The Ocean Becoming Light

Sometimes, when I really get to thinking about it, I have a lot of issues with the Bible. And sometimes, it takes a lot for me to remember why I shouldn’t.

When I step back from it, the Bible should just be stories written by men, and pretty crappy examples of men too. Men who were adulterers, men who were murderers, and men who were both (David, the man after God’s own heart). Written a couple thousand years ago, in a different continent, in a different language, in a different culture. It should just be a religious book, with its thesis centered on a great guy whose main mission was to help the poor and heal the sick. Sometimes, when I find myself away from God for a long period of time, I think that maybe that’s true. I mean, in a completely rational way, it is true. It’s just a book of stories, written by men, who followed another man.

            It’s usually in those questioning times that I feel like I can hold it all together myself. I can rationalize my life, I can determine what I need to maintain a certain level spirituality, and I can go about my own business without letting God mess it up too much. But it always seems like at the end of every day, and the beginning of the next, I’m trying to grasp that next thing ahead of me, or looking for that one thing- that mysterious thing- that will complete me. I know deep down it is all the pursuit of vanity, and yet when I am on my own, doing it by myself, I cannot stop trying to continually fill the sieve that is my life. The days and months begin running into one another, and despite the abundant fortune I’ve been given with a job, a great wife, and amazing friends, I still feel I’m missing something.

            Then somehow I end up talking to a friend about God, or actually opening my Bible (once my allergies let up from all the dust I shake off) and reading, aloud, a passage to myself. And then I’ll do it again the next day. I’ll think about it a little more, and ask God to make me a better person, and help me to be Christ’s kingdom on earth, to be a light in a darkened world. Suddenly, things start falling away in a way that I can’t explain. I start to realize how weak I am, and all that I thought I had built on my own was no better than a couple cardboard stage props for a low budget one act play. I find I have more peace about the once seemingly significant struggles in life. I find myself allowing others more grace (i.e.  allowing the car in front of me one extra second of not moving at a green light before I slam my horn).

            Somehow, when I finally throw in the towel on myself and actually search for God in a non-half-assed way, I find him. I don’t know how it happens, but it just does, and because it does- because of that tangible life experience- I have no option other than to believe. I cannot build a completeness myself, and trust me- I try incredibly hard most of the time. As much as I want to guide this ship every damn day, I realize I can’t do it on my own. My compass’ true north is not true at all.  It is only when I sit back and survey my life as I run it that I realize I’m not at the helm of a sleek cruiser yacht, but I’m standing knee deep in water in a wooden sloop with about twenty holes from the rocks that I’m dashed upon. The same rocks that I dash myself upon about every other day, and sometimes for years at a time.

            But when I come back to God, when I let go of my pride that I love so much, he is still there, and he gives me all that I could ask for, as if I had never left. And he knows that probably at some point again I’ll go on a solitary me-myself-and-I-bender and forget the way he loved me in my darkest moments, how he told me that I am his, that nothing I do can separate me from the way he loves me and wants me to stay, just so that he can breathe life into my bones when they are so tired from running.

That is not something I just recite as religious liturgy. It isn’t proverbs or psalms or words written on a page. It is something that I feel in a gospel that comes to life, inside my life and the lives of so many others who are so much more in love with God than me, people who can only be described as walking miracles. Because it’s those people who make me realize that somewhere in those 2,000 year-old words written by men, the hope of Christ was made clear. So clear, that when read and believed, people who have been locked in decades-long struggles in the gutter of humanity have been pulled out into a new life. Addicts who have shaken horrific addictions are released from their turmoil because when Christ said, “All you who are weary, come and I will give you rest,” they believed those words and the person that said them actually followed through. It is the poor made rich, the blind made to see, and the dead raised to life.

            When I allow myself to realize that, the logical issues I have with the Bible seem to fade away in the light of its true power. I admit it is not a logical book, because its message isn’t logical. It doesn’t make sense that those who are poor in spirit will inherit the earth. A savior dying a horrible death so that murderers, rapists, drug addicts and me can be given a life of hope almost doesn’t seem fair. In those things, the beauty of Christ and his resurrection are made apparent. Nothing we do on our own, nothing we can try to figure out from those words will ever make sense in a rational way. We are asked of so little- to believe in a hope that has been given freely.  So that us at our best is a life of stumbling and falling and forgetting God and remembering him again, and that Christ loves us despite of that. That is the transformative power of God’s word, and that is enough for me to believe.