the unbelieving believers

What do fully-vaccinated mask-wearers and a lot of Christians have in common?

This question popped into my mind while I was reading one of my favorite books on walking with God called Sidetracked in the Wilderness, written by Michael Wells. In the first few chapters of the book, Wells makes the case that most Christians, despite their miraculous born-again status, are living in a state of defeat borne out of none other than the original sin: unbelief.

Stay with me.

As we’ve probably all heard by now, the CDC recently changed their guidelines regarding masks for the vaccinated population, causing a lot of businesses to relax their rules about wearing masks indoors. At Spuds, we are no longer requiring customers to wear masks, under the assumption/ideal that those who choose not to have had the Covid-19 vaccine.

Inevitably, this has created yet another us-them dichotomy in the general population. Over the course of this pandemic we’ve had the maskers and the anti-maskers, the vaccine-enthusiastic and the vaccine-hesitant, and now we have the “masked vaxxed” vs. the “unmasked vaxxed.” Today during my shift, we had two middle-aged women with two completely different approaches; one of them saw our “Masks Optional” sign on the door and immediately took her mask off, saying she was vaccinated; the other pointedly told me at the cash register, “I’m vaccinated, but I’m not taking this thing off.”

One of the women believed that because she had received the vaccine, her body had created the antibodies necessary to protect her from the virus, and her mask was therefore unnecessary. The other probably also believed in the efficacy of the vaccine, or she wouldn’t have bothered to be vaccinated—but she did not trust that her body would do its job if she came in contact with the virus. She kept her mask on.

These two women remind me of what Michael Wells writes:

Let me explain that an unbelieving believer is someone who is a Christian, is born again, and will arrive in heaven; the problem is that this person has never believed in the Lord Jesus with his whole being. That is, with his mind he receives and believes all that is told him about the grace, care, concern, and love of the Lord Jesus; he is a believer. Yet at the same time, he feels that he is in charge of every aspect of his Christian life, that he must change the lives of those around him, bring transformations into his own life, and work to make himself pleasing to God. That is, in his emotions he is unbelieving.

- Sidetracked in the Wilderness

I think we can all identify with the concept of the “unbelieving believer” at some point, or perhaps at many points, in our walks with God. We are all sometimes the fully-vaccinated mask-wearer—the wholly-justified do-gooder. We are all sometimes tempted to add our own works of righteousness to the complete work of Christ on the cross, even though “all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment” (Isaiah 64:6). We all have days of fear, doubt, and uncertainty when we’ll slap a germ-laden cloth over our mouth and nose just in case the power within us isn’t as powerful as we once believed.

For some, the lifestyle of the unbelieving believer, like that of the masked-vaxxed, becomes a religion—a system of rules that slowly blinds him to the truth, binds him with fear, and ultimately leads both himself and others away from God. Have you ever wondered why, as a “Covid precaution,” your takeout at McDonald’s is now handed to you on a tray—when you know that someone had to touch the bag to get it on the tray in the first place, so what’s the point? Then you might also be apt to wonder why the Pharisees tithed “mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matthes 23:23a) or, more pointedly, why you can read your Bible and pray every day but still walk through life in the defeatedness of legalism and stubborn self-reliance.

I will venture a suggestion: It’s because you—we—do not trust that the power of God is truly within us, or that if it is, it’s truly enough.

If you’re vaccinated, the scientific research currently indicates that you are at extremely low risk of contracting Covid-19. If you somehow do get sick, you are almost certain to have an extremely mild or even asymptomatic case. There is no data to suggest that vaccinated people pose a risk to unvaccinated people. So your mask, if you choose to wear it (which is totally fine, I’m not here to tell anyone what to do), does nothing but betray your fear, inhibit your breathing, and signal your views to others.

So it is when we try to layer our self-powered good works onto the perfect sacrifice of Christ. He paid our debt in full; our mere pennies of righteous acts are an insult to that magnificent price, and if we insist on throwing them at His feet anyway, it’s because we are acting to appease our self-focused fears and to impress those who might be watching, not because they have any value with which to pay the debt we owe.

It is Christ alone who has done the hopeless work of reconciling our lost souls to God, and it will be the Spirit alone who does the equally hopeless work of sanctifying us into His likeness. Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20b). How can any of us outdo those who followed the letter of all 600+ commands of the Law, right down to the very last jot? Only by receiving our righteousness from Someone else, and then living freely and wholeheartedly in the reality of it.

mothered

As I expected, being a mom has opened up an entirely new dimension of God to me—but in unexpected ways. I never expected that one of the questions that would keep nudging me in the middle of the night would be “Why are we so slow to see God as both our Father and our Mother?”

I don’t exactly mean this question in the sense of “God is genderless”—although I would venture to suspect that, considering Genesis 1 & 2, the masculine half of the gender binary is at best an incomplete representation of who God is. What I mean is, why do we (or maybe it’s just me) habitually fail to see the character of God in the role of mothers?

