I used to think all Christians were cheesy. Cheese balls smothered in wiz cheese, wrapped in a Kraft single. What a story! You turn to God, you pray a prayer, you stop having fun and stop showing cleavage. Done. Cool. Stupid. Not how it is, not how it was for me, anyway.
For me, it was a gradual, persistent evolution within myself. Actually, it is a gradual, persistent evolution because it hasn’t stopped, and I don’t expect it to within the next few hundred eternities, but the point is, there must be a beginning, as chains of events tend to have those things. And mine (my beginning of my real beginning) began at the moment in my life when this thought appeared in my mind like a pinprick—so slightly noticeable but fine-pointed and prickly. I’m sure, like it did to me, this thought presents itself to everyone at some time with a tap dance of Morse code on the conscience. It pricks with these words in this order to form this particular sentence: there has got to be something more. And maybe that sentence comes to you when you’re just tipsy enough to think coherently about things you normally wouldn’t, or you’ve just had terrible sex with your ex-boyfriend, or you’ve just rolled a strike at the bowling alley and your fat great-aunt accidentally gives you a high-five on the forehead (I don’t know!) but it will come, and when it does it will keep pricking like a flustered seamstress ten minutes before the wedding. You can do two things with that sequence of pin pokes, that sentence that somehow shows up in your head and on your gut: you can ignore it, or, you can pursue it like hell.
I’d bet a ripe turkey and eight paint pails that you're scoffing. I know this because I was a scoffer in my day. In fact, if this were a year and a half ago, I’d ’ve challenged you to a good, old-fashioned scoff-off, and I would’ve won. But I got tired of scoffing. Yup, I did. I got tired of it because I was exceptionally unhappy. Of course, no one was able to put a finger on my unhappiness. I could barely do that. I never wrote sad Facebook statuses, or walked around hating bright colors, or hating the people who liked bright colors. I liked bright colors alright, and I liked uplifting Facebook statuses, too (people are ok), but I felt empty. That was it. I had this sinking feeling whenever I was alone, and I needed to surround myself with friends at all times, so I wouldn’t have to think about it. I fully believe that loneliness is the most supremely terrible human feeling, and I think it is probably the most common. What people don’t realize, though, and what I didn’t realize then, is that that emptiness was never meant to be there. We don’t have to settle for it. I used to get this pit in my stomach when I was alone (because if I wasn’t being Class Clown, I had no purpose to fulfill). I never get that anymore (because I’m never alone). Too, I wasn’t able to figure out why the heck I was here and what I was doing on this oversized, blue/green ball of matter. I had no idea what would fix the feeling. Now, I know.
I think people have the wrong idea about God. I know I did. A lot of people (admittedly, a lot of misinformed Christians) think you need to clean up your act before getting to know God, that you have to summon the willpower to change one hundred percent on your own, and then (only then!) can you present yourself to him, and ask him to, just for one second, notice you. I used to think that, but there couldn’t be anything further from the truth. This is God’s desire: that you come to him when you are most broken, when you are most hurting, when you are the ugliest you’ve ever been in your life—when you have a fractured fibula, a black eye and, on your chin, a pudgy zit. He wants to draw close to you exactly as you are. You don’t try to mend yourself before going to the hospital. You just go, and you let the nurse bring you jell-o and dress your wounds, and you leave properly healed, completely refreshed, and jiggley giddy on orange jell-o, all because you simply decided to show up.
God doesn’t care about your past. He doesn’t care about what you did or did not do in your life. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest childhood or the ugliest heart; it doesn’t matter whether you had one thousand people to love you, no one to love you, or a brown-spotted cow and a balding sister to love you. The point is, every single one of us is missing a piece, and that piece doesn’t stop whispering.
When you don’t know God, it is impossible to get beyond a certain level of happiness. Your happiness can’t continue to increase; at some point it comes to a standstill. A time will always arise when that heavy bolder of vacant nothingness comes to sit on your chest, bring you down from the clouds, and back to the reality that life isn’t all that great. I’m saying, though, that with God, there is no quota of joy. With God, you are given a joy that is continuously bubbling. It has no bubble quota. It is a forever-bubbler. When you let God love you, there is nothing that can smack you in the face and bring you back to earth because this joy isn’t from earth. It is unearthly; it is heavenly.
