Faith Actions: Sometimes Thinking is Overrated

**Disclaimer: this is not an attack against where I was raised and the community there. These are simply my reflections and my way of processing my current state in life. Please do not take offense. It was not written with the intentions of hurting.**

8 November 2015

Today in church, I hit my wall. I guess I should’ve seen this coming considering I hit my work wall this week as well. Since moving to Memphis and even before in college, I’ve been living a state of tension, a state I don’t believe I was called to bear alone.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve finally been able to truly grasp the entities at odds in my life: religion vs. faith or belief. In the Bible belt, I think more often than not we are raised in churches to be religious more so than to actually be believers. We hear sermons chalked full of commentaries and trendy authors in Christian circles rather than actual God-breathed scripture. We are raised with right answers and Wednesday/Sunday standards but rarely discuss or sharpen one another in the day-to-day cross-bearing that we are called to as Christians.

This has left me in a very precarious and fragile state. It leaves me as a single, 26-year-old woman struggling to claim my salvation as true despite laying claims to it many moons ago. It leaves me feeling guilty that I have a heart and mind that wants to wrestle and question the word, not in an act of defiance but more in the manner of an inquisitive child who is curious and always wants to understand the whys of life.

I had a professor in college once who called me out as being a Southern Belle. Oh, how I despised his interpretation of my life. How dare he? He didn’t even know me (in retrospect, he had a better grasp on me than I ever did in college). Now, I see the truth is still engrained in my faith story. I was taught church answers and when to say yes, but I wasn’t given a safe space to come with my heart’s deepest questions and doubts and fears. I like to believe my professor would be proud of how I’ve shed the Southern Belle skin in my work and social life; however, I know he’d be disheartened to see this skin still imprisoning my faith life.

In the New Testament, Mark 9 to be specific, we hear an account of a father appealing to Christ to save his son from a demon that has possessed him since he was small. The father asks if Jesus can handle the task and in verse 23 Jesus responds, “If you believe, all things are possible to him who believes.” In 24, the father proclaims his belief saying, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” This resonates with me a lot. I can proclaim that I do believe, but I still have a lot of uncertainties and I need God to help quiet and subside my unbelief.

I just read Angie Smith’s Chasing God because I felt like I needed a book not for brand new believers, but for someone at odds with their childhood belief paradigm. In her intro, she makes the case that we’ve made faith “messy” “by desiring to understand Him more than know Him.” I feel like this is what religion has taught me. I remember many a lesson or sermon devoted to understanding the character and nature of God, but that’s not His desire for His children. I feel like this is a glimpse at the feminine nature of God, which all too often gets overlooked. God isn’t to be understood; much like men feel about women, “I just don’t understand her.”

Angie goes on to say on page 33, “God doesn’t want us to be unsure of our salvation, but I [Angie] also believe He warns us against believing we are saved because we repeated a couple of words one time in a  church service.” She reminds me that salvation is meant to be a lifestyle, not a sign on the dotted line contract and then we go our separate ways. This is where I’ve been feeling most convicted lately. I knew how to be the honor roll Sunday School student and say the right things, but I was never shown how accepting the invitation was/is supposed to permeate my life beyond Wednesdays and Sundays. Luckily, I’ve found myself at home in Memphis with a community of friends and believers who are showing me and taking me alongside them in community to see what this lifestyle looks like played out (Don’t get me wrong. I know I could’ve found this in E. TN  if I looked hard enough.The Logan family and Global Outreach Development in Nashville, thanks Billy, definitely planted the seed for it before I hard words to describe it). Moreover, her sentiments about salvation also remind me that I actually can’t claim credit for any of it. My salvation isn’t based on my works and whether I earn the grade or not in legality.

Angie appears to be a lover of words, much like myself, and she discusses the difference between the words “chase” and “follow” which for me was sheer delight. Chase gives us credit; we play an active role in pursuing and attaining God. Follow, on the other hand, puts us in a passive role of accompanying and hoping to reflect the one leading. We are called to the latter. She gives words to my situation perfectly when she says, “I would have told you I believed in Him before that night, but I had never felt my need for Him. Head knowledge, not heartbreak over sin. I had never experienced repentance.” She reminds me that my faith cannot be dictated solely by emotions such as not feeling his presence equaling a lack of love on His part, etc.

