Top 10 Kendall Children Sayings of 2011

1.  Hadessah: Momma toots like a duck; Daddy toots like a rhinoceros

2.  Scene: All three children are sitting at the bar and waiting to be served their meal. Miriam is making a proclamation three-year-old-style.

Miriam: I love Daddy. I love Dessah. I love Momma. I love Benny.

Benaiah: I only love Daddy and Dessah.

3.  Scene: In the car. The family is on its way home from an outing. Daddy and Benaiah are playing rhyming games.

Daddy: Hi.

Benaiah: Bye!

Daddy: Yellow.

Benaiah: Mellow!

Daddy: Fell.

Benaiah: Hell!

Daddy: Oh, Ben, don’t say hell. It’s not a good word to say.

Benaiah: Okay.

Daddy: Door.

Benaiah: Whore!

4.  Scene: Daddy gets cut off in a downtown intersection and is developing road rage.

Daddy: [bangs his palm on the steering wheel] Oh, for…

Miriam: …Pete’s sake!

5.  Hadessah: I tried to clean my room but Ben just astracted me, and I can’t work when I’m astracted.

6.  Miriam: I fell in the ditch and died yesterday.

Translation: I fell off the stage and cried yesterday.   

7.  Hadessah: Daddy, is the tooth fairy really real?

Daddy: What do you think, sweetheart?

Hadessah: [sits pensively for several moments] Well, there’s monsters and I don’t want them to be real.

8.  Benaiah: Mom, you have a [makes an exaggerated motion with his arms to make me feel really good about myself] BIG stomach!

9.  Benaiah: Some kids’ parents are fat, but you and Momma are skinny (talk about a paradox).

10.  Scene: Miriam is sitting on Mom’s lap and eating breakfast. Daddy is preoccupied while getting ready for work.

Miriam: I love you, Momma. You're the best mom.

Mom: [gives Miriam a squeeze] I love you too, baby.

Miriam: Daddy, did you hear that? Momma says that I’m perfect.

Peace be yours this holiday season. With very much love,

Jeremy, Michaelia, Hadessah, Benaiah, & Miriam

Have a Heart (A Story of Social Justice)

Imagine, if you will, a young couple with stars in their eyes. They’re so in love they can't hardly stand it. Then one day, the girl discovers she is pregnant. She, having mixed emotions about the pregnancy and can’t decide whether to be happy because she’s excited to be a mother, or be scared because she isn’t in a family who would approve of such circumstances. The guy also cannot decide, for he too is excited for his growing family, but is acutely aware of the precious few dollars he has to his name. 

The family and friends surrounding this couple say to them that they were altogether hasty in their relationship, that marriage is not a good idea, and the child is the product of the sin of fornication. The couple was told by the pastors in their church that unless they split up, they cannot be a part of the church because their relationship is not Godly. The couple decides to elope, and the very next day, the young girl's enraged father cancels her from his health insurance plan. The couple has nothing. The girl is a few months pregnant and in need of her first obstetrics check-up. The guy works for two dollars an hour above minimum wage, and the girl fears that her growing belly might now be noticeable to any potential employers. They live in a shabby, run-down, one-bedroom apartment.

At the advice of a friend, the couple knocks on the door of a local Department of Social Services (DSS) branch. She needs to begin thinking of medical care for her and her baby. The social worker, without hesitation, signs them up on state medical insurance (Medicaid), and then asks them how they plan to eat. The couple, not realizing what the social worker meant looked at one another and shrugged. “Buy food, I guess,” the young girl said. The social worker then told them about government issued EBT cards (formally food stamps) and approved the couple for those benefits as well. 

Over the next few months, they young man acquired a construction job with only slightly better pay and with no benefits. The girl managed to find a minimum-wage job at a café with meager tips, yet the manager was gracious. The couple still had very little money to their name, but they were taken care of by the the welfare system that would take care of them -- instead of the church that wouldn’t. 

Years passed. The couple stayed together through it all and delighted in their child. Both the young man and young woman attended the university with the help of welfare to aid in expenses. The young woman  had dealt with nasty looks form the checker when she paid for groceries with her EBT card. Her child had a black eye, but what the clerk didn’t know was that her child had just begun walking and had tottered into the corner of the coffee table. 

The young man, who graduated first, couldn’t find employment in his field that made much more than he did before he attended college. At just $1,800 per month in income, the couple was $100 over budget for EBT benefits; however, the young man loved his new job, and though he now had the option of health insurance for his family through his employer, he could not afford the premiums which were $480 per month, so he and his wife lived without healthcare while they depended on Medicaid for their child’s healthcare, which ranged from childhood illnesses, immunizations, and to well-child check-ups.

The man went on for his master’s degree, still depending on Medicaid for his child’s medical care. He once got the stomach flu so badly that he had to be hospitalized. Two hours, a basic medical exam, one x-ray, one prescription, and a bag of IV fluids later, he was released, costing him all $2,500 of his family’s federal tax return (which included Earned Income Credit). When fuel prices sky-rocketed, he rode his bike to work and school and applied for heating assistance through DSS. The young woman, after years of part-time schooling because she also was a stay-at-home parent, also graduated with a degree and began working. And after 7 years, the couple finally earned enough money to support their family without the help of welfare.