When Clara was a newborn, I didn’t know what to dread more: the days or the nights. The nights were fraught with the fear of hearing her cry again, as she awoke hourly or more to eat (I didn’t know until much later that this was not normal, and that she wasn’t feeding efficiently). The days were spent in an all-out war with her constantly-tense and alert little body to get her to sleep. I can still feel her tiny self rigid in my arms, sometimes screaming in protest and sometimes just wanting to interact with me—but never, ever sleeping.

Now, after eight months of doing all the small things that nurture a baby—changing wet diapers, feeding when hungry, holding when frightened or tired or sad, building comfortable routines, constantly communicating love and safety in both words and actions—I sway and sing three short verses of “O The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” in her dark room, and she immediately rests her head on my shoulder in submission. I lay her down and she sleeps.

And I wonder: Why do we so rarely notice God in this?

Like our mothers, He knows what we need even when we are protesting it with every fiber of our feeble being.

Like our mothers, He holds us and comforts us even we are screaming in His face.

Like our mothers, He provides for every seemingly insignificant thing that, over time, becomes a firm foundation of His trustworthiness to us.

This passage from the Psalms comes to mind:

Because Your lovingkindness is better than life,
My lips will praise You.
So I will bless You as long as I live;
I will lift up my hands in Your name.
My soul is satisfied as with marrow and fatness,
And my mouth offers praises with joyful lips.

When I remember You on my bed,
I meditate on You in the night watches,
For You have been my help,
And in the shadow of Your wings I sing for joy.
My soul clings to You;
Your right hand upholds me.

Psalm 63:3-8

God’s lovingkindness might be the most mother-like attribute He possesses. It is sometimes called His mercy, or His faithful love; my favorite way to describe it is “a love that will not let me go.” A love like a mother’s—a love whose steadfastness is decided by the identity of the giver, not the worthiness of the receiver.

And God’s help is no ordinary help, either: this comes from the very same word used to describe the woman as man’s “helper” in Genesis 2. It’s a word for deliverance and rescue. For filling a desperate need that no one else can fill.

Loved like this, we can rest our heads on God’s shoulder in submission. We can trust in Him to satisfy and to protect. We can sleep.

After Clara’s 4am feeding, when she is fully satisfied and resting limp in my arms, another favorite verse from the Psalms often surfaces:

“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”

Psalm 46:10 ESV

I have studied this verse many times before, and what I always come back to is the meaning behind the phrase “Be still.” To me, worded like that, it has always sounded like an admonishment to a fidgety child—as if the intent is just to stop moving, to sit in rigid silence, like a kid might do in Sunday school. But it actually means “to sink, to collapse, to relax, or to become helpless”—to go limp, and know that God is God, and His will shall prevail.

Like Clara does now when it’s time to sleep after her midnight snack: no tension, no anxiety, no fear. Just perfect trust, perfect satisfaction, because I’m her mommy and she is safe.

How much more perfectly we are all mothered by our God—so may we learn to do the same.

the night warriors

Little Miss Clara just turned seven months old, and she is still waking up once a night for a feeding. Sometimes it’s 3am, sometimes it’s 6am, or anywhere in between… but ultimately it means that I have been called out of my sleep and out of my bed every single night for more than half a year.

Since we were dealing with literally hourly wakings in the first few weeks of her life due to all the complications she had with nursing, and since I had three solid months of horrific insomnia after her sleeping and feeding issues finally resolved, getting up once at night for 20 minutes isn’t really that big a deal. I can do it, and I don’t really mind. But every now and then I get a nagging spirit of discontentment and impatience and think, She should be over this by now. She shouldn’t need a night feeding anymore. She’s big and healthy and I want my sleep back.

When she woke up way earlier than usual the other night—2:30am—I was really frustrated, and wondered if I was doing something wrong, or if I needed to sleep train her. But sitting in the rocker in her pitch-dark room, with her warm milky breath on my cheek, I began to pray for her, as I always do. And I remembered: “Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18).

Without these wee-hours wakings, would I be as faithful to pray?

Daytime comes with diapers and housework and to-do lists, nap routines and mealtimes and chores. It is so easy to cease praying when my mind and hands are constantly busy. But at 4am, when there is nothing to look at, no one to talk to, and nothing that needs urgent doing—when there is only a baby in my arms and the hum of her sound machine in the background—I am reminded to pray, and reminded of the countless spiritual wars that have likely been won in these dark and quiet nights by the prayers of mother-warriors across the generations. It may be that the mightiest power in the cosmos is within easy reach of the empathetic hearts and nurturing hands of praying moms.

My mom is one of the fiercest warriors I know. So was my mother-in-law, Suze—whose loss I feel keenly every day, though I hope God still lets her intercede for us in heaven. I have seen spiritual battle done tirelessly by both of them on behalf of their children, day and night, not for a mere seven months, but for decades.

I can only hope to follow in their footsteps, and if I need to keep getting called out of bed at 4am to build the skills, then so be it.