I asked one of my good friends yesterday while reading this book if Christ’s love can compel those who aren’t certain of their faith. I went to him because he is the second person in my life to make the case that he sees the Spirit at work in me. This is where the limited academic side of me comes out, and partially why I believe I’ve been struggling so much with salvation. Back in my teacher pet days, I remember learning that the Spirit comes and dwells in you as a believer once you’ve accepted Christ’s salvation of you. Can I give you a scripture passage to back this up/ No, but see earlier discussion of church experience and know that the running joke was the answer to every question was always one of three options: Jesus, Love, or Jesus’s love. You may be able to throw in a fourth option of God is good all the time. Of course, this was before the age of Common Core and text dependent questions. My apologies. Anyway, my dear friend reminded me that “Christ moves in all things. Anything that is true or holy or sacred or love, if it is really that, than it is Christ.”  He went on to remind me that “if Christ is the way, the truth, the life, as he claims, then whenever you find truth, absolute truth, it belongs to Christ.” By golly, I have some brilliant friends, and I am grateful of his reminder as I desperately needed it.

Angie goes on to talk about how people are told/mandated that they need to love God and then struggle because they don’t actually feel that way in that moment. She challenged us to “act as if we did [love God].” She goes on to remind us that we may never fully buy into the concept that God truly does love us like a father loves a child, and she argues that that is okay,

because you’re a finite human being trying to understand something that you weren’t created to thoroughly comprehend. Often times, the best thing we can do is continue saying we believe Him in spite of the fact that we don’t have the emotional counterpart in the measure we wish we did. And God isn’t punishing you if you don’t feel it. In fact, He’s telling you something you might never have fully considered until now: It’s not required.

Today in church, Ali talked about needing to be free in Christ in order for relationships to function as they were designed, despite our sin. I realized or was reminded that I’ve never really felt free or at peace. I’ve always felt somewhat shackled by societal expectations, unattainable comparisons, religious bureaucracy, etc. This is most present in my tension with southern expectations for women. Ali preached from 1 Peter 3:1-7, a passage that I have heard quoted many a time at weddings in the South. My friend and I immediately looked at each other with gasps and rolled eyes at what was about to come (needless to say, we had not had positive experiences with sermons and this passage due to society twisting and misconstruing this passage to meet cultural and societal norms/desires). Today, however, I felt like Ali was helping unlock the gates of the cultural prison I had been shackled in for so long. I grew up in a small, conservative, southern town and was subconsciously taught that my role designed by God was to be that of a wife and mother before anything else. This is reinforced every time I go home and am asked where my boyfriend is or if I am seeing anyone now or when I am going to settle down and get married. It’s as if I’m not even a whole person without a man.

I didn’t get to dialogue with her after the service, but I was pleasantly surprised with the direction it took. Ali spoke to me in my singleness arguing that the Bible does not call me to submit to all men or any man really; rather, I am called to submit to my husband if I choose to marry and even in that, I am not called to endure abuse or subservient treatment. Instead, I am called to submit as the Church is to submit to Christ (still processing this and unpacking this to figure out what it looks like), but it is freeing nonetheless as someone who has spent at least ten years fighting the tension of being a woman in a male dominated world. Sorry for the rambling, but all this to say the gate to my prison  was opened today through song and word.

So now the question is where does this leave me. Here’s what I know. I know that I am tired of fighting a battle that wasn’t meant for me to fight. I wasn’t meant to fight between gender expectations and religion vs. belief. I am tired of fighting, and I wasn’t designed to fight alone. I am broken and weary in trying to do good on my own. The good news: I know that I believe in God who gave up his only Son to pay for my past, present, and future sins, the ones I recognize daily and the ones that I don’t. I know by accepting this truth that God will dwell in me in the form of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3: 16, Romans 8:10-11, Eph. 2:22). I know that His presence is unconditional, so even when I feel distant or at odds with my heavenly father, He will still dwell in me and seek relationship with me as he desires me to be in community with Him as well as with the body of believers. I also recognize that because of my inquisitive and academic nature, I most likely will be asking God daily to “help me in my unbelief.” Moreover, I know me, and I know that I’m a practical person. I crave the tangible, so I’m going to call on my community to help raise me up in my re-established faith and help disciple me so that my faith will not be a subsection of my life, but rather it will permeate all areas of my life, acting as a springboard for my decision making and everyday actions, so that I may glorify God in all I do.