What you don’t know about this couple is that both sets of their parents and multiple aunts and uncles and cousins had also taken advantage of welfare programs when their families were young and times were tough. None of those members are currently enrolled welfare benefits, and haven't been for years.

Knowing what you know now about this couple’s story, what would you say about:

1. The church and other religious organizations being the entities that facilitate taking care of the poor?

2. The idea that the poor are poor because they choose to be poor?

3. The dire need for some kind of healthcare reform?

4. The idea that everyone should have access to affordable healthcare?

5. Mandatory drug testing for all applicants and recipients of welfare programs?

6. The opinions that you yourself have unwittingly formed about certain social demographics?

7. More tax breaks and benefits for the poor, particularly concerning earned income credit (EIC)?

8. The catch-22 each woman is put in when evaluating her options (damned if she has a "welfare baby", damned if she doesn't)?

9.The idea that welfare programs keep people dependent on welfare programs?

Deconstructing the Constructed

                About a year and a half ago I stood in the inspirational section at Borders bookstore with a pile of books in my hand: Churched, Velvet Elvis, Adventures in Missing the Point, The Shack, How [not] to Speak of God, and Everything much Change. My cousin had just finished reading my memoir and called an emergency meeting to search for publishers of controversial Christian literature—one where she believed I should send my memoir to.

                “I stayed up ‘til three in the morning reading your book and it’s not because the book’s about you,” she had said about my memoir. “This is a really important book. I’m convinced that if you don’t publish a book like this, no one ever will.”

                At this point, I was getting a little uncomfortable. I didn’t know how good my writing was; I thought maybe she was putting me on because she’s my cousin and biased. My first drafts of my book had been crap. I knew I had improved as a writer, I just didn’t know how much.

                She pulled one more book off the shelf and stacked it on top of the pile of books I held. “Just be warned, I’m not going to let this go. You need to pursue publishing. A book like yours can’t sit unpublished in your sock drawer.”

                I took the top book and turned it over in my hand to check the copyright. “It says here that this book was published by Thomas Nelson Inc. That’s a big-name publishing house. Besides that, this book is a New York Times Bestseller. I’d be fooling myself to think that they’d actually want a book like mine.” I set the book back atop the pile and searched for a place to sit. “Publishing houses like this can afford publishing a controversial book. The smaller houses like the ones that would publish an unknown author would never take a chance on my book.”

                She pointed to the literature section. “There’re two chairs together over there if they’re not taken,” she said, but before I could go to where she pointed, she grabbed my arm, willing me to look at her. “I think you’re selling yourself too short. How could you know if a big publisher won’t take your book?”

                I sighed. “I’ve got a pretty good idea, okay? And if I go for a small publishing house and only sell 10 books, the ramifications for publishing my book would greatly outweigh the benefits.”

                The only action that came from that meeting with my cousin was not my vow to publish my memoir, but to make a $16.99 purchase of the book at the top of the pile: Blue Like Jazz.

                I read Blue Like Jazz in two days, after which I read The Shack. I loved both of the books and am now reading the other more weighty titles, and though they are overtly Christian, they hold the hint of controversy I was looking for at the time, something I had yet to find in Christian literature, thus beginning my exposure to what I now know is called the emerging conversation.

So on March 3^rd Jeremy and I decided to try a new church, a church more apt to entertain the emerging conversation, swearing that if this one didn’t work out, we would be finished with church, not finished with the pursuit of spirituality, mind you, but finished with institutionalized spirituality, one where the community of faith equaled more or less the commonality of beliefs. It’s not that Jeremy and I necessarily had bad experiences with church in recent years, but there always seemed to be this disconnect from our experiences and thoughts of God to what were others’ experiences and thoughts of God, which were of course the more widely accepted ways to go about Christian spirituality. We found that though we seemed to be accepted as a family into churches, our views were a little off, especially Jeremy’s, as Jeremy is by nature a more abstract thinker, which is one of the reasons why I love him so much. He is the catalyst for why I myself embarked on this journey to a different kind of spirituality—a more alluring an honest approach to what thoughts on God could be, one where every question or thought is given voice, and one where learning to sit with ambiguity is a strength and not a weakness.

                We walked into this church without knowing exactly what we were getting ourselves into. The message that day (Via Negativa) was one about apophatic theology (meaning negative theology, which is atheism at its core), or what is referred to as one of the four Christian mystic pathways to God, that is, the idea that one will be closer to knowing the nature of God by focusing on what God is not rather than what God is. If all we as believers do is sit around and name what God is, we end up limiting and putting boundaries on a being who we say is infinite, and in turn make that being finite. There’s this ancient rabbinic tradition which would say that to even speak the name of God would be to limit God. And so there’s this idea within this tradition that to name God by focusing on what God is, actually pulls one further away from the truth. Perhaps genuine faith is more likely to be constructed by the destruction of one’s presuppositions.  