Maybe people don’t understand, really, what “heavenly” means because most people’s idea of heavenly isn’t even close to the truth. But guys, Heaven is a real place. Heaven is a place where you can experience, dwell in, become ensconced in the most exquisite, giddying, wrapped-up tight love that exists, has existed and will exist for all time. The best part about this, though, is that we have access to that same love right now, wherever we are. I know this because I have tasted just the tiniest sliver of this love, and it’s the best thing I have ever ingested; I want more. It’s better than a beer pong tournament and a keg stand on a Saturday night; it’s better than three fat blunts and a sleeve of Oreos; it’s better than fake love. I never thought I’d value a Bible over the approval of friends, or I’d come to strive for anything more spiritual than the lighting of a packed bowl. But I did, and I am, and it’s absolutely worth it.
It is risky, though, because all those things are really thrilling; all those things provide us with happiness, and good stories, fun, a sense of belonging, and confidence, but at some point the time we spend chasing temporary happiness turns into a bunch of little temporaries added up to one big lifetime, and pretty soon you’re wondering how many temporary happinenesses it will take to amount to one whole, perfect, forever happiness. But they won’t amount. Ever. It’s like saying that if you keep adding more and more 5th grade basketball players to the roster, their skill will sum up to Dwayne Wade level; it’s not going to happen. No matter how many 5th graders you put on the floor, you’re still going to have a flock of gangly, sharp-elbowed kids who kind of know about double dribbles. No matter how many shallow loves you put in your life, they will never add up to one complete, deep, satisfying love.
Not only is the stuff we chase a fraud, but so is the confidence that comes with it. It’s superficial. It’s not truly who we are, and that’s the thing. Do we let go of it? Do we sacrifice what brings us at-your-disposal pleasure to become familiar with something that is unknown? For something that is challenging to pursue and not even tangible? I say yes. Because once we let go of that false confidence we are given a new boldness—a true, real, bone-deep boldness that isn’t justified by who we hang out with, or intellect, or chugging ability, but through Jesus and because of Jesus. And this new boldness has nothing to do with pride or arrogance. It doesn’t have a thing to do with whether we have a million friends and dollar bills, or a plethora of the cutest shoes, but it does have to do with humility and love, with delving the part of you that thinks maybe you’re not as content as you had thought with being wholly half-liked and half-wholly drunk all the time—maybe you’re not content with being average. And this is the great oxymoron! How deliciously absurd it is that when love and humility seep into those places of pride and self-assuredness, we can walk in even more confidence than before. We can become something much more attractive than average.
It wasn’t easy at first for me to give up the things that had made me momentarily happy. I used to think it fully ridiculous that a perfect God would make us give up fun, exciting, Friday-night things, that he would ask us to leave out activities from our lives, which the rest of the world was allowed to experience and enjoy, but I began to realize that God asks us to do that not as punishment or to make us miserable, and not even because he wants a reason to call us flawed, but because he created us and knows unequivocally that when we chase him wholeheartedly he can give us a joy that outweighs, by ten thousand elephants, any other thing we might pursue. The pursuit of God brings true passion into our lives in a world that completely lacks anything worthy of our obsession.
God’s love is vast, deeper than the quarry, thicker than apple butter, but there is a “however” to throw in here. God never said things would be perfect. Even though we have access to his love from Heaven on Earth, Earth is definitely not Heaven. God never said bad things wouldn’t happen, that things wouldn’t get sludgy and stinking and downright shitty. But what he did promise is that he would be there when life happened. When the shit snuck up on you and you ended waist-deep in a field of manure. He said he’d be there for that, for sure. God can walk side by side with you through the nasty. With me, he has trudged. God will turn your heaviest chains into balloon strings.
The idea crossed my mind that perhaps after I became a Christian my life would basically be perfect. Maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with hurt feelings and tears, or stubbed toes, or walking into doors. Nope, all of those things still occur (and I really mean all of them). But I think with a lot of us, it’s this desire for instant gratification that hinders our pursuit of deeper things. Because that’s what we’re used to—instant oatmeal, instant replay, instant coffee—but a good novel isn’t written in three pages. It takes a lot of chapters to make up a great book. It took a year for me to really notice the impact God had had on my life; it took a year for me to realize how drastically I had changed, grown, and matured because of my relationship with him. My friendship with God hasn’t changed me into someone who likes to wear turtlenecks and long skirts, nor into someone who no longer finds humor in strange sarcasm; what it has done to my personality is enhance it. I am more of myself now than I’ve ever been in my life, and this is because until we know God, we don’t really know ourselves. “It is in Christ that we find out who we are, and what we are living for.” You can’t know a thing’s inner workings without talking to its creator.
A year ago, one of my good friends cuttingly asked me if I had found Jesus. My face tomatoed, I shrugged and stayed quiet because I wasn’t about to put myself out there without absolutely, positively knowing that I had found the real deal. I wasn’t sure if this whatever-it-was I was having with the supernatural was just a fling, or an actual love affair. Maybe it was just temporary. But now I can say, without doubt or reservation, yes! Yes I did. By golly George junglebee, I found the real deal.
