on -ologies

I didn’t always know I wanted to be a parent. In fact, for the first 25 years of my life, I didn’t want to be a parent, and I felt some shame about that as a young Christian wife. I jokingly credit my change of heart at age 25 to the good old-fashioned biological clock, but maybe there was a nudge of the Holy Spirit in it as well, because it turns out that having kids has changed my life (shocker!).

I probably say to myself at least once a day, “I can’t do this.” And I truly was not built for it. I’m extremely auditory-sensitive and my children are both very loud. Clara barely stops talking to take a breath from sunup to sundown, and Jane communicates each of her feelings in a different pitch of yell or shriek. My nervous system gets a workout every single day.

They don’t know it, but it’s through my two daughters that I have also found sanctuary for my soul—internal, quiet, rest.

How? Because they have shown me who God is.

All the years that I spent reading and studying the Scriptures before I had children were good and edifying, but all that propositional knowledge merely laid the foundation for finally experiencing what is true. In parenthood, I get the palest glimpse into the reality of God as a father who lavishes love on His children and a mother who gathers her chicks under her wings. The Gospel is no longer a one-dimensional story about how I can “get out of hell free”—it’s the good news of victory, that the Creator of heaven and earth has resoundingly defeated sin and death so that both realms can be united again as His kingdom and I can be part of it, because—what is this miracle?!—He wants me there.

I have met God the Rescuer, and He is good.

I have met God the Redeemer, and He is good.

I have met God the Nurturer, and He is good.

I have met the King, and to my amazement, He’s not a control freak. He’s not obsessed with punishment, retribution, or how my behavior reflects on Him. He is the Prince of Peace, gentle and lowly. He delights in me and the thoughts and reflections I share with Him the same way I delight in everything Clara and Jane are learning and doing each day.

Sometimes I think we get so lost in theology and terminology that we forget to look for God Himself, and hesitate to let Him be God when He colors outside our preconceived lines.

I understand it—the fear of being flippant with the truth, or defining who God is based on the narrow parameters of how we feel or what we experience. Those things can never give us a complete picture. But what can? Do we expect that any of us will find our picture of God to be perfectly accurate when we meet Him face to face, regardless of whether we know the “right” theology, soteriology, eschatology, or other -ology?

My hope for that day is that I’ll have more than a picture; I’ll have a relationship.

A picture might give me some facts so I can recognize Him when I see Him, but the relationship is what I can take deeper and deeper into eternity. The relationship is what transforms me into His likeness. The relationship is where everything I know to be true about Him actually becomes true in my life.

It wouldn’t do my children much good to be raised by a portrait of me. To know my philosophy on parenting or my stance on discipline or even a disembodied fact about how much I love them.

None of it matters unless they get to live in the reality of it, a living and breathing and dynamic two-way relationship.

The Bible depicts God’s connection with His children as that of a breastfeeding mother with her baby, and there are few relationships as real, experiential, and vital as the mother-baby dyad. Facts and depictions can’t feed, comfort, hold, warm, support, love, and sustain a life. The baby deprived of any of those experiences, let alone all, would fail to thrive.

Human experience doesn’t live on the pages of books or the lines of doctrine. And God doesn’t fit there, either.

I am reminded of the words of James that used to make me feel so uncomfortable:

But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without works, and I will show you faith from my works. You believe that God is one; you do well. The demons also believe—and they shudder.

James 2:18-19

Rather than contradicting salvation by grace, as my younger self often worried, these words underscore my point: Knowing a certain set of facts is not evidence of faith. I’d argue that most of the underworld knows a lot more information, and more accurately, about God than any human on earth. It doesn’t make them His disciples.

Facts and information don’t create disciples any more than they raise babies.

A friend of mine went through a multi-year health crisis which impacted her so much that she couldn’t do anything, including go to church or read her Bible or spend time with other believers. For several years she passed her days mostly alone in her room, with little more stimulation than the view of tree branches from her window.

But the Holy Spirit communed with her there.