                I think it’s highly possible that some readers of my blog get irritated with my writing, thinking I’m totally lost (which I am, I promise you). Some try to assure me that I’m on the right track and that I should simply drop the whole thing because I’m already there or that it really doesn’t matter. But there is something more important that I’m trying to accomplish. You see, I am not the type of person (like my husband) who becomes enthralled with books on philosophy or theology or whatever. It’s not that I don’t understand them, but it’s more accurate to say that I gain more from the discussions of theology and philosophy than by reading. Moreover, having a fan base (or perhaps an anti-fan base) through a blog forces me to ponder, and perhaps deconstruct, my presuppositions in order to become closer to the truth. I’m engaging in what is called the emerging conversation, and I’m inviting you to join in with me.

Testing the Limits of A-theism

             Someone told me recently that if I start rejecting bits and pieces of God’s Word (the Bible), for whatever reason, the whole foundation for answering any of my questions crumbles. The sentiment totally makes sense to me because it is, after all, the reason why I never thought to give my questions a voice from the time I was a little kid. I’m sure most people know someone who’s been brought up in a devout Christian faith, but once that person grew matured and started doubting any one piece of the structure, the whole foundation for his or her faith crumbled to the ground.

The thought of my faith crumbling to the ground terrified me so much that whenever I had a fleeting doubt, I’d shove it away as if I were trying to keep a wild animal out of my cabin in the big bad woods. This reaction worked for a long time. It was my defense mechanism to keep my faith safe and alive. As long as I could control my environment and stop cold the velocity and ferocity at which my doubts came, I was safe within this structure of my beliefs. If my doubts started biting and scratching away the structure, I’d rebuild it stronger and more rigid than it was before. And so, in that way, my faith became a faith that needed to be defended rather than lived out. Because a faith like the one I had needed to be defended in order to be kept alive.

Much of Christianity today is like that, isn’t it? I hear day after day, on the news, on the Christian radio stations, and wherever else that Christianity is under attack from every which way. “In God We Trust” is being considered to be taken off our currency. “Under God” has been taken out of our nation’s Pledge of Allegiance. Christians cannot pray in school. Science is progressing in a way that rejects a 6-day created, 10,000-year-old earth. Do you hear what I’m saying? Christianity is under attack! And so I wonder, why is it that I feel like something as personal as my faith needs to be defended? Is it the bad guys out in the big bad woods who are forcing me to defend it, or is it the structure itself that begs to be defended? And if it’s the structure that begs to be defended, why then do I believe that God is in that structure and that it is therefore God who needs to be defended? And if God needs to be defended, why would I believe in a god so weak that I, a mere mortal, need to defend it?

I don’t think God needs to be defended.

I wonder if I do believe that God is supreme, can God can handle if I doubt God? Do my questions, my doubts, my wresting, compromise God? I’ve turned down what I had once believed is a dangerous path, because whenever I start rejecting bits and pieces of this structure, when I take out that piece and turn it over in my hand to examine and re-examine it, just the fact that I removed that piece to examine it made the whole foundation crumble to the ground. And so I wonder, is this structure really what Christianity is about? As I grow, do I sit in Sunday school, then in youth groups, then in church and learn exactly how each piece fits in this giant puzzle, this structure that I must defend?

Let’s call this structure “theology.”

So I’ve turned down this road of examining my theology. There’s no place I can find to turn around, nor do I want to, because this path is so alluring to me. Now that I am here, where do I stop? Is there a point at which I should again shove away my questions, because if I don’t, my theology will be destroyed? At this point I wonder how important my theology is for me. I think about how exhausting it has been to try to live within my theology, and how when something unexpected has happened to me, testing one piece of my theology, my faith has totally crumbled to the ground.

I’ve heard it said recently that Christians were the first anti-theists, meaning that the biggest thing that set Jesus apart from other leaders in his day was that he chipped away at the structure of theology. So, in a sense, Jesus could be said to be the first a-theist. Countless times in the NT writings, Jesus was asked pointed questions by the leaders of his day and he dodged the questions, often answering their questions with more questions, ultimately committing to no concrete answer at all. And so I wonder again, how important is theology to me? What’s interesting to me is that, biblically speaking, I should test God. I should wrestle. I think about the story of Jacob wresting with the angel. All night Jacob wrestled, and then at daybreak, what was important was not who won, but that Jacob wrested with God. How many times have I been given a structure, a theology, only to swallow it whole, not questioning it, not doubting it, not wresting with it.