For me, it was a gradual, persistent evolution within myself. Actually, it is a gradual, persistent evolution because it hasn’t stopped, and I don’t expect it to within the next few hundred eternities, but the point is, there must be a beginning, as chains of events tend to have those things. And mine (my beginning of my real beginning) began at the moment in my life when this thought appeared in my mind like a pinprick—so slightly noticeable but fine-pointed and prickly. I’m sure, like it did to me, this thought presents itself to everyone at some time with a tap dance of Morse code on the conscience. It pricks with these words in this order to form this particular sentence: there has got to be something more. And maybe that sentence comes to you when you’re just tipsy enough to think coherently about things you normally wouldn’t, or you’ve just had terrible sex with your ex-boyfriend, or you’ve just rolled a strike at the bowling alley and your fat great-aunt accidentally gives you a high-five on the forehead (I don’t know!) but it will come, and when it does it will keep pricking like a flustered seamstress ten minutes before the wedding. You can do two things with that sequence of pin pokes, that sentence that somehow shows up in your head and on your gut: you can ignore it, or, you can pursue it like hell.
I’d bet a ripe turkey and eight paint pails that you're scoffing. I know this because I was a scoffer in my day. In fact, if this were a year and a half ago, I’d ’ve challenged you to a good, old-fashioned scoff-off, and I would’ve won. But I got tired of scoffing. Yup, I did. I got tired of it because I was exceptionally unhappy. Of course, no one was able to put a finger on my unhappiness. I could barely do that. I never wrote sad Facebook statuses, or walked around hating bright colors, or hating the people who liked bright colors. I liked bright colors alright, and I liked uplifting Facebook statuses, too (people are ok), but I felt empty. That was it. I had this sinking feeling whenever I was alone, and I needed to surround myself with friends at all times, so I wouldn’t have to think about it. I fully believe that loneliness is the most supremely terrible human feeling, and I think it is probably the most common. What people don’t realize, though, and what I didn’t realize then, is that that emptiness was never meant to be there. We don’t have to settle for it. I used to get this pit in my stomach when I was alone (because if I wasn’t being Class Clown, I had no purpose to fulfill). I never get that anymore (because I’m never alone). Too, I wasn’t able to figure out why the heck I was here and what I was doing on this oversized, blue/green ball of matter. I had no idea what would fix the feeling. Now, I know.
I think people have the wrong idea about God. I know I did. A lot of people (admittedly, a lot of misinformed Christians) think you need to clean up your act before getting to know God, that you have to summon the willpower to change one hundred percent on your own, and then (only then!) can you present yourself to him, and ask him to, just for one second, notice you. I used to think that, but there couldn’t be anything further from the truth. This is God’s desire: that you come to him when you are most broken, when you are most hurting, when you are the ugliest you’ve ever been in your life—when you have a fractured fibula, a black eye and, on your chin, a pudgy zit. He wants to draw close to you exactly as you are. You don’t try to mend yourself before going to the hospital. You just go, and you let the nurse bring you jell-o and dress your wounds, and you leave properly healed, completely refreshed, and jiggley giddy on orange jell-o, all because you simply decided to show up.
God doesn’t care about your past. He doesn’t care about what you did or did not do in your life. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest childhood or the ugliest heart; it doesn’t matter whether you had one thousand people to love you, no one to love you, or a brown-spotted cow and a balding sister to love you. The point is, every single one of us is missing a piece, and that piece doesn’t stop whispering.
When you don’t know God, it is impossible to get beyond a certain level of happiness. Your happiness can’t continue to increase; at some point it comes to a standstill. A time will always arise when that heavy bolder of vacant nothingness comes to sit on your chest, bring you down from the clouds, and back to the reality that life isn’t all that great. I’m saying, though, that with God, there is no quota of joy. With God, you are given a joy that is continuously bubbling. It has no bubble quota. It is a forever-bubbler. When you let God love you, there is nothing that can smack you in the face and bring you back to earth because this joy isn’t from earth. It is unearthly; it is heavenly.
Maybe people don’t understand, really, what “heavenly” means because most people’s idea of heavenly isn’t even close to the truth. But guys, Heaven is a real place. Heaven is a place where you can experience, dwell in, become ensconced in the most exquisite, giddying, wrapped-up tight love that exists, has existed and will exist for all time. The best part about this, though, is that we have access to that same love right now, wherever we are. I know this because I have tasted just the tiniest sliver of this love, and it’s the best thing I have ever ingested; I want more. It’s better than a beer pong tournament and a keg stand on a Saturday night; it’s better than three fat blunts and a sleeve of Oreos; it’s better than fake love. I never thought I’d value a Bible over the approval of friends, or I’d come to strive for anything more spiritual than the lighting of a packed bowl. But I did, and I am, and it’s absolutely worth it.
It is risky, though, because all those things are really thrilling; all those things provide us with happiness, and good stories, fun, a sense of belonging, and confidence, but at some point the time we spend chasing temporary happiness turns into a bunch of little temporaries added up to one big lifetime, and pretty soon you’re wondering how many temporary happinenesses it will take to amount to one whole, perfect, forever happiness. But they won’t amount. Ever. It’s like saying that if you keep adding more and more 5th grade basketball players to the roster, their skill will sum up to Dwayne Wade level; it’s not going to happen. No matter how many 5th graders you put on the floor, you’re still going to have a flock of gangly, sharp-elbowed kids who kind of know about double dribbles. No matter how many shallow loves you put in your life, they will never add up to one complete, deep, satisfying love.
Not only is the stuff we chase a fraud, but so is the confidence that comes with it. It’s superficial. It’s not truly who we are, and that’s the thing. Do we let go of it? Do we sacrifice what brings us at-your-disposal pleasure to become familiar with something that is unknown? For something that is challenging to pursue and not even tangible? I say yes. Because once we let go of that false confidence we are given a new boldness—a true, real, bone-deep boldness that isn’t justified by who we hang out with, or intellect, or chugging ability, but through Jesus and because of Jesus. And this new boldness has nothing to do with pride or arrogance. It doesn’t have a thing to do with whether we have a million friends and dollar bills, or a plethora of the cutest shoes, but it does have to do with humility and love, with delving the part of you that thinks maybe you’re not as content as you had thought with being wholly half-liked and half-wholly drunk all the time—maybe you’re not content with being average. And this is the great oxymoron! How deliciously absurd it is that when love and humility seep into those places of pride and self-assuredness, we can walk in even more confidence than before. We can become something much more attractive than average.
It wasn’t easy at first for me to give up the things that had made me momentarily happy. I used to think it fully ridiculous that a perfect God would make us give up fun, exciting, Friday-night things, that he would ask us to leave out activities from our lives, which the rest of the world was allowed to experience and enjoy, but I began to realize that God asks us to do that not as punishment or to make us miserable, and not even because he wants a reason to call us flawed, but because he created us and knows unequivocally that when we chase him wholeheartedly he can give us a joy that outweighs, by ten thousand elephants, any other thing we might pursue. The pursuit of God brings true passion into our lives in a world that completely lacks anything worthy of our obsession.
God’s love is vast, deeper than the quarry, thicker than apple butter, but there is a “however” to throw in here. God never said things would be perfect. Even though we have access to his love from Heaven on Earth, Earth is definitely not Heaven. God never said bad things wouldn’t happen, that things wouldn’t get sludgy and stinking and downright shitty. But what he did promise is that he would be there when life happened. When the shit snuck up on you and you ended waist-deep in a field of manure. He said he’d be there for that, for sure. God can walk side by side with you through the nasty. With me, he has trudged. God will turn your heaviest chains into balloon strings.
The idea crossed my mind that perhaps after I became a Christian my life would basically be perfect. Maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with hurt feelings and tears, or stubbed toes, or walking into doors. Nope, all of those things still occur (and I really mean all of them). But I think with a lot of us, it’s this desire for instant gratification that hinders our pursuit of deeper things. Because that’s what we’re used to—instant oatmeal, instant replay, instant coffee—but a good novel isn’t written in three pages. It takes a lot of chapters to make up a great book. It took a year for me to really notice the impact God had had on my life; it took a year for me to realize how drastically I had changed, grown, and matured because of my relationship with him. My friendship with God hasn’t changed me into someone who likes to wear turtlenecks and long skirts, nor into someone who no longer finds humor in strange sarcasm; what it has done to my personality is enhance it. I am more of myself now than I’ve ever been in my life, and this is because until we know God, we don’t really know ourselves. “It is in Christ that we find out who we are, and what we are living for.” You can’t know a thing’s inner workings without talking to its creator.
A year ago, one of my good friends cuttingly asked me if I had found Jesus. My face tomatoed, I shrugged and stayed quiet because I wasn’t about to put myself out there without absolutely, positively knowing that I had found the real deal. I wasn’t sure if this whatever-it-was I was having with the supernatural was just a fling, or an actual love affair. Maybe it was just temporary. But now I can say, without doubt or reservation, yes! Yes I did. By golly George junglebee, I found the real deal.