Her story has led me to reflect on the substance of my own walk: I love the Scriptures deeply, but suppose all my Bibles and Bible study resources were suddenly no longer available to me?

In relationship with the Triune God, the Word-Made-Flesh would still dwell with me. God would still be Father to me. The Holy Spirit would still animate me.

All the -ologies in the world can’t compare with that.

“And the Father who sent me has given evidence about Me. You’ve never heard His voice; you’ve never seen His form. What’s more, you haven’t got His Word abiding in you, because you don’t believe in the one He sent.

“You study the Bible,” Jesus continued, “because you suppose that you’ll discover the life of God’s coming age in it. In fact, it’s the Bible which gives evidence about Me! But you won’t come to Me so that you can have life.”

John 5:37-40, The Kingdom New Testament

belonging to Jesus

The reformer in me is ever-tempted by the idea of a Ninety-Five Theses moment—a complete break from the ball of religion attached to my limbs by a chain of bureaucracy (in other words, your average Western church). What would it feel like to run—to set off at a sprint toward the finish line, cheered on by that Cloud of Witnesses, unencumbered by sin, guilt, law, fear, or any other unnecessary hindrance?

I have spent my life immersed in evangelicalism, in a variety of different local church bodies. The weight of religion seems to grow heavier over time, and I wonder if it’s because it didn’t feel like much of a burden when it gave me belonging. But what if conformity, not Christ, has been at the root of that belonging? Ever since I started seeking first the kingdom of heaven—sometimes at the expense of the “kingdom” of the church—the shackles of religion have become much more obvious.

When you belong, it’s so easy to believe that you’ve got it right. You are where you’re supposed to be, doing what you’re supposed to do. Your church must be approved by God, because you feel so at home there. But wait a second. Doesn’t that just mean your church is approved by . . . you?

I heard this quote recently for the first time, and it made me think:

Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence—religious meaning—apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but, at least in America, almost never against the crowds.

Eugene H. Peterson

When my sense of belonging began to erode, I noticed: I may have been substituting the ecstasy of being part of the crowd for the actual transcendence of being part of Christ’s body.

I may have been conflating going to church and doing “churchy” things with obedience. I may have been measuring my faithfulness by how many Sundays my butt was in the pew. I may have started making my faith about going somewhere once a week for two hours to play-act the perfect mix of smiling and submissive and vulnerable and guarded—not about being something, being an apprentice of Christ alone, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

When Jesus called His disciples, He didn’t say “Meet me at the synagogue on the Sabbath for an hour.” He said, “Follow Me.”

Starting here, now, wherever we are and wherever we go—and continuing indefinitely. And, importantly, doing it together, even when our backgrounds are beyond disparate, our personalities mix like oil and water, and our political differences would normally have us killing each other. That’s what being a disciple means.

That’s what being the Church means.

The ball and chain of religion would have us believe that “church” is a place we go with a bunch of people who look and sound and think exactly like us. That it’s an event we help make happen, not a body that we are an animating part of. It often pushes a certificate of church membership or confirmation like it’s a certificate of marriage, forgetting that biblically, we don’t marry a church; we are the Bride of Christ. Religion tries to pass off valuing conformity as treasuring the truth, gatekeeping ministry as protecting the body, and upholding legalism as fearing God.

The truth is something to treasure—so maybe we shouldn’t try to shut down truth-seekers for fear that they’ll find where our statement of faith doesn’t fully reflect God’s heart.

The body is something to protect—so maybe we shouldn’t try to silence and dismiss whole demographics within it that could provide a valuable voice and perspective on behalf of its vulnerable.

God is Someone to fear—so maybe we should consider how He will judge those who, like Pharisees, obstruct the entrance to the kingdom of heaven by paving the way instead toward kingdoms of this world. Jesus said of them: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven in front of people; for you do not enter it yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (Matthew 23:13, emphasis added).

I’m not calling out any particular church I’ve been part of in the last 30 years. I’m pleading with all of them. All of us.