I think about how many people’s faith would be destroyed if tomorrow scientist discovered definitive proof that the earth is 3.9 billion years old. I think about how many people’s faith would be totally destroyed if they started to question whether or not it was an actual, physical snake who spoke to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Recently, Jeremy and I had dinner with some acquaintances of ours. We get together maybe once a year if we’re lucky. Now, this couple is Jewish and incredibly educated, so I often feel like a little black bird perched under an eagle with a fresh kill, hoping that the eagle will drop some of the morsels down to my level so that I may partake of the same meal. I’d already been questioning for quite some time what makes my theology so special by comparison to others. I’d already been questioning my elitism, and so when this Jewish man said that he didn’t believe that Jesus was the Christ, I became intrigued. He said that even Jews who believe that the messiah is still to come believe that the messiah will be fully human and not fully God, so the idea that Jesus (or Ben Joseph, meaning son of Joseph) was born of a virgin makes absolutely no sense. It sounds like some distorted combination of Greek Mythology and contemporary Jewish ethics and tradition.

 If I test this one piece of the structure, will the foundation for my beliefs crumble to the ground? Will I lose everything that I’ve worked so hard to establish? The answer to my question is overwhelmingly, “yes.”

So I wonder once again; how important is theology to me?

Did God Fail? [part 2]

In his book, Love Wins, Rob Bell can’t be mistaken as anything but an evangelical Christian, as he’s got passage after passage of Scripture references to back up his teachings. He theorizes that we make our own heaven and hell here on earth. He talks about the time he took a trip to Rwanda. As he walked down the street he saw child after child with missing limbs from the genocides. You see, the best way to humiliate someone is to cut off the limb of a loved one. That way, the victim and the victim’s family will always be reminded of the violence they endured at the perpetrator’s hand. Bell says that when he’s asked if he believes in hell, he responds with a question: “Have you sat and talked with a family who just found out their child has been molested? Repeatedly? Over a number of years? By a relative?”

He tells stories of crimes against humanity and the hell that people inflict on each other, be they genocide or simple indifference to one another, he says, “I tell these stories because it is absolutely vital that we acknowledge that love, grace, and humanity can be rejected. From the most subtle rolling of the eyes to the most violent degradation of another human, we are terrifyingly free to do as we please. God gives us what we want, and if that’s hell, we can have it. We have that kind of freedom, that kind of choice. We are that free. We can use machetes if we want to.”

One the flipside, Bell talks about how we can choose heaven too, here, on earth, and it’s this absence of the idea of someplace else that seems to have his fellow evangelical Christians in an uproar. I think it’s because we want to believe in a sort of “spiritual judicial system.” We want to believe the system works, that for this life we’re on trial and then when we die, we get what we had coming—gold streets and jeweled crowns, or fire and torment. We truly want to believe that God is just and gives people what they deserve. But that’s not what the Bible teaches about love and grace, is it? The very definition of love given to us in II Corinthians is anything but fair. If God’s desire is for all mankind to come into oneness with God, and if God doesn’t accomplish what God set out to do, what does that say about God’s omnipotence? And if God is not omnipotent, then what would be the point of belief in God if God is a failure just like all the rest of us?

Bell talks about life as being dimensional and how he doesn’t believe that God is limited to this piddly little existence we call life to turn the hearts of men toward God. God’s love is that big, that perfect. It transcends dimension. It transcends everything we think we’ve got figured out about consciousness. Because if God is perfect, and if God’s love is perfect, and that in the end we believe that God wins, and if God is love, then Love Wins.

There is so much more that I’d like to write, but if I write too much, I might lose your interest. The main thing I want to leave you with is that being a Christian or having faith in God is not synonymous with the belief of a God like you’ve been told about, or the one I’ve been told about. If you simply cannot reconcile an “unconditionally loving God” with one who will torture you forever in hell because you don’t respond the right way, then you’re not alone. Not all Christians believe this and you don’t have to believe it to be a Christian (paraphrasing Rob Bell). With that said, I will end this post with another excerpt from Love Wins, because there is no way I could say it any better myself.

Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his Son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they’ll be able to have a relationship with God.

Beautiful.

But there’s more. Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being  to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony.

If there was an earthly father who was like that, we would call the authorities. If there was an actual human dad who was that volatile, we would contact child protection services immediately.

If God can switch gears like that, switch entire modes of being that quickly, that raises a thousand questions about whether a being like this could ever be trusted, let alone be good. Loving one moment, vicious the next. Kind and compassionate, only to become cruel and relentless in the blink of an eye.

That kind of God is simply devastating. Psychologically crushing. We can’t bear it. No one can.

And that is the secret deep in the heart of many people, especially Christians: they don’t love God. They can’t, because the God they’ve been presented with and taught about can’t be loved. That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable.

[…]

Listen. We’re told a better story. Because the good news is better than that.

Did God Fail? [part 1]

First, I was a believer in Arminianism, then I was Calvinist. Some people are both, but now I am neither. That said, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve contemplated the afterlife. At some point along the way, the idea of it became less and less paramount in my faith until one day it wasn’t at all. When my brother Chad passed away, I used to tote cliché sentiments about how I will see him again someday and that I’m glad he’s in a better place. Sometimes, I even remarked about how I couldn’t wait for Jesus to return because I couldn’t wait to see my brother, always looking to the someplace else to experience real life, because at that point, my life didn’t cut it. The dinner table suddenly became quiet because Chad was the jokester and the rest of us were serious. Life as I knew it then had become empty.

