Jesus is Hiding in the Bushes (the strangeness of evolving faith)

I saw a quote on Facebook recently, posted by Rachel Held Evans, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  It resonated so deeply with me:

“Faith is not a belief. Faith is what is left when your beliefs have all been blown to hell.”-Ram Dass

Those of you who have followed this blog through the years know that I mainly share weird stories about faith, about seeing a big God in the small things, about finding God in the dregs and minutia of life. He meets some people in beautiful, lofty places deserving of Instagram glory, but often He meets me in the odd and ordinary (I’m convinced it’s His warped sense of humor).

I laughed when Keith discovered this Jesus statue buried deep under an overgrown bush in the back yard of our new home.  That discovery is a pretty good metapohor for my faith experience – Jesus shows up in some strange, unexpected places.

For awhile now, my faith has sort of gone to a place that is hard to explain.  I’m a talker, an external processor . . . this is the first time in my life that I’ve had trouble putting words to what is happening in my heart and mind.

But the quote above summed it up nicely. After years of angst about what I believe, about the church, about interpretations and spiritual practices, etc., I now waste very little energy worrying about that stuff.  It’s all still very important (I mean, you have to have a structure before you can restructure, and beliefs certainly drive behavior), but it’s not faith.

For most of my life, I conflated belief and faith. It has taken a lot of life experience and dark crisis-of-faith seasons to let go of my white knuckle grip on what I believe and, instead, relax into faith that is not restrained by belief or denomination or any other man-made rules.  That’s why it’s hard to explain.

Religion and theology are supposed to be good things, helping us connect with a loving God, helping us develop character and integrity and grow into more loving people who encourage and challenge one another in all the right ways.  But organized religion often becomes a poor substitute for God and faith.  When what we believe becomes the measure, instead of who we are and how much we love, then something is wrong.

Much like our strange discovery in the back yard, it seems that if our “religion” overwhelms God’s love, then Jesus gets buried in our hearts and minds, and we no longer live in freedom.

When I thought I was destroying my faith by dismantling and reevaluating it (this is called “deconstruction” in many circles), I was actually getting ready to discover God in a new way.

All around me are still swirling questions, arguments with God, wrestling with issues, the difficult work of recognizing my own ego and pride, but at my core, there is this peaceful knowledge that, ultimately, none of that matters.

The process (at least for people like me who grew up thinking there’s a “right” way to believe) is kind of terrifying at times, and feels wrong and off-balance when you are in the muck of it, but if you can really let go, there is freedom.

And here’s the weird thing:  the knowing is in the not knowing.

There is something so freeing about coming to that place where you can just accept the mystery and say, “I don’t know.” This is what I “believe” but I hold loosely to what I believe and I rest comfortably in God’s love. 

I’ve been to both extremes – I’ve tried the religion of certainty (it’s exhausting) and I’ve teetered on the brink of atheism (but it only takes a beautiful sunset, or something equally unexplainable and amazing, to make me shake off the idea that there is no God).  I think I had to visit both extremes in order to find some balance.

It’s freeing to let God be God.  Who knew?

Another weird thing:  the less you think you know, the bigger God becomes.

I used to think that if I didn’t know, (there goes that certainty thing again) then I didn’t have real faith;  if I had doubts, then I was just immature in my faith.  But now I think real faith comes with acknowledging that I’ll never have it all figured out (again, the knowing is in the not knowing).  God will always be a mystery, and yet close and tangible (His creation – His original incarnation – is all around us!  His Spirit is within us!).  I believe the Bible is a vast wealth of knowledge and the closest glimpse of Him that we have in written word, but it barely scratches the surface of who He (and/or she) is.

I can now be a perpetual student which is exciting and freeing.  If I have something to give that helps someone, then that’s just a bonus, but because God has helped me let go of rigid doctrines and denominational hierarchies (even though it feels like He is sometimes prying my fingers open), I can be open to the ways that God works in every single life, in all situations. When we say things like, “God doesn’t work that way,” we just limit ourselves and close our eyes to the wonders God is doing in the world around us!

When I was a kid, my Dad used to preach a sermon where he said, “God is God.  He can do whatever He wants.”  I have always loved that.  We try to box God in (as if we can!).  We try to shrink His radical love into something we think we can control, where we are only worried about who is right and who is wrong, who is in and who is out. I don’t care about any of that anymore. God is God. He can do whatever He/She wants.  I can focus on my purpose, which is to be a channel of God’s love, grace, mercy and goodness (life-long challenges!), and leave the rest to the Creator.

A few years ago, when we left our church of 10 years, we were “homeless” for a few months while we were searching for a new church.  This felt terrible to me – I was sad and felt unmoored.  Now I can look back and see how much I equated God with church.

We just moved to a new town and are church homeless again, but the experience is wildly different.  I don’t feel homeless this time.  Letting go of certainty has opened up the world to me.  Instead of seeing God with tunnel vision, through the lens of the church, these past few years, I have begun to see God everywhere. Some of my most spiritual moments have been with people who wouldn’t consider themselves Christians.  While I still value the church tremendously, it is not solely where I look for Him anymore (besides, most the time, I don’t find Him – He finds me).

I still want to find a church because I love being part of a community of seekers (particularly when it is multi-generational and multi-cultural) and I need the reminders, the accountability.  Plus, I really want my kids to have a foundation – a spiritual language of sorts. (I heard recently that spiritual language is much like any other language . . . you have to learn a specific or native language before you can effectively learn a new language.  Hopefully, we’re giving the kids a foundation that will allow them to broaden their view/language of God as they get older.)  I’ve written about the church many times, and although it’s broken, there is still so much beauty, so I keep going back.

I’m not giving up on the church by any means. But I am expanding my view of who God is and what He/She does, and, for me, that is far beyond the church walls and doctrine and ritual.

But be careful, if you start questioning and cutting out the unnecessary trappings that give us a false sense of control, you might just discover Jesus.  You never know where He might show up.

“I don’t mind saying I find it strangely comforting that walking the path of Christian faith means being confronted moment by moment with what is counterintuitive and ultimately beyond my comprehension to understand or articulate. In an unexpected way, God becomes more real to me, not less.” (Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty)