As a Christ follower, this might seem
strange or perhaps disappointing for some to hear but I often
struggle with the perspective that some fellow Christ followers have.
Sometimes when I hear them talk about faith it's like they are
saying that just a little faith and they are flying high. Like they
are some sort of firework launched into the stratosphere by simply
believing. As someone who has at various times in my life struggled
with depression, addiction, and physical, spiritual, and relational
brokenness on some very profound levels, I can truly say that I find
it nearly impossible to relate to the viewpoint that some put out of
God as an amazing artist who is painting a beautiful tableau of their
lives or a benevolent deity who wants nothing more than to rain down
amazing, tangible blessings upon them. I am not sure what frustrates
me more, the fact that they think this, or that it still has some
sort of power to affect how I view my own faith or more accurately,
to cause me to doubt it. I still remember conversations with some
who told me their stories of quitting some sort of objectionable
behavior with no difficulty at all, simply by putting their faith in
Christ which seemed amazing and awesome to me. Then came the hammer.
Why can't you do the same thing? Why do you continue to be
depressed, why can't you just quit looking at porn, why can't you
just make better financial decisions, etc...... all I felt at the end
of that conversation was hollow doubt. I work with men, many of whom
are deep in the hold of sexual issues of varying levels of depth
and/or societal acceptance. Sometimes, when I talk to people about
the work I do, they misunderstand and get all excited about telling
me how disgusting they think these men are. Sometimes I will talk
with someone and some sort of controversy of the day will come up,
maybe legalizing marijuana, or homosexuality and they will begin to
share about how repulsive they find those things. In those moments,
I sometimes start to feel somehow superior as I think about how
awesome, I mean thankful, that I am to be able to love anybody, no
matter what. Then I realize that I'm not really loving. I'm proud
and I'm small and vindictive and I'm back to hollow doubt
.
Most of the time, if I feel any sort of
artistic element to my faith, it's the feeling that I'm a broken tile
that somehow gets pieced together with other broken pieces into a
mosaic. I'm always in awe when I see one of those. All these
individual shards of pottery and glass, rescued from the trash, and
pieced carefully together, creating absolute beauty from ruin. This
I can relate to. And here is the way I have come to understand faith
and the various expressions of it. The shiny, ecstatic,
enthusiastic, judgmental, addicted, depressed, angry, proud Christ
followers, are all broken. We are all broken. We may not all know
or understand it. Some of us may choose to deny or ignore it, but we
are. We are all broken, dusty, shards that an artist is piecing
together into something so beautiful, we can't really even imagine
it. And it wouldn't be the same without any of us.