Sometimes, though, I’d get a sense of panic that Chad wasn’t really in heaven, and that I couldn’t be certain that I’d see him again. I knew that people could lose their salvation through sin and so I wondered if those parties Chad went to in the weeks leading up to his death might have been the end of him. The Jell-O schnapps that I knew he’d consumed before he was of legal drinking age might have sent him straight to the pit of hell, to burn in torment forever. Because he’d made a choice—God or sin--and Jell-O schnapps were sinful. He swore sometimes too. And swearing was sinful.

People deified Chad after his death, as people often do when someone dies. Chad was perfect. Chad was a good person, a lover of God, and a namesake for many of the children who were born in the months that followed. But I knew the truth because Chad talked to me. I knew he looked at girls. He told me his stuff, his sins, and without any apparent remorse for any of them. A close friend of the family said that he saw Chad respond to an altar call at church where he rededicated his life to Christ, but I doubted it. I went to every service that Chad did, and I saw no such thing. I’m sure this friend meant to reassure us that Chad was where we assumed he was. But as I sat and listened to the deifying stories, I knew it was quite possible that he went to hell and I was the only one who knew it.

By the time I was college age, I began to reevaluate what I thought about God and how people are saved. I was exposed to Calvinism and its ideas of unconditional acceptance of the saints. Nothing can separate you from the love of Christ, neither height nor depth, neither heaven nor hell, nor any other created creature can separate us from the love of Christ. That once accepted, that’s it, you’re in, your problems are solved. The end. This idea freed me as a “saint.” It freed my brother too, because I knew he’d asked Jesus into his heart as a child.

But then, Calvinism presented a whole new set of problems for me. If salvation is not by our own merit, but God’s, then why must people accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior? Doesn’t that, well, count as your own merit, your action to be saved, and not God’s? So I thought that maybe it’s by my own merit that I trusted in Jesus, but after I became born again, it’s all God? I saw the inconsistency, but I ignored it because I didn’t know what else to think. For it is written, “For Jacob He loved, but Esau He hated.” Wait a minute. He hated Esau? Pardon me but, what the hell? We are all God’s children, loved by God, and desired by God to come into full repentance and oneness with Christ, but one sibling was loved, and the other was hated? Does this mean that God had fully loved and accepted me, unconditionally, by grace, and yet my brother may not have been fully loved and accepted, unconditionally and by grace, or vice versa? Yes. That’s exactly what it means.

So, with Arminianism I must accept the yoyo of falling in and out of favor with God, because my salvation is totally dependent on what I do or don’t do to earn acceptance into the Kingdom of Heaven, or that I can “resist” the free gift of grace. Then with Calvinism I must accept that, though we are all God’s children, we can’t resist the free gift of grace, yet salvation is totally dependent on God’s choosing, and that there are those God has damned and those God hasn’t, yet this “gift” is somehow by some ambiguous merit—because God said so. I felt like the plastic bag swirling in the wind in that scene from the movie, American Beauty.

I am nearly finished with a book right now that I originally said that I wouldn’t write about. “Love Wins,” by Rob Bell, is subtitled, “A Book About Heaven and Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived,” a provocative title for the religious community if I’ve ever heard one. Look up personal reviews of this book on Amazon or wherever else you chose to purchase it and you’ll find a massive amount of people crying that he’s the anti-Christ, the devil incarnate, horribly deceived. This is exactly the kind of book that will routinely get my attention.

Here’s an excerpt from the back:            

“God loves us.

God offers us everlasting life

by grace, freely, through no

merit on our part.

Unless you do not respond the right way.

Then God will torture you forever.

In hell.”

Huh?

Exactly. What, pray tell, is the good news about this…ahem…Good News? Because if God loves everyone, and extends grace freely by no merit of our own, and that God desires that we come into oneness with God, and that if in the end, when millions of people do not choose God, does that mean that God ultimately failed?

Soulless Earrings

After our hike around Center Lake, we visited a nearby tourist town. Jeremy bought me chocolate chunk ice cream in a waffle cone as we walked the cobblestone streets and window shopped, making small talk and pointing every so often at something in the windows that caught our eye.

He glanced at me and the corner of his mouth tipped in a wry smile. “You need some new earrings.”

I touched my left earlobe with my free hand and felt my cubic zirconium, surgical steel studs. “Why? What’s wrong with my earrings?”

“They have no soul.” He chuckled and pointed to a shop just ahead. “This guy makes beautiful sterling silver earrings. I’m going to get you a pair of them today.”

I crinkled my nose. “That’s an odd thing to say. No one’s ever told me that I have soulless earrings.”

“You are a very soulful woman. You need earrings to match.” He stopped at a trashcan, ate his last chunk of waffle cone, and dumped the wax paper from it and the napkin in the trash. He turned to me and crossed his arms over his chest and watched me, amused.

