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February 02, 2009
Books , Faith : Location or Trajectory
I’ve written about this before; but God has been working in my life to transform these beliefs into practice so I thought it was time to revisit them in the blog. The point is that many Christians (including myself in years past) define what it means to be a “good Christian” as a bounded set – A good Christian is someone who believes certain things, does certain things, avoids certain things. There is a well defined boundary, and you are either on one side of the line or the other.
The problem with that is that Jesus never seems to operate that way. He was far more pleased with thoroughly messed up people who were at least trying to get closer to God than with people who may have technically been closer to what God wanted but had become satisfied with their level of closeness. His idea of a “good Christian” seems more to be a “centered set” focused on God where what mattered was not where you were but what direction you were moving.
While I have believed this was true for a while, there is often a distance between what we believe and how we react, and God has been working in my life to make this not just a belief but a part of my character.
This all was brought to home recently as I read some of Anne Lamott’s books (“Traveling Merices”, “Plan B”, etc). Anne is a successful Christian author from the San Francisco Bay area (she grew up and lives across the Golden Gate Bridge from the city). Her books are quite popular these days with the new generation of Christians (even though she is actually of the same generation as my wife (also Anne) and I).
And here’s the thing – 20 years ago I would probably have not considered her a Christian at all, and certainly not a “good” one. In her books she refers to God as “He or She” (or sometimes even just “She”), She practices Buddhist meditation, and does other assorted things that I would have said “Christians, at least good ones, don’t do”.
But not now. Now, I can now read her books and see myself in them – a struggling, humble Christian seeking to get closer to God. I can look past the doctrinal issues and can see in her words someone who has experienced God’s hand in her life just the way I experience it in mine – gentle, firm pressure to “get past myself” and focused on God and others. The occasional nudge here, a word there, an experience that highlights the need for Him. The kinds of things Anne talks about are so familiar from my own life that I have no doubt that God is working in her just as He is working in me. So if God is willing to invest in her life, who am I to judge her otherwise?
Now Anne started her journey towards God from a very different place than I did (a place which she documents in frightening detail in “Traveling Mercies”); and being a different person from me, she has resisted God in her journey in different ways that I have, but we have both struggled with things God has demanded of us. As a result, we are today in two very different places relative to where God wants us to be. There are perhaps things I have “gotten right” which is still ahead of her on her path; but there are also things which God has managed to teach her which I am still working through. What matters though is that we are both struggling to allow God to bring us closer to Him.
That’s not to say the things she has wrong don’t matter – I believe they do, just as the things I still have wrong matter. What I am however learning is to give room for God to work in other people’s lives according to His plan, not mine. It is not for me to decide what issues any other Christian needs to focus on now. It isn’t even for me to decide what issues I should be working on in my own life (to claim otherwise is to usurp God’s lordship in my life). We all stand before God and submit to His will for us, and are judged by Him (and not each other) based on how well we follow the path that God has set before us, not how well we follow someone else’s path.
I suspect, living in San Francisco, it is going to be very important to not just believe this is true; but for it to be second nature to me to act based on it being true, so God is driving the point home in my life. Thank you Anne Lamott.
Posted by Steven at February 2, 2009 05:00 AM