Unity does not, cannot, mean conformity to a particular denomination or set of secondary and tertiary doctrines. The goal isn’t to belong to a large and growing crowd, it’s to become one healthy body. Genuine unity can only come through recognizing Christ as the body’s Head—meaning, according to Ephesians, its Unifier. Only a central focus on the Messiah Jesus, His death and resurrection, and His kingdom can bind us together into one living and working and fruit-bearing organism.

Any “unity” achieved through legalistic conformity instead of the pursuit of Jesus will lead only to the (continued) mass fracturing of Christianity into a million tiny echo chambers. We can’t accomplish our mission in that state.

The call of the disciple is simple and difficult: She must deny herself, take up her cross, and follow Jesus.

Jesus, not a crowd.

Jesus, not a husband.

Jesus, not a pastor.

Jesus, not a denomination.

Jesus, not a political party, candidate, or policy platform.

Jesus, not a particular side of a culture war.

Belonging, while a vitally important aspect of human flourishing, is not a biblical metric for how well we’re doing this. Belonging—at least the kind that feels comfortable, confirms all our priors, and lets us come together to congratulate ourselves on our rightness week after week—may not be part of the deal.

We belong to Jesus, and no other.

“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.”

John 10:27-28

all who call

I have two children now.

I remember this phase with my first surprisingly well, despite the fact that I was (unknowingly) in a fog of postpartum depression at the time. Thankfully, that’s under control this time, but the newborn stage is still as stretching and demanding as ever. I had almost forgotten how all-consuming it is to be everything to someone: to be their source of food, drink, warmth, hygiene, safety, comfort, even life itself.

There is a familiar loneliness—an inevitable isolation. Even those who have been in these shoes probably don’t quite remember what it was really like. And those who are in them right now are too consumed by them, as I am, to be really available to anyone else. Who can blame them?

And God—it’s hard not to feel like I’m failing Him when I can hear the voices of so many pastors from so many pulpits endlessly reminding us that we need to pray and read our Bibles and go to church, and I have barely gotten us all dressed and fed in a day, let alone done any of that.

But I was reminded lately that I come from a very knowledge-centric tradition of Christianity, and that knowledge is only one small piece of a real relationship. I feel safer in my head than I do in my gut or in my heart, but there is so much more. And if my relationship with God is measured only in how much I know, how much I read, how much I’ve learned, and how much I pray—is it a relationship at all? Or is it just the same old carnal striving to attain wisdom without really needing Him?

And is God cold toward how thin I’m spread? Does He watch me rinsing diapers, calming tantrums, juggling a fussy baby, and putting food on the table and think “How dare she slack off on what matters?” Or is it possible that the God who made me also knows me, knows that He made me highly sensitive to sensory stimuli, knows how frayed I am at the end of a day where it felt like someone was always screaming at me—and has compassion toward me?

There is one name of God that I hold especially dear: El-Roi, “the God who sees.” It’s the first time God is given a name in Scripture, and it is given to Him by a woman who is desperate, utterly at the end of herself, when she meets Him. He calls her by name and asks for her story. Then, instead of rebuking her, He guides her. Instead of judging her, He blesses her.

The psalmist says,

The LORD is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth.

Psalm 145:18

It is the nearness of the Lord that I yearn for in these long, yet fleeting, days. I need Him to meet me at the end of myself, call me by name, and listen to my story. And so right now—when I don’t have the words or minutes to form paragraphs-long prayers covering adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, and all the other “requirements”—I am choosing instead to call.

In the tiniest of moments, there is still room to call upon the Lord. It takes no more than a breath and a few words: “You are the God who sees.” Sometimes this is a cry for help from the One who sees me in my frustration or my exhaustion; sometimes it’s a proclamation that even in the isolation, I am not alone. Every time I breathe this small and powerful prayer, I can picture my loving God looking down on me, seeing it all in its chaos, and offering me His presence, His compassion, His blessing.

For a moment, I am released from the inside of my head, where I keep my Bible scholarship and my endless questions and my spiritual to-do list. I’m washed in the power and presence of the Spirit of God, where there is freedom.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. But we all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.

2 Corinthians 3:17-18