curiosity and color

The funny thing about calling into question the accepted understanding of a tertiary issue (as I have done over the last year or so, regarding the status of women in Christian spaces) is that you find out how many people actually hold it as a secondary doctrine—or even almost primary. Not because they really believe that what I think about the “role” of women in churches and marriages has any bearing on my standing before God (I don’t think?), but because our whole culture currently runs on extremes, and we generally don’t know how to handle the idea that gray area or other interpretations exist. Especially as it regards things of God and the Bible.

Of all things, surely these, at least, must be black-and-white.

Right?

I certainly used to think so. But the more time I’ve spent poring over the pages of the Bible and listening to the Spirit that brings them to life, the less I’ve been able to retain that monochrome worldview. Do we really think that the nature of God and His glorious design for Creation and humanity and the kingdom of heaven can be described without a full scope of color and light? Ezekiel tried to tell us what it was like to witness just one brief vision of God’s glory, and the passage is bursting with color:

Something like a throne with the appearance of lapis lazuli was above the expanse over their heads. On the throne, high above, was someone who looked like a human. From what seemed to be his waist up, I saw a gleam like amber, with what looked like fire enclosing it all around. From what seemed to be his waist down, I also saw what looked like fire. There was a brilliant light all around him. The appearance of the brilliant light all around was like that of a rainbow in a cloud on a rainy day. This was the appearance of the likeness of the Lord’s glory. When I saw it, I fell facedown and heard a voice speaking.

Ezekiel 1:26-28

It gives me pause to recall how much of my life I’ve spent limiting how God is “allowed” to act in my life, in the church, or in the world. We build our tidy sets of theological walls, made from little rows of black words on a white page, to contain our gods—proof-texting and cherry-picking and forgetting altogether that the true God operates in another dimension, where our comfortable boundaries are meaningless.

In that realm, color and creativity and living water flood out from every crevice. Curiosity is rewarded with wonder. Ask, and receive—seek, and find. The Father God reveals His heart. The Savior Jesus wins our access. The Holy Spirit beckons us in.

It’s a new and better Eden, lush with the Creator’s life-giving presence and heart-changing glory. He is abundant, and abundantly generous, giving us Himself.

God forbid we wait around to die instead of taking hold of the victory and living like citizens of that kingdom now! Abiding in the nurture of God’s heart is for today. Abiding in the triumph of Christ’s defeat of sin and death is for today. Abiding in the tranquility of the Spirit’s voice is for today.

We’ve met the true God. Can we stop trying to shrink Him down into the form of a golden calf?

We’ve been set free, made new by grace. Can we actually shake off our chains and stop fearing what it means to live without the tutelage of the law?

We’ve been adopted as daughters and sons into the Royal Family! Can we please stop acting like we’re still banished and cursed?

I know that we haven’t entered the full reality of Christ’s victory yet. But that seems like a poor excuse to actively choose a life characterized by defeat or narrow-mindedness. The Spirit of God—who raised Jesus from the dead!—lives in us. Hallelujah!

Let’s wonder at these truths, and fear not our wondering, because if God is good and holy, He will reveal His goodness and holiness in response to our honest curiosity. And then, even here on earth, we might get to see hints of heaven’s glorious color.

mad, but

One of my favorite retellings of the Cinderella story is the 1998 Drew Barrymore film Ever After. It’s the source of many of the random quotes and sayings I use in my everyday life, but one line of Prince Henry’s has always struck a particular chord with me:

“I used to think that if I cared about anything, I’d have to care about everything, and I’d go stark-raving mad. But! Now I’ve found my purpose.”

I exist in the middle of that quote—somewhere between the word “mad” and the word “but.” One of the hardest things about writing (essentially, publicly journaling) for the last 14+ years has been the pressure I constantly feel to cover everything, to respond to everything, to consider everything. Whether I’m writing about a lightbulb moment I’ve had regarding God’s purpose for the church, a line-by-line study of a chapter of the Bible, or a meandering musing inspired by some little snippet of my life, it’s easy to feel like I’m wasting my time if I can’t head off every potential argument or acknowledge every possible perspective.

And it does, indeed, make me feel stark-raving mad.

It reminds me of something I heard another writer I admire say in an interview recently: “You have to be willing to disappoint your biggest fans, or else you’ll become a caricature.” This, to me, intersects with the Ever After quote right at the end—in the words “my purpose.”

My purpose.

What I’m learning, painfully slowly, is that I’m an individual. I’m small. I’m one person living one life in one comparatively tiny radius on the earth. When I write, I can only write what God is showing me. I can only show you how He’s shaping me. Inevitably, my limits will disappoint you eventually.

I can’t speak for every person or cover every experience. Even on topics in which I’m well-versed, I can’t address every point or counterpoint. There just isn’t enough of me.