My ice cream had begun dripping out the bottom of the cone and my napkin wouldn’t soak up much more. “Well, it was good ice cream. Now it’s just messy.” I dumped it in the trash and gave my hands a good wiping before throwing the napkin away too. I gave him a peck on the lips. “Fine then. Let’s go buy me a pair of soulful earrings.”

He took my hand and started walking.

As he opened the shop door for me to go in the store, I put a hand on my hip and coyly looked him up and down. “I should buy you a more soulful corduroy jacket.”

He gasped in mock surprise and ran his hands down the lapel of his jacket. “See the chipped buttons, the brown faded fabric, the frayed edges? This is a poet’s jacket—the definition of soul.”

The Epidemic of the Sinner’s Prayer

The growing idea of the sinner's prayer is said to be less than 500 years old, stemming from more protestant interpretations of the Bible, and reaching its peak of popularity around the time of Billy Graham. I said the sinner's prayer once when I four. I don't remember saying it, but according to my mother's account, I was a little stinker before saying it, and after, a delightful little girl. As I grew, I always accepted that I was a Christian, recounting my conversion experience through the eyes of my mother and never my own.

There was only one time in my youth when I thought to ask any sort of question about the idea of salvation. I don't know how old I was, preteen at the most, when a missionary came to my Sunday school and showed us pictures of her long-term missionary trip to Papua New Guinea. About the same time in my history lessons, I was reading about secluded tribes in Africa where there was little, if any, exposure to Western culture, let alone Christianity. "Do you really think that God would damn people to hell if they've never heard the gospel?" I asked Mom one day. "I mean, it's one thing if someone's heard about Jesus and doesn't believe in him as Savior, but it's another thing if they've never even heard about Jesus. Would God damn people when it's not their fault that they haven't heard?"

She looked pensively at me for a moment before she answered. "The Bible says that all will have heard the Good News by the time of Christ's return."

"Yes, but people are dying today, people who've never heard, never even had a chance to say no to Jesus."

She thought again, then reached for her leather-bound Bible on the kitchen table, flipping it to the heavily-highlighted book of Romans. She read, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." She set down her Bible. "Our world, everything that has been created, speaks of a divine Creator. The evidence of God is plain to see. If people are not saved, it will still be by their choice."

Her answer still didn't quite satisfy me. It felt as though she was dodging my question. "Yes, but what about Jesus? The Bible says that no one gets to the Father except through him. Nature can't tell anybody about Jesus. It can only point to a divine Creator. So if a person believes in God, just not the way we do because of Jesus, does that still mean they're going to hell?"

She didn't say anything for a long time, until finally she said, "Maybe you should ask Jesus when you meet him in heaven one day. There are some things we'll never know."

I didn't question the idea of salvation anymore. I shoved it aside into all the categories of my faith that I didn't understand. It didn't affect me anyway, did it? It only affected people whom I've never seen nor met in distant countries. And so it was that I didn't revisit this idea of salvation and the sinner's prayer until much later, eighteen in fact. You see, I'd always been somewhat self-conscious of my testimony, that is, my personal account of my salvation story, because it always felt so flat and lack-luster, like the reason why I'm a Christian is, well, because I've always been one. I hated to admit this to myself, but I always felt the need to conjure up a salvation experience, or perhaps embellish my own into something that it wasn't. I needed a pivotal moment, a shifting, one where I once was lost, but was now found. Telling people that I was a little hell-bound four-year-old didn't seem to cut it.

I began to wonder about this idea of the sinner's prayer not being what makes us Christians. It's almost like certain Protestants have created this whole mentality that if a person has never prayed this prayer, that they can't consider themselves Christians, and will in turn go to hell. You must do this to be this, they say, just like the more mainline denominations baptize infants as soon as they're born so that they can be assured that the baby's soul is safe. I can't help but think that both ideas are either, one, fear-based faith, or two, tradition and nothing more.

I never considered how against the idea of the sinner's prayer I was until Hadessah was Sunday school age. At the time, we were attending a Baptist church and I was reading the church bulletin about its Wednesday night Children's classes. For her age group (she was 5), it said that the program will give them a basic understanding of faith, and often, some Children will make a decision for salvation during these classes. I never took her there. I could picture the teacher giving a lesson on heaven and hell, and once the subject of hell was broached and the teacher would ask the children if they wanted to ask Jesus into their hearts, all the kids' hands would shoot up—because no child wants to go to hell. Hell is fire and pitchforks and eternal gnashing of teeth, and heaven is fluffy clouds, gold streets, and huge mansions. Huge mansions. I thought of Hadessah's favorite TV show, Extreme Home Makeover, and couldn't bear the thought. Of course she'd choose the mansions! That is not authentic faith!

We started attending another church, which we actually liked a lot in the beginning. To our surprise a close family member started attending with us. The pastor started taking a keen interest in the status of this person's soul, so he finally asked me, "Does so-and-so know the Lord yet?"

