All That Matters Pt. 3: No Tree that's Fit to Eat From
We're the Messiah's misfits. You might be sure of yourselves, but we live in the midst of frailties and uncertainties. You might be well-thought-of by others, but we're mostly kicked around.
How it’s possible I don’t know but this season of my life has been remarkably together and remarkably lonely. I’m getting married and feeling disconnected from church. Circumstances are at the forefront, but the world and its set of circumstances aren’t helping anything. Especially what I see on the rectangle in my pocket.
Community has become tribal, not familial. We are united by what we hate, not what we love. Nuanced middles and moderates are not the ones with the largest Twitter followings and they never will be. Oof, and adding religion to the mix makes it somehow more dicey.
We’ve gotten to the point where the dominant narrative on Tik Tok, on cable news, and on internet feeds is literally split in half. Two kinds of people; the good guys and bad. Whoever has the phone in their hand, well… obviously they are the good guy according to that phone’s algorithmic pattern.
In spite of all this malarkey and polarizing lunacy, somehow I don’t fit. I can’t fit.
But honestly, actually, truthfully, I don’t think any of us do. Really.
Antifa, white supremacists, wealthy posh liberals, closeted staunch supporters of Trump, whatever kind of person you are that somehow enrages the other half of the populace you’re not… that doesn’t quite describe what you belong to. These corners the internet has put us in, for some reason, can’t get us real sense of connection and unity.
Hatred never brings true belonging, only hollow unity. Furthermore, hate begets more hate.
However, even though the opposite is true, that love begets more love, that doesn’t make it any less hard to love. It’s fairly easy to hate; it’s pretty difficult to love.
I’m in process to start my practicum in counseling. Whole lot of paperwork, emails, trainings, things to sign and review to not get sued, the whole nine.
I’m going to get married in July too. Golly… what a wonderful prospect. Expensive one too.
It’s a 2022 with a lot of crazy 2020 and 2021 thrown in, but with a heaping of blessings too. I found the love of my life. I got her.
One of the ways it’s kinda rough though is the lack of community. A prerequisite to millennial life is not having enough time, not seeing your friends often enough, and not having enough money.
To be fair we don’t need money to have friends, but it does help out with going out. Time… time is precious for us 30somethings. And if we have friends, keeping them is a challenge, and if we don’t have them then finding them is hard too.
One of the things churches should and often does do is provide community.
A place to hang your hat and cross, your virtues and vulnerabilities, a table where the communion is usually grape juice but sometimes a nice IPA.
Yet through and through, church should be about a bunch of sick patients opening up a Bible to find a cure, a home remedy, a healthy daily dosage of hope.
But as many of my close friends leave the church, I’m honestly torn. I know apart of this struggle is the nature of prioritizing a blossoming, about-freaking-time romance that is long-distance and now with the ring on her finger long-term over and ahead friendships and group hangs.
In this reflective period, however, I can’t help but wonder, time and again, that the place with the most togetherness I’ve found is my support group.
For porn.
Now, thanks be to God that has been nearly a year since I’ve watched. I praise God for that. But when I joined this accountability group, I thought I was stopping a behavior.
But really I needed to find God, to find Him in that hospital setting I talked about before. With other sickies, other addicts, other broken people.
The friends I’ve seen come and leave church, I wonder if their leaving was due to engaging in hollow communities around a shared belief in Christianity, rather than a messy yet deep community based on a shared weakness that only Christ can fill.
As I was elaborating on before, it seems like these algorithms, newsfeeds, and phone addictions actual boil down to two ideologies, not two people groups. What’s slowly happening is people thinking that their “people” are those who think the same thoughts.
The Bible and New Testament beg to differ.
The Good News doesn’t belong to white nationalist MAGA Christians. It actually doesn’t belong to ultra progressive SJW types either.
The Good News is for everyone. A weird thing though, however, is that recognizing that the news is good is to simultaneously see that the world and circumstances and contexts and hardships of the world are bad.
Again, something that on some level we can all agree too. Suffering, the hard knocks, rainy days, it’s present for all of us and yes, for some of us, more so.
Instead of seeing the universality of suffering, however, and seeing how when my brother suffers, the alt-right racist and the alt-left Antifa, we all suffer, instead we look to remedy our own tribe’s suffering even if at the expense of the other side. Heck, now it’s even popular to enjoy their suffering.
This just isn’t it. Everyone loves yelling, if usually over tweets or all caps, but yelling at the “bad guys” and getting atta boys for doing so just isn’t community. Not what the Bible says is the church or community or the fruit of the Spirit.
I don’t belong there. And you don’t either, and I don’t care if you are in support of January 6th or Roe v Wade.
We all need somewhere we belong.
Jesus brought people around a table. His belonging was in His body, figuratively but also literally when He died and then came back. He had a Jewish nationalist terrorist and a Roman-approving tax collector for dinner and somehow they didn’t kill each other.
It should be a cross that we carry that unites us, not a flag (American or LGBT, take your pick). It should be that we share brokenness, not a theological belief. It should be “I struggle with xyz and I know you do too” that gets an amen, not a “they’re taking our rights” or “we stand for fill in the blank virtue signaling.”
I’m just convinced that until modern Christianity leans into sharing vulnerability, hope, and personal, soul-level change over and ahead vigilance, homogeneity, and social and/or political change, people will keep leaving.
Why go to church for your MAGA filled rants when Facebook has them everywhere? Why go to social justice initiatives in the sanctuary when Twitter broadcasts where and when and who and why to protest?
The church should be the alternative to rage, not its propagator. Until we are more unanimously opposed to vitriol, fear-mongering, and divisiveness, I see no chance for revival.
Jesus can’t show up when the Devil and his antics are praised and held up with high regard.
This thought is rambly. I’m not sure I’m conveying what I hope to. I’m not sure if I ever do.
But apart of being in community is being ok with talking about what’s going on inside and the confusion within without certainty of anything save for acceptance and love.
That’s the place I belong. I think it’s the place where we all do. Everyone, according to all I see on the internet, is mad, critiquing and micro managing and canceling and shouting and crumbling, seriously crumbling, on the inside.
Church should be the safe place. Where you look for answers yes but also for questions too and without trite answers back. Sometimes we don’t have words to describe our inner experience and longing; the Bible says the Spirit intercedes for us when this happens.
And I think it happens all of the time.
Sometimes I’m still looking for a safe place to go to these spaces. 9 times out of 10 it comes from the group of people who sin the same way I do. It’s not the people who hate the same things I do; it’s the people who struggle to love like I do.
But I think we in the group, slowly but surely, loving better through sharing where we are broken.
And that’s the whole point. To get back to the fruit of the tree. If it’s rotten in the roots, then it’s unfit to eat. And if we as a church can’t admit it’s rotten, they’ll keep running from the tree.
I want good fruit, and I want a lot of it.
I know I’m not alone.