Follow Your Nose
From Gold Teeth and Parking Spaces, a 2012 collection of my earlier blog posts
I have this feeling that many of us who feel we are walking towards God are actually walking away from Him.
And many of us who feel we are actively walking away from God are actually getting nearer and nearer.
Setting aside for one minute the logistics and navigation of finding God inside, outside, above, between... I'm talking about the sense in which repentance (changing direction) somehow brings us back home with Father God, like the Prodigal Son - wasted, hungry, fed up, just wanting rest.
The son's remorse was irrelevant in that story.
The Father's love was the destination, the place to crash and burn. The son was 'found' while he was simply walking in the direction that felt like it held the warmest welcome in a time of poverty and desperation.
For years now, decades in fact, I've felt encouraged when I hear of Christians pulling out of formal church life.
I don't mean by that that I don't value church, or that I've overlooked the verse about not giving up meeting together. But I believe INTEGRITY and HONESTY sometimes require us to make our escape from the feeling of being force fed - in order to be able to feel hungry and eat again.
That takes some courage, and/or desperation. Guilt and misguided loyalty might stand in the way, beckoning us not to make the break from what everyone else says is good, but at the same time we're sensing life like we'd never known before, calling from somewhere unexpected and unlikely.
Which influence is more likely to be God - guilt-driven or life-driven?
No amount of effort to convince ourselves to go through the motions can compare to the reality of waking up to the revelation that the whole thing is closer, more challenging, more intimate, more tangible, more forgiving, more embracing, more peaceful, more vibrant, more staggeringly beautiful than we had ever led ourselves to believe.
I think there's a lot of structural and historical nonsense that has tainted the blood stream between us as the body of Christ. I think some people are hurting - and many depressed - because they buy into the artificial ways we have of positioning ourselves with regard to each other, and then struggle with the fallout when people aren't living up to our expectations.
Or they feel guilty for not being able to live up to the call from the leaders at the front. But I think the resurrection life of Christ in us gives rise to relationship with each other in unexpected and amazing ways that we could never dream up.
And I think that where real life is rising, people (whether officially attending church or not) are finding God, DESPITE the constructed forms, BETWEEN their best efforts, gaining ground that is strengthening the whole body more than countless unfelt disciplines could.
My hope is that we can all start to follow our noses, seek out the fresh air, stop trying to fathom and forge things intellectually, but be honest about where - in the whole of life - love is stirring, as we come on home to God.