I admit, my defenses took over; I didn't ever want anyone to approach members of my family and ask them such a questions. "Is this person's spiritual status yours to know?" I wanted to retort but didn't. "I don't know," I said. "I think so-and-so ponders the idea of God and is possibly a believer." I waved my hand in the air dismissively. "Anyway, Jeremy (my husband) himself has never said the sinner's prayer, but he is a believer, and I don't think it makes his faith any less authentic."

I think I sent the pastor's wheels turning. What do you mean you don't believe in the sinner's prayer?What kind of Christian are you? But I didn't care. I can't make myself adopt a belief system simply because I say that I am a woman of faith, and I don't care if it discredits me. I can't help but think we Christians have diseased the whole idea of redemption, that maybe heaven and hell isn't what our faith, and especially our initial faith, is about. We've diseased our Godly wonder and made it into a system of responses. We've diseased salvation by making it divisive, so that there are those of us who "know" God, and those who don't.

As I wrap this up, I can't help but realize that my words seem angry, and as I self-reflect, I realize that I am angry. I try to pass it off as some sort of harmless thing that some Christians believe, but to me, it is so much more than that.


 

 

Love Doesn't Exist, and So, Neither Does God

I am always perplexed by this thing called love. For instance, I've spent the better part of nine years trying to prove to other people that my love for my husband, Jeremy, is real. This was especially true in the beginning, because in those days most people questioned the validity of our love affair. At first I would try to tell people plainly and without pretense: I love Jeremy. But when saying these words, they always sounded empty and void, even disingenuous. The claim itself wasn't about love; the claim was really about me.

In his blog post, “Love Doesn't Exist,” the Irish philosopher, Peter Rollins, suggests that for something to exist it must stand out. He likens love to light, saying, “For love (…) is like light. When we are sitting with friends we do not think about the light that surrounds us but only of the friends that the light enables us to see. Likewise love illuminates others and so our attention is focused on what love illuminates rather than with the illumination itself.” In other words, love doesn't exist because it does not stand out, but rather, love illuminates others, always pointing away from itself, for we do not notice love in a room, but we notice that which love illuminates.

I think about Jeremy and some of our first few talks together, and then our letters, and then of the days we began dating. I can related to the idea of love being that which illuminates rather than being something that exists. Which would explain why I could never explain it. It wasn't Jeremy who illuminated love because love doesn't stand out. Love doesn't exist, and yet love has so affected me personally.

It was in a discussion group recently where a friend talked about the idea of proving the existence of God. People on both sides have tried, usually through science, to prove or disprove the existence of God, but have failed every time. God can't be proven either way, it seems. “But,” said my friend, “perhaps there might be a way to prove the existence of God through the existence of love, for it is written, God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. So whenever we see love exhibited, it is, in essence, the closest thing we get to evidence of God.”

Once he said this, I was immediately taken back to pondering the non-existence of love, how love doesn't exist but it effects us all, and yet it is scripture that tells us that God is love. So it would seem that God doesn't exist either.

I think about how many people I have known in my short life, people who've loved selflessly, who've taken soup to the bums behind Prairie Market on cold winter days, who've taken care of foster children and even adopted the ones they could, who've stood up for various causes in spite of adversity, who've loved their families without asking anything in return. People everywhere of every nation are showing the effects of something beyond themselves every time they choose to love--because God is love. Maybe, just maybe, it is this idea of God which casts our focus outward, illuminating everything around it, but never casting our focus on the illumination itself. Perhaps it's true, that God doesn't really exist, yet is the only thing that affects us all.

If You Had Faith, You Wouldn't Doubt

There were times I even sat at a desk, facing forward to the one who knew all the answers. Mostly though, I sat at a table with other little boys and girls. We colored pictures of and talked about Jesus and Peter walking on the water, of a Elizabeth pregnant with John the Baptist who leapt in her womb, of Lazarus being raised from the dead. I knew Old Testament stories too, of the harlot, Rahab, and her scarlet cloth, of Jonah running away from God and getting swallowed by a fish, of Jacob’s sacrifice of his only son, Isaac.

As I grew, the stories became more intricate teaching tools applicable to modern day. We learned how to interpret their meaning. We learned who God was, his characteristics, his will for our lives. I suppose I even hungered for this teaching, but it was in my hunger that I experienced moments of spiritual ambiguity, moments when my questions didn’t have clear answers.

The year after I graduated high school, I had the opportunity to take an entry-level theology class at my church. I didn’t question most chapters in this book, but I remember the one that I did.

One of the pastors of my church at the time taught on the canonization of the Bible, about how there were many religious texts considered for canonization and how many of the canonized books of the Bible are not complete. For instance, the book of Ruth (if I remember correctly) is only about half canonized.

I gasped. “So our Bible isn’t complete?”

“We believe the Bible is the complete, inspired, and infallible Word of God.”

“But it isn’t complete. You said yourself that the Dead Sea Scrolls weren’t even found until the 1940s and 50s. Who says the Bible is complete?”

