i originally posted this over at thoughts from the sugar bowl:

there have been times in my life where i’ve thought i had God figured out. not even in that hubris-laden way of ‘completely figured out’ but even in relatively small ways. ways where i looked at my faith, theology, practices and was quite convinced that i had put together a solid religion with my ducks in a row. those are the times when i stopped wrestling with God, stopped fighting with the world around me and acquiesced to a shallow road of simple beliefs.

the first time i did this was as a nonchristian, looking at the world around me and knowing there was more but refusing to engage with it, desiring only to be left alone and to live out my days. surprising only myself, i again faced that same error years later as a young christian; convinced that i had arrived, i achieved my salvation and now needed only continue on as i was and happy to preach conversion and teach scripture to those around me. i was insufferable.

God disabused me of that notion right quick.

that brings me to where i am today. down in the trenches, fighting. doing battle with my own beliefs and wrestling with God as revealed to me through scripture and through relationships. trying to understand in tiny ways the church, the community of broken people around me and what is it all worth? this tension is the only thing that keeps me moving forward, bumbling in ways to try to understand just what the hell i am doing with my days on this planet.

i have to recognize that even in this simplistic look at the world – this recognition of tension and questioning – there lies the seeds of trying to be ‘arrived’, to be done with it and able to focus on other things.

to which gabrielle responded:

What is the point of all this struggle anyway? Can we really be assured that there IS a point? Is HOPING that there’s a point enough? Every time I think I’ve survived some major turning point in my life and come out ahead, I wonder how much God had to do with it and how much I just hit the right combination of blind luck elements and came out ahead. I am terrified of losing my love. I am terrified of losing my freedom. I am terrified of losing my sobriety. If I have to start being terrified of losing my salvation as well, what is the fucking point? I’m sorry, but there it is. Why can’t we feel assured in God? Is there NOTHING that gives us a sense of calm anymore? Are we to even doubt our very faith and salvation and existence until the end of our days because struggle is the only religion there is of value?

I can’t accept that. We might as well die then.

a response to which i am pretty much dumbfounded. in a sense it forms another experience to support my point that every time i think i have something understood i’m brought to a place where new information causes me to have to rethink my theology and worldview. this is one of those questions i don’t know how to answer. i don’t want to have a gospel of “suffering” – nor for that matter one of “prosperity”, “easy answers”, “power”, or any other single aspect of our life and faith.

of course the sunday school (or bible study!) platitude might be to say i want a gospel of jesus christ, but even to say that is burdened with imagery and associations that are inherently flawed. so am i becoming completely postmodernist, tearing apart my beliefs until i have nothing left and trying to reconstruct reality as a discursive framework?

i hope not.

still, what assurance do i have and where do i get it from? why don’t i just give up? is it all just a fool’s hope, a child’s self-centered expectation of safety?

i’m confused. i look at the world around me and feel like i have seen and know more but i understand less. i look back at the world i used to inhabit and how it at least seemed to be a world i could comprehend, a world with terms that i knew and could rely upon. but now i wake up again and realize that perhaps my understanding was simply falsehood, indeed perhaps i have never known anything and that is the only thing i have been learning.

i have always suspected i am underqualified for this task, the job of simply being. i take it as cold comfort that literally billions have been faced with a similar responsibility and all have acheived it to some level or another. still, i look at the world and wonder if it is simply madness to try to engage with it. wouldn’t i just be happier watching my tv shows and buying my video games and drinking my beer and not wondering what is going on. why are the people around me who they are and why do i even do the things i do, believe the things i believe? am i an unreasonable person trying to make sense of a world of nonsense, or the opposite?

i am overwhelmed by the world. a man has thirty thousand days in his life, give or take a few thousand. as i complete my 9,591st day i cannot help but wonder, what does tomorrow hold – will i make of it something useful or will i squander it? all i know is that i will wake up and each of my actions throughout the day will determine that.

do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. sufficient for a day is it’s own evil. – matthew 6:34

pat robertson.

perhaps you’ve heard of him?

inspired by torch, the folks at open conversation, and even bizket, i’ve given some thought to what it means for us to be Christians.

it seems like a common response to the blathering of folks like robertson, fred phelps, and their ilk is to attempt to disassociate ourselves. we don’t want people to meet us and categorize us with them, to assume that the Christians they have seen in the media are synonymous with us. ultimately, the difficulty of defending ourselves becomes too much. we drop the moniker altogether. it is after all just a label, a word – and we are to be known not by what we call ourselves but by our love for one another.

i don’t think it is that simple.

i think stepping away from the issue is an easy escape, a cop-out. much harder is it to live a life trying to love radically, to see Jesus’ story writ on the world so large that the imitators are seen as precisely that. what i don’t think we can do is walk away from the name of ‘Christ’ in our lives and allow our culture to take it over and diminish it. God granted his name to his people in the old testament, and the tetragrammaton was considered so holy as to be unspeakable, unchangeable. his character must be made visible, not hidden behind clever wordplay and our own fear of being labeled and misunderstood.