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.