He folded his hands on the table in front of him and gave me a fatherly smile. “The parts of the Bible which were canonized have been widely accepted as the inspired Word of God.”

I admit, I got a little exasperated--even then, even when I wholly believed what I believed was true. “Yes, but who says so?”
 

He explained that our Bible was canonized by a council of men who pondered and executed their final authority as to which scriptures were canonized. There were different councils for different Bibles, that is, the catholic Bible had a different council than the King James Bible and the versions that followed the King James and so forth. After he finished, he waited for my response.

I sat back and crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t know if there’s a good reason why I should believe that the Bible is infallible,” I said. “I simply don’t see why I should believe that a council of men sitting in plush chairs around a heavy oak table deciding what the Word of God is, is a divine occurrence. In fact, it sounds nothing like a divine occurrence.”

I think he thought I was being belligerent, but all I wanted were answers--answers that satisfied me. I could tell he didn’t know what else to say. So he said the only other thing he could: “The subject of canonization all boils down to faith. Our church believes and has faith that God was present during the meeting of this council and that he inspired those men’s decisions. We believe that God was supernaturally a part of this human event, which in turn, made it divine.”

His implication was clear: If you had faith, you wouldn’t doubt.

In the following months, years, and even now, I still have doubts about aspects of Christianity. Truthfully, I have doubts about most aspects of my faith. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak from my own experience and the domino effect that doubt has caused. I’ve always been one to seek resolve. I tend to like movies and books with resolved endings. I seek resolve in all of my life experiences. I often can’t stand loose ends; I must tie them up like untied shoes, as if they’d trip me up in life if I didn’t.

The trouble I’ve found is that I’ve not been able to resolve most things in my life. My brother died when I was 16. I’ve had too many friendships end for reasons that I was unable to control. I couldn’t resolve my faith. I never became who I thought I would become. My world fell apart. And because of doubt, because I was never able to resolve it, I eventually feared it. I feared that my doubt would be the end of me. Eventually, everything I set my mind to do I my life became a direct result of my fear.

I think back to the story I learned of Peter walking on the water. Sunday school teachers told me that Peter walked on the water because he had faith. He started sinking when he doubted. No wonder I think my doubt will lead to failure. No wonder I become frantic for resolve. No wonder I fear it. Because I was told at a very young age that faith is good and that doubt is bad. I never learned how to deal with the idea of sitting with my doubt, allowing it to always be present in my journey. Perhaps I should.

Maybe It's About the Journey

I used to think we had so much in common in our pre-courtship days, in the days when we still wrote letters to one another from across state lines, in the days when we still had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. My now husband, Jeremy, spoke of God in mystical terms, in experiential terms, in philosophical terms. I looked at him from across various café tables, dreamy-eyed and transfixed. Mom told me that if I asked most Americans if they were Christians, they would say yes because Christianity has permeated our culture because of our country’s beginnings.

“Christian ideas are part of America,” she’d say, “but it doesn’t mean that most Americans are Christians, even if they think that they are.”

I often wondered how it was that people could not be who they genuinely thought they were. So I’d try to discover if Jeremy was a Christian by asking him everything but asking him directly. I’d ask what he thought of certain Bible passages, what he thought of God. He’d give me circular arguments and ultimately turn my questions back on me. I’d begrudgingly give him my answers (usually backed up by scripture passages and my interpretation of them) though all I wanted were his answers. Finally, in one of my last letters to him, I’d had enough of his question dodging.

“Philosophy is all well and good,“ I wrote, “but at some point you must establish what you believe. Tell me, what is the Trinity?”

He wrote me something of a formal essay back, giving me a squeaky-clean definition of the widely accepted doctrine of the Trinity. I should have been happy. I should have been thrilled. I at last had an answer that I could measure according to my Bible! But there was only one problem: his answer had no soul. His answer was nothing more than dead words scribbled on a page, lifeless and void of humanity. But to be fair, my question was too. I wanted to pinpoint his personal theology and all he wanted was to dialogue about it. I cared about correct answers. He cared about the journey.

Knowing Jeremy threw a wrench in the framework that I used to describe myself as a Christian. If I hadn't fell in love with him I could have forgotten our conversations all together. I could have passed him off as some sort of heretic, some ignorant heathen that I used to know, but it didn’t work out that way.

Maybe it was because I wanted so badly to justify my relationship with him that I embarked on my journey to find a different kind of truth. I wasn’t supposed to have a relationship with him after all. I was Fundamentalist. He was Episcopal. I was conservative. He was a liberal. I was anti-philosophy. He was a philosopher. I was left-brained. He was an artist. I was a Christian. He was a seeker of God. The Bible spoke against relationships with men like these. Or so I thought. In reality, it probably was exactly my pursuit of Jeremy that made me take my faith in a new direction. I’d like to think that I was more of a feminist than that that, but I wasn't.

Whatever the case, I'm here on this journey. It's been 9 years, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to articulate my destination. But lately, I’m wondering if this journey is even about the destination. Maybe this journey is simply about the journey.