I love that there are so many people who support my writing and enjoy reading my work. It’s a humbling and, at times, terrifying realization. What a gift it is to be able to write anything at all that somebody else out there might glean a grain of truth or insight from.

And, with all the love in the world, I confess: I don’t write for “fans.” I write because this is how I learn, and I’m learning to follow God’s Spirit and listen to His voice. I’m learning to let Him define my purpose, and that it’s okay if my calling doesn’t resonate with yours.

I know how hard it is, when you enjoy someone’s work or admire their gifts, to keep a separate sense of self from them—so that when they change their mind on something, it’s okay if you don’t; or when God is revealing something to them, it’s not a commentary on what He’s revealing to you. We tend to admire people we identify with or aspire to be like, and it can feel personal when they go in a direction that we can’t or won’t—but it isn’t.

You can still learn from those you don’t perfectly align with. I can still love those I don’t agree with. We can still be enriched by those whose lives are in a very different place from ours. And because we are all just individuals, with our small and limited perspectives, we need that diversity of thought in our lives. To know anything doesn’t mean we have to know everything.

There is only One who is omniscient. There is only One who has it all right. As Rich Mullins once said (oft-quoted by my mom and dad), “We were given the Scriptures to humble us into realizing that God is right, and the rest of us are just guessing.”

the beginning and the end

My studies over the last few weeks and months have had me turning over the idea of “the beginning and the end” in a variety of ways. This is a familiar phrase from a few different Biblical passages, perhaps most famously the Book of Revelation, when Jesus claims this title for Himself:

“Behold, I am coming soon, and My reward is with Me, to give to each one according to what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”

Revelation 22:12-13

Interestingly, the last couple chapters of Revelation act as a mirrored bookend with Genesis 1-2—the beginning and the end of the story. They match, and they tell us so much about what comes in between. Genesis begins a conversation about who God is and how He intended Creation to work; Revelation then offers the final say on who God is and how He intends the New Creation to work. The middle is … messy, full of questions and contradictions and moments of uncertainty, where we watch humanity fail to carry out God’s intentions again and again.

It has me thinking about how we view the Bible generally: As the beginning of the conversation, or the end?

Most of the time, I’ve noticed, we use it as the end. To doubters, we hand verses. To questioners, we respond with verses. To people who would ask us to see something in shades of gray rather than black-and-white, we give verses.

We effortlessly throw verses at anyone who disagrees with us, makes us uncomfortable, or asks us to think about a different possibility—and not because we want to open the floor for discussion or better understanding, but to silence debate, stay in our comfort zones, and have the last word. The Bible becomes a clumsy battering club in our denominational disputes and culture wars, leaving little space for it to act as the precise, soul-piercing blade of the Spirit it claims to be.

And the more time I spend with the Bible, the less convinced I am that we are “accurately handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15) when we use it in this way.

One of the things I love and hate about being a lifelong believer who grew up in church is that I “know” all the answers—the church answers, that is. This is helpful when it comes to constructing and corroborating doctrine, or avoiding blatant heresies, but it’s much less so when all those clean and pat church answers cloud my ability to recognize the complex and uncomfortable questions God is actually asking.

In other words—I’m well-trained in using the Bible as an end. But what about learning to let it be the beginning?

What happens when we let the Bible speak on its own terms, unfettered by our pre-determined bounds of doctrine? What happens when we let God tell us who He is, uncontained by our neat boxes of divine attributes? What would we learn about who He is, what He is doing, and how He wants us to reflect Him if we stopped trying to tell Him—and everyone else—who He is allowed to be and what He is allowed to ask of us?

Of course, I know there is a vitally important place for right doctrine. It matters that we relate to Yahweh rightly, and we know a lot about how to do that (and how not to do it) from the Scriptures. But an honest reading of the Bible won’t let us hold our “right answers” very tightly. It will challenge them and question them and throw them into turmoil at nearly every turn. It will demand of us to think and feel and undo and rebuild. It will constantly force our conversation-ending verse-wielding back into a place of humility and uncertainty, where there is room for an incomprehensible God and His creative work.

The Bible is an end: It has the authority to define God and tell us His story. It has the true answers we are looking for. But if that’s all it is—if the conversation has no beginning—then we will miss the messy riches of the middle, the parts where we have to wrestle with God and leave marked by the encounter to receive the blessing. We miss the questions it would ask of us. We miss the lifelong journey of discovery and delight it promises, because we were too mired down in making sure we “knew it all.”

I’m noticing that the more I learn, the less I know. As God increases in my perception, I decrease. Every new discovery or epiphany simply expands the universe of what I don’t understand. With every answer comes a thousand more questions.

This, I think, is as it should be.