could tightly wrap up with three memorized verses which I could translate into Greek and make sense of in my head and explain to an unbeliever, but I met God. I knew His face, heard His voice, touched His robes. Everyone in the Gospels that meet Jesus are changed. They either go away blessed or jaded, but they do not go away unchanged.

I believe there is an answer for your toughest questions. The answer is not "Jesus" as we were taught in church, but rather the answer is: the heart of God for you. Getting through our walls of beliefs is usually difficult and it demands of you your whole heart.  Meeting God is something that every believer and cultural Christian needs to do.  How is it that we have lived so long without God?  The living God that has input for us everyday, every moment who wishes to be with us, upon us and in us all.

 

Living like a snail in our shell.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world."

- Marianne Williamson

 

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

-Ephesians 2:10

 

In a large conferance room full of people, I found myself lazily looking around the room for someone with their hand raised.  The pastor leading the service had taught us about God's Kingdom, His love for us and His desire to see us whole.  At the end of the teaching, he asked to have people with cancer raise their hands so that the congregation can pray for them.  This was supposed to empower the people listening with boldness and to provide us a safe environment to pray for the sick to see them healed.

 

It isn't that I didn't believe him.  I did believe him.  I did believe that God can, does and will invade this world for our benefit, but I found myself not running to a person with their hand up.  Was I scared?  Was I afraid that I would lay hands on someone and ask God to move and He wouldn't?  Or was I afraid that He would?

 

The world is a messed up place.  You cannot generously give someone on the street corner a $5 bill without thinking that he "will buy booze with it," you cannot help someone load groceries into their car because you think they will think you will steal their stuff, their car or even kidnap them.  The world actively causes us to curl up farther into our shell.  It pushes us into isolation.  It makes us think that the only life you can affect in a positive way is your own.

 

In my shell, I walked around that conference room.  "Oh, that person has 10 people already praying for them, they are good."  Then walking a little farther, circling around the outside of the room because everyone had moved into the middle to find those with their hands raised.  I was actively trying not to find someone.  But, as luck (or God) would have it, someone walked into the door at the back of the room right in front of me. 

 

Don't put your hand up, don't put your hand up...  Boom.  Oh. Man.  His hand goes up.  He was in the bathroom, but had heard the challenge / opportunity to be healed. 

 

I am gregarious, so I started to chat with him about what his name was, where he was from, what he had been diagnoised with, how bad it was, all the while encouraging him to keep his hand up because God is going to need more than the two of our faiths.  Another couple people started to come near, so we (read: I) asked them to join us.  We covered the small talk again with the others, and then we started to pray.

 

I do believe that God is actively seeking opportunity to work through us to change the world.  I do.  I think He interceeds for us on a daily basis and is talking to us in a soft whisper all of the time.  Maybe this is why we have a hard time being in complete silence.  We are unconciously turning up the noise so that we cannot hear the whispers of God. 

 

We hear the less frequent yelling of God alright, but the subtle whispers of daily direction, challenge and opportunity are something we drown out.  Why do we do this?  I believe it is so we do not see the worth of random strangers.  So that we don't have to put ourselves out there when we don't want to be hurt.  We don't have to say the difficult thing, to reign in our daily desires to do what we want, to crawl out of our shells and see the world for what it really is: broken.

 

As we prayed, we pulled together all of our belief that this could happen.  He moved around not feeling much different.  We prayed again.  Nothing seemed to happen.  He thanked us and we all went our seperate ways.  Just then, I heard screaming.  Not bad screaming, but good screaming.  The screaming of "Holy crap that tumor in my neck just disappeared!"

 

God was in the building and we all knew it.  I was suddenly faced with something that I was not prepared to deal with, and yet it was there the whole time.  The fact that this is real.  This can happen.  The concept moved from the "I believe" part of my brain to the "it is" part.  Reality set it and I was faced with one overwhelming fact: what I believe, what I say, what I pray, who I pray for, all matter.  Not just to me, but to the people around me.  The world became very big.  All the world's problems became mine.  In this one moment, I had inherited something that was already mine: the broken world.

 

I believe that this realization is key to every believer's experience.  We need to understand and know that God loves us as much as He loves everyone else.  To the people that don't know Him, He wants us (read: you) to introduce them to Him.  How?  He will tell you, show you, whisper to you how, we just need the ability to hear Him.  Whether it is praying for their broken leg, buying a homeless man breakfast, "reading someone's mail," mowing your neighbor's lawn, rebuking the crazy guy's demons or insulting your local barista by calling them out on their stuff, He will tell you.  All you have to do is realize that the person is in your broken world and you have the power to introduce them to the living God.  The God that saved you from your mess.  The God that heals not only the inside, but the outside as well. 

 

Once you have that realization, you can do one of two things: move forward and grow into a deeper relationship with God or stop where you are, cover your eyes and try to back out of the room you just walked in to.  After you see something, you cannot un-see it.  Once God has revealed it to you, you cannot put the viel back over it.  You have to deal with it, process it, weep over it and then accept it and boldly move on into the Kingdom.

 

When I first realized this, no joke, people on crutches were everywhere.  On the street as I drove by, in front of me in line, on the bus, on my friends.  Seriously, they were everywhere.  I had the overwhelming feeling that all of these people could be healed if I only had the faith and the boldness to step up and pray for them.  To introduce them to the living God.  I felt a responsiblity for them.  They were no longer strangers, but rather opportunities for God to work. 

 

What did I do?  I closed my eyes and tried to back out of the room.

 

I am not proud of it, but that is the truth.  Admittedly, I sat on the sidelines watching my friends go for it on the field.  I watched as others boldly went out and sought every opportunity for the Kingdom to invade others' circumstances.  I saw people healed, delivered, and I saw nothing happen as well.  Amazingly people are blessed that total strangers would interupt their lives with an awkward opportunity for greatness. 

 

I have since embraced the fact that the world is bigger and more messed up that I can imagine, however, I know the One that can fix it.  God took mercy on me.  He took me back to the beginning.  He closed my eyes to the crutches and wheel chairs and leg-less and took pity on me.  We started over. 

 

I have since peaked through my fingers at the world around me.  I have prayed for people and seen nothing happen.  I have also prayed for people and seen something happen.  God is good.  All the time, He is good. 

 

Everyday is a new opportunity to speak into the darkness in the lives of the people around us, to walk in the good works that He prepares for us.  Each moment is pregnent with the possiblity for greatness.  Who knows what will